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Fried Oysters in Batter
Clean, and dry between towels, selected oysters. Dip in batter, fry in deep fat, drain, and serve on a folded napkin Clean, and dry between towels, selected oysters. Dip in garnish with lemon and parsley. Oysters may be parboiled, drained, and then fried. 2 eggs 1 teaspoon salt
A short entry that assumes you already know the book's frying batter and its deep-fat rules. The text as printed is damaged, with a duplicated line and only the tail of the batter ingredients surviving.
- The hinge: dry the oystersBatter will not cling to a wet oyster, and the water it carries turns to steam in the fat and blows the coating off. Drain the oysters thoroughly, press them between towels, and let them sit a minute before dipping.
- The batter list is incompleteOnly "2 eggs" and "1 teaspoon salt" survive in this printing; the flour and liquid have dropped out. A frying batter of this type would have been made by beating flour and a little milk or water with the eggs and salt, but the proportions intended here cannot be recovered from the page as given.
- "Deep fat" means about 375F"Deep fat" -- No temperature is given; period books judged frying fat by dropping in a cube of bread and watching how fast it browned. A modern equivalent is a thermometer at roughly 370-375F. Fry a few oysters at a time so the fat does not fall too far.
- "Selected" oystersA market grade, not a quality judgment: shucked oysters sorted by size, larger than standards and smaller than counts. Any medium to large shucked oyster works; very small ones overcook before the batter colours.
- ParboilingThe recipe gives no detail beyond "parboiled, drained, and then fried." In practice a brief parboil, well short of a real simmer, firms the oysters so they hold their shape in the batter; prolonged cooking makes them rubbery.
- Timing in the fatTwo to three minutes, until the batter is an even golden brown, is enough. The oyster inside is essentially cooked the moment the coating sets.
- The folded napkinA period serving convention: a linen napkin on the platter absorbed steam and kept the crust from softening. A rack over a warm plate does the job now, and drained fried food should never be stacked.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A pint of shucked oysters serves about four as a first course with lemon and parsley.
Fried oysters belong to the stretch of American cooking, roughly the 1840s through the 1910s, when oysters were cheap, abundant and shipped inland by rail and barrel; cooking-school books of the period carry a whole run of oyster entries, from broiled and scalloped to panned and pickled, which suggests how routine they were on a middle-class table. Frying in a batter rather than the more familiar crumb coating gives a puffed, fritter-like shell. The folded napkin under fried food and the lemon-and-parsley garnish follow French service conventions that the cooking-school movement passed on to domestic kitchens. Overharvesting and pollution badly damaged the Atlantic oyster beds in the earlier twentieth century, and dishes like this became occasional rather than everyday.