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Deviled Oysters
Wipe the oysters dry and lay in a flat dish, cover with a mixture of melted butter, cayenne pepper (or pepper sauce), and lemon juice. Let them lie in this for ten minutes, turning them frequently; take out, roll in cracker crumbs, then in beaten egg, then in crumbs, and fry in hot lard and butter, half and half.
A straightforward fry that depends almost entirely on how dry the oysters are before they go into the crumbs. The original assumes shucked oysters and an open pan of fat, and gives neither a temperature nor a time.
- Dry means dryShucked oysters hold a great deal of liquor, and any that remains will steam the crust off. Drain them in a sieve, then blot both sides on paper towels before the butter mixture goes on.
- The marinadeThe original gives no quantities. As a starting point for about a pint of oysters, roughly 4 tablespoons melted butter, the juice of half a lemon, and cayenne or hot pepper sauce to taste. Keep to the ten minutes the recipe specifies; a long soak in lemon juice will begin to firm and whiten the flesh.
- Cracker crumbsPeriod cracker crumbs came from plain soda or water crackers, crushed fine. Unsalted saltines are the closest modern match; panko fries crisper but reads coarser than intended.
- Crumb, egg, crumbThe order given is unusual but appears in period frying instructions; the first coat of crumbs plausibly gives the egg something to grip on a buttered oyster. Follow it as written rather than reversing it to egg-then-crumb.
- Frying fatHalf lard and half butter browns beautifully, but butter's milk solids begin to scorch well below normal frying heat. Clarified butter mixed with lard, or lard alone with a spoonful of butter added at the end, holds up better. Keep the fat around 350-365F, about half an inch deep.
- Time in the panOne to two minutes a side, until the crust is deep gold. Oysters are cooked the moment their edges ruffle; anything past that turns them tough and shrunken.
- Batches and drainingFry six or eight at a time so the fat does not drop below temperature, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- YieldA pint of shucked oysters, depending on size perhaps fifteen to twenty-five, serves three or four as a first course with lemon wedges.
"Deviled" in nineteenth-century American cookery simply meant heavily seasoned with something hot — cayenne, mustard, or a bottled pepper sauce — and the term was applied to crab, ham, eggs and kidneys as readily as to oysters. Its appearance in a Southern compilation like The Dixie Cook Book reflects how cheap and ubiquitous oysters were along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts before overharvesting and pollution thinned the beds; cookbooks of the 1880s and 1890s often give shellfish a section of their own, with oysters fried, scalloped, pickled, stewed, roasted in the shell and served raw. The double crumb coating here is the same technique used for croquettes in the period, and the cayenne-and-lemon butter belongs to the same broad taste for hot seasoning that had already made Louisiana pepper sauces widely available beyond the state.