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Corn Oysters
To one quart grated corn add three eggs and three or four grated crackers, beat well and season with pepper and salt; have ready in skillet butter and lard or beef-drippings in equal proportions, hot but not scorching; drop in little cakes about the size of an oyster (for this purpose using a tea-spoon); when brown turn and fry on the other side, watching constantly for fear of burning. If the fat is just the right heat, the oysters will be light and delicious, but if not, heavy and "soggy." Serve hot and keep dish well covered. It is better to beat whites of eggs to a stiff froth and add just before frying. - Mrs. V. G. Hush, Minneapolis, Minn.
A corn fritter batter thin enough to spread into an oyster shape in the pan. The whole thing hinges on fat temperature and on how you get the corn off the cob.
- Grated corn, not cutSplit each kernel row with a knife tip and scrape the cob with the back of the blade so you get the milky pulp and leave the tough hulls behind. Whole cut kernels bind poorly and will not hold an oyster shape. A quart of grated pulp takes roughly 8 to 10 large ears.
- Grated crackersMost likely plain soda or water crackers, grated rather than crushed, as the recipe specifies. Three or four crackers will give well under a cup of fine crumbs depending on their size; adjust so the batter mounds on a spoon instead of running off it.
- Fat and temperatureButter with lard or beef drippings in equal parts, in a skillet, implies a shallow fry rather than deep fat. "Hot but not scorching" corresponds roughly to 350 to 365F in modern terms, though the recipe gives no figure; below that the cakes absorb fat and go soggy, above it the butter solids blacken before the centers set. Any neutral oil cut with a little butter behaves the same way.
- The whitesTake the closing note as the main instruction. Beat the yolks into the corn with the crackers and seasoning, whip the whites to soft-stiff peaks, and fold them in just before the first spoonful goes in the pan. Batter that stands around deflates and fries flat.
- Size and timingA rounded teaspoon per cake, flattened slightly, browns in about two minutes a side. Cook in batches with room between them; crowding drops the fat temperature, which is the exact failure the recipe warns about.
- SeasoningSalt the batter properly and taste a test cake before frying the rest.
- Yield and servingA quart of corn makes a large batch of small cakes, enough for a table of several. Keeping the dish covered keeps them hot but also steams the crust; a low oven on an uncovered rack holds them crisper.
The name is often said to describe the shape and size rather than the flavor: dropped from a teaspoon, the little cakes come out roughly the outline of a shucked oyster, and they were fried in the same shallow fat and served in the same way. Period sources also invoke a resemblance in taste to fried oysters. Oysters were cheap and ubiquitous in nineteenth-century American cooking, which made them a useful yardstick for describing anything small and fried. Corn oysters appear across American community cookbooks from the mid-1800s onward, in the breakfast and supper-cake chapters alongside griddle cakes and fritters, and always dependent on fresh corn scraped from the cob in season. This version arrives credited to a contributor by name and town, which is how such collections were assembled: subscribers sent in what they actually cooked, down to the warning about soggy fat.