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Oyster Fritters
Separate the yolk and white of an egg, beating the yolk well and mixing with it two tablespoonfuls each of ground rice and salad oil, three-fourths of a tablespoonful of vinegar, and a small quantity of cold water. Mix smoothly and allow the batter to stand for half an hour. Open and beard the oysters, whisk the whites of the eggs to a stiff snow, and mix them in lightly with the batter. Then place a large lump of clarified fat in a flat stewpan over a fire until it boils. Take the oysters, one at a time, in a tablespoon and fill it with the batter, pouring it into the boiling fat. Fry until nicely browned, then drain well, spreading on a folded napkin or ornamental dish-paper over a hot dish, pile the fritters in the center, garnish with cut lemons, and serve with a plate of thin slices of brown bread and butter.
A light rice-flour batter, closer to a tempura than the thick flour-and-milk fritter batter most American books of the period used. The two things that decide the result are the temperature of the fat and how briefly the oysters stay in it.
- How many eggsThe recipe opens with one egg, then calls for "the whites of the eggs" plural. One egg's white will lighten this quantity of batter adequately; two whites give a still lighter coating. The original is genuinely inconsistent here.
- Ground riceGround rice is rice flour, coarser than the modern superfine sort but interchangeable in this batter. It fries crisper and browns less than wheat flour, which is the point of using it.
- Resting the batterThe half hour is not optional padding. It lets the rice flour hydrate so the coating clings instead of sliding off the wet oyster.
- BeardingTo beard an oyster is to trim off the frilled gill and mantle edge at the rim. On modern shucked oysters this is usually already minimal; pick over them for shell fragments and pat dry, or the batter will not adhere.
- Fat temperature"Until it boils" describes the shimmer and faint movement of hot fat, not an actual boil. Use 365-375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease; above it the coating colors before the oyster is heated through.
- Frying timeOne to two minutes, until the coating is pale gold. Oysters are cooked the moment their edges curl; longer and they tighten to rubber inside the shell of batter. Fry in small batches so the fat does not drop in temperature.
- Clarified fatThe recipe says only "clarified fat"; in a hotel kitchen of this date that most likely meant clarified suet or lard, both of which take high heat cleanly. A neutral high-smoke-point oil is the practical substitute.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield; the quantity of batter (a tablespoonful per oyster) suggests well under a dozen fritters. The folded napkin under the fritters is there to absorb fat, so drain on paper first if you want to keep the linen.
Oyster fritters belong to the enormous American appetite for oysters of the late nineteenth century, when Chesapeake and Long Island beds supplied city restaurants by the barrel and oysters were cheap enough to fry, stew, scallop, pickle and put in pies. Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's celebrated maitre d'hotel whose 1896 Cook Book ran to some nine hundred pages, gives dozens of oyster preparations; this one is unusual for the period in using rice flour and oil rather than a wheat batter, a notably lighter treatment. The brown bread and butter alongside was the customary accompaniment to raw oysters, and the cut lemon and dish-paper are pure hotel service: the fritters arrive as a built object, not a plateful.