Important: Safety Warning

This page describes home-canning methods from before the causes of botulism were understood. Canning low-acid foods without a pressure canner, as described here, can allow the growth of Clostridium botulinum, whose toxin is among the deadliest known. Follow current USDA home-canning guidelines instead.

This information has been left in for historical purposes but should not be acted upon.

No. 802

Pickled Oysters

Huitres Marinees

Blanch some large oysters, drain them after the first boil and keep the liquor; boil some vinegar with cloves, whole pepper, whole allspice, half an ounce of each for every quart of vinegar, and add a little mace; put two-thirds of the oyster liquor with one-third of the vinegar, and also the oysters into hermetically closed glass bottles, and keep them in a cool place. Serve on side dishes with sliced lemon and sprigs of parsley set around.

← No. 801 Olives Stuffed with Anchovy Butter and with Cold Side Dishes No. 803 Raw Oysters on the half Sheel or Little Neck →

For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

This is a shelf-preserve of barely-cooked shellfish in diluted brine, and it belongs to a period before anyone measured pH or understood Clostridium botulinum. The notes below explain where it fails rather than how to rescue it.

The acid is diluted below any safe levelThe acid is diluted and the finished pH unknown -- Two parts oyster liquor to one part spiced vinegar gives a weakly acidified, salty, protein-rich liquid whose acidity is nowhere stated. Safe pickling of seafood depends on the finished liquid staying at pH 4.6 or below; nothing in this method shows that it does, and no amount of spice compensates.
"Hermetically closed" is the problem, not the solutionSealing a low-acid food into an airtight glass bottle creates exactly the oxygen-free environment botulinum spores need. An airtight seal was commonly taken as a sign that a preserve was sound; here it is the opposite, because nothing in the process destroys spores.
"Blanch, drain after the first boil" is not a cookOysters lifted out as the liquor first breaks into a boil reach a temperature and hold time far short of anything that would pasteurise them. Lifting them out that early does keep the oysters plump, but it leaves a raw-ish product going into storage.
A cool place is not refrigerationRanhofer's cool place is a cellar or larder, plausibly 50-60F. Kept there for days or weeks, this is a warm incubator by modern standards, and botulinum toxin can develop with no smell and no off taste to warn you.
No quantity of oysters, no yield, no keeping timeThe recipe fixes only the spice rate: half an ounce each of cloves, whole peppercorns and whole allspice per quart of vinegar, about 14 g each. It never says how many oysters, how much liquor they yield, or how long the bottles may stand. Preserving instructions without measured proportions and a defined holding time cannot be validated.
Raw shellfish carries its own loadOysters are filter feeders and are a known vehicle for Vibrio species and norovirus. Undercooking them and then holding them for days compounds a hazard that even fresh, properly sourced oysters carry.
If you want pickled oystersUse a current, tested recipe with a stated finished acidity and refrigerated short-term storage. The serving idea from the original -- cold, on a side dish, with sliced lemon and parsley around the edge -- transfers perfectly well.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's account of his decades as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it reads as a professional reference: numbered recipes, French headings, and a section of hors-d'oeuvre and cold side dishes designed to be set out at the start of a long meal. Pickled oysters were an American commonplace long before Ranhofer wrote them down -- oysters were cheap and enormously abundant in New York and Chesapeake waters through the nineteenth century, and spiced vinegar was the standard way to hold a glut for a few days or send it inland. Recipes of this shape appear in English and American household books from the eighteenth century onward, generally with the same three spices: cloves, whole pepper, allspice, sometimes mace. What the entry really records is a kitchen that judged preservation by seal and by smell, since C. botulinum was only identified by van Ermengem in 1895, the year after the book appeared, with the wider understanding of anaerobic preserves following in the early twentieth century.