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Oyster Fritters
Chop thirty oysters. Make a batter of two well-beaten eggs, a half pint of milk and a pint of flour sifted, one teaspoon baking powder and one-half teaspoon salt. If the batter is too stiff add more milk. Stir the oysters into the batter and drop by the spoonful into deep, boiling fat. Turn the fritters over so that they shall brown nicely on both sides. Drain in a hot colander. They should be a golden brown when properly fried.
A plain drop-batter fritter that depends almost entirely on two things: draining the oysters and holding the fat steady. Everything else is forgiving.
- Drain the oysters before choppingThirty shucked oysters carry a surprising amount of liquor, and if it goes into the batter the fritters slacken and spit in the fat. Lift them out, chop, then drain again in a sieve before they meet the batter. Reserve the liquor for a sauce or chowder.
- The measuresA half pint of milk is 1 cup; a pint of sifted flour is 2 cups, roughly 8 oz by weight, since the original measures flour by volume after sifting. Thirty medium oysters is about 1 pint of shucked meats, or a little under a pound drained.
- Fat temperatureThe book gives no figure; "deep, boiling fat" is usually taken today as somewhere around 365-375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease; above it the outside colors before the center sets. Fry in batches of four or five so the temperature does not crash.
- Batter consistencyIt should be thick enough to hold a mounded spoonful without running, looser than a biscuit dough. The recipe's own instruction to add more milk covers any batch that comes out stiff.
- Baking powderModern double-acting baking powder gives a second lift in the hot fat. One teaspoon to two cups of flour is on the low side by modern practice but works fine here; do not increase it.
- Draining"A hot colander" was a way of keeping fritters from steaming themselves soggy. A wire rack set over a sheet pan in a 200F oven does the same job better, and holds the first batches while you finish.
- Cooking time and yieldTwo to three minutes total, turning once, is enough; the oysters inside are chopped small and cook almost immediately. Expect about 18 to 20 fritters, serving four to six as a first course with lemon or tartar sauce.
Oyster fritters belong to a period when oysters were cheap protein rather than a luxury: through the nineteenth century the beds of the Chesapeake, Long Island Sound and the Gulf supplied American cities in enormous volume, and cookbooks of the era treat a pint of shucked oysters as an everyday purchase, fried, scalloped, stewed, curried or worked into batter like this. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, issued its cook book as part of a broader run of household manuals aimed at the same middle-class subscriber. The instructions assume a cook who already knows what deep fat should look like and spend their detail on proportions instead. The filing of this recipe under "Sauces" may be an artifact of how such books were assembled and indexed, with oyster preparations clustered near the sauces that accompanied them rather than sorted strictly by course, though that is a guess.