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Oyster Sandwiches
Place two or three fried oysters between two buttered slices of brown or white bread. They may be sprinkled with pepper, salt, horseradish, lemon-juice, tabasco, Worcestershire, or watercress, according to taste.
The recipe assumes you already know how to fry an oyster, which the same book would have covered elsewhere; everything else here is assembly. A few notes on quantities and handling.
- Frying the oystersThe recipe assumes the technique. By modern practice: shucked oysters, drained and patted dry, egg-washed and rolled in fine cracker crumbs or cornmeal, fried in hot fat (around 375F) for a minute and a half to two minutes, until the crust colors. Longer and they shrink and turn rubbery; the interior only needs to set.
- How many oystersTwo or three per sandwich suggests a medium oyster, roughly the size of a large walnut once breaded, though the recipe does not say. A pint of shucked oysters, on the order of 20-24, will make somewhere between seven and a dozen sandwiches.
- Drain before assemblingThe hinge of this sandwich is keeping the bread dry. Rest the fried oysters a minute on a rack, not paper flat on a plate, and butter the bread to the very edges so the crumb does not soak.
- "Brown bread"In an American sandwich chapter of this period 'brown bread' most often means ordinary whole-wheat or graham bread, though the steamed molasses-and-rye Boston brown bread also went by the name. The steamed loaf is sweet and crumbly and will not hold up as well.
- Tabasco and WorcestershireBoth are still made and both are stronger poured than they look on a sandwich. A few drops of Tabasco or a scant teaspoon of Worcestershire mixed into the butter distributes better than shaking it over the oysters.
- HorseradishThe period cook meant grated fresh root or bottled horseradish in vinegar. Bottled creamed horseradish is much milder; use appreciably more if that is what is at hand.
- ServingBest eaten within a few minutes of frying, while the crust is still crisp. These do not travel or hold well.
Fried oysters between bread were cheap food before they were novelty food. Through the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, oysters were among the least expensive proteins in American cities, dredged in enormous quantities from the Chesapeake and Long Island Sound and sold from cellars and street stands, and the fried-oyster sandwich was cheap, ordinary eating. A parallel use of fried oysters is the New Orleans oyster loaf, la mediatrice or "peacemaker," a hollowed loaf packed with fried oysters that a late-returning husband was traditionally said to bring home as a peace offering. Butterick's version is the parlor form of the same idea, trimmed to buttered slices and a list of optional seasonings, and it sits in a sandwich chapter. The long list of condiments, from watercress to Tabasco, reflects how far the sauce trade had spread by then: Worcestershire and Tabasco were both national bottled products by the time this book was compiled, and a home cook could reasonably be assumed to have them on the shelf.