Pickled Oysters
Take two quarts of oysters; one teaspoon of cloves; two teaspoons of allspice, one teaspoon of mace; one teaspoon of pepper; one teaspoon of cinnamon; two teaspoons of salt; some vinegar. Place the oysters over the fire in their own liquor, and cook just long enough to "plump" them; then skim out, and rinse them in cold water. Add the seasoning to the liquor in the stewpan, and gently simmer for fifteen minutes. Remove the liquor from the fire, and when it is cold add sufficient vinegar to make the whole quite acid. Place the oysters in a threequart jar, turn over them the spiced vinegar, and cover tightly. They will be ready for use in twenty-four hours.
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A cold vinegar pickle, not a canned preserve. Everything depends on barely cooking the oysters and on keeping the finished jar cold.
- The hinge: "plump" means seconds, not minutesThe hinge: barely cook the oysters -- Bring the oysters up in their own liquor only until the edges ruffle and the bodies firm slightly — roughly one to two minutes at a bare simmer. Anything longer and the pickle will be full of rubber buttons, since the acid continues to firm them over the following day.
- Two quarts of oystersThat is shucked oysters with their liquor, sold in tubs — about 4 lb, or 75 to 100 smaller oysters. If you shuck your own you will need roughly 6 to 8 dozen, and you must save every drop of liquor, as it is the entire pickling base.
- Ground or whole spiceRecipes of this type often use whole cloves, allspice berries, blade mace and stick cinnamon; ground spice will cloud the liquor and settle as grit. Use whole where you can, and note that blade mace is the outer covering of the nutmeg seed — a scant teaspoon of ground nutmeg is the nearest substitute.
- "Some vinegar" and "quite acid"The original gives no quantity because it is judged by taste. Expect to add roughly an equal volume to the reduced liquor, using cider or white wine vinegar at 5 percent acidity; the mixture should taste sharply sour, not merely tangy, since the oysters will dilute it.
- Add the vinegar coldThis is not fussiness. Hot vinegar poured over the oysters keeps cooking them, and the strained liquor must be fully cool before the two are combined.
- The stewpan and the jarUse non-reactive equipment throughout — stainless or enamel, never bare aluminium or cast iron, which vinegar will pick up as a metallic taste. A three-quart jar means the oysters should sit submerged with a little room to spare.
- Storage, which the book omitsThis is a refrigerator pickle and nothing more. Keep it at refrigerator temperature from the moment it is jarred, and eat within three or four days; there is no processing step here that makes it shelf-stable, whatever "cover tightly" suggests about the cool larder the author had in mind.
- YieldTwo quarts of oysters serves twelve to sixteen as an appetizer, forked out of the jar onto crackers or lettuce.
Pickled oysters belong to a period when oysters were among the cheapest animal foods in America. Chesapeake and Long Island beds supplied barrels of shucked oysters to inland cities by rail and, before that, in kegs of their own liquor, and pickling in spiced vinegar was one of the standard ways of stretching a perishable glut by a few days. The spice list here — cloves, allspice, mace, cinnamon, pepper — is essentially the mixed "pickle spice" of nineteenth-century American kitchens, the same combination applied to walnuts, mushrooms and beef tongue. The stray "L" at the end may well be the credit for whoever sent this one in. Oyster populations declined under that scale of harvesting over the following generations, gradually and unevenly from region to region, which is why a recipe calling casually for two quarts now reads as a period document as much as a set of instructions.