Put two ounces of butter into a pan and let it cook till nut brown, then add to it twenty oysters well drained and wiped; fry them till they assume a light color on both sides, then pour in a quarter of a pint of oyster liquor, salt and pepper. Serve at the same time thin slices of toasted bread, or else pour the oysters over slices of toast laid in a deep dish.
A two-minute dish that lives or dies on dry oysters and hot brown butter. Everything else is assembly.
This is from Charles Ranhofer's The Epicurean (1894), the enormous compendium of his years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, where nearly every dish carries a French name whether or not it has a French pedigree. "Philadelphia style" here is often taken to mean what Americans of the period called panned oysters: fried fast in butter and served on toast, as against the stews, roasts and fries that filled the rest of the oyster chapter. Philadelphia's association with oysters was commercial as much as culinary; the beds were an important source for the city through the nineteenth century, and oyster cellars and street vendors were a fixture there long before the Delmonico dining room existed. Ranhofer's oyster section runs to dozens of numbered preparations, a reminder that oysters were then cheap, plentiful and widely eaten, not the luxury they became after the beds declined in the following decades.