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Oyster Fritters
Drain off liquor, boil, skim, and to a cupful add a cup of milk, two or three eggs, salt and pepper, and flour enough to make a rather thick batter. Have hot lard or beef drippings ready in a kettle, drop the batter into it with a large spoon, taking up one oyster for each spoonful. The oyster must be large and plump.
A simple batter fritter that hangs on two things: the oyster liquor being used as the liquid, and the fat being hot enough that the batter sets before the oyster overcooks.
- The hinge: fat temperatureAim for 365-375F. Below that the batter absorbs grease and the oyster stews inside it; much above and the outside colors before the center is set. Fry in small batches so the temperature does not crash.
- Cook timeThe original gives none. Two to three minutes total, turning once, is enough — the oyster only needs to firm and its edges to ruffle. An oyster held longer turns rubbery.
- The liquor"Drain off liquor, boil, skim" means the oysters' own packing liquid, brought to a boil so the grey scum can be lifted off. A cupful of liquor plus a cup of milk is the wet base; if your oysters yield less, top up with bottled clam juice rather than water.
- Batter consistency"Rather thick" means it should mound on the spoon and not run. The original gives no flour quantity: add it by feel to the liquid and eggs, which will take roughly two cups or more. Too thin and the batter slides off the oyster in the fat.
- Beef drippingsPeriod frying fat, and it gives a distinctly savory result. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works; lard is closest to the original.
- KettleA deep iron pot, not a tea kettle. Use a heavy saucepan filled no more than a third, and a thermometer.
- YieldAbout 18-24 fritters, serving four to six as a first course. Drain on paper and serve immediately with lemon or a vinegar-pepper sauce; they collapse as they cool.
- Oyster sizeThe instruction to use large plump oysters is practical — a small oyster disappears into the batter. Select or standard-size shucked oysters, patted dry before dropping into the batter, hold their shape best.
Fried oysters in every form — battered, breaded, in fritters, in loaves — were everyday food along the American coast and up the navigable rivers through the nineteenth century, when oysters were still cheap, abundant, and shipped inland packed in ice and their own liquor. The Dixie Cook Book, compiled in the 1880s from the same family of community and household compilations that produced Buckeye Cookery, gives oysters a section of their own, which reflects how ordinary they were on Southern tables rather than any special status. The economy of the recipe is worth noting: the liquor drained from the tub is not discarded but boiled, skimmed and used as the batter's liquid, so nothing of the oyster's flavor is lost. Fritter batters of this kind — milk, egg, flour, and whatever savory liquid was at hand — were a standing technique applied to corn, apples, clams and salsify as readily as to oysters.