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Pickled Oysters (II)
Mrs. Carl Hammond.
Wash the oysters and scald them in strong salt and water; skim them out and throw into cold water; scald vinegar well and whole peppers; let it get cold. Put the oysters in a stone jar; make liquor to cover them of water they were scalded in, and vinegar. A cup of vinegar to one quart liquor, to be used cold.
This is a keeping recipe, and the keeping is where it fails. The pickling liquor here is far too weak to preserve shellfish, and nothing in the method brings the oysters to a safe temperature or holds them at one.
- The acid is far too diluteOne cup of vinegar to a quart of the salty scalding water is roughly one part vinegar to five of liquor, and against the buffering of the oysters and their own liquor there is no way to know whether the finished pickle falls below the pH 4.6 threshold at which Clostridium botulinum is held in check. Modern seafood pickles specify a vinegar of known strength and a tested proportion for exactly this reason.
- A scald is not cooking"Scald them in strong salt and water" then "skim them out" describes a brief plunge in hot brine, with no time given. That does not reliably reach the internal temperature needed to kill Vibrio parahaemolyticus or Vibrio vulnificus, both of which are ordinary residents of raw oysters and both of which are dangerous.
- Reusing the scalding waterThe liquor is made partly from the water the oysters were scalded in, which carries their shed liquor and grit straight back into the jar. It is then cooled and the pickle kept cold, with nothing in the method to reduce what the oysters brought with them.
- The stone jar assumed a cold cellarA glazed stoneware crock would have stood in an unheated pantry or cellar, cool through the winter months. Nothing in the text says so, and a modern reader has no such storage.
- No quantities, no times, no sealThere is no weight of oysters, no salt concentration for the brine, no scalding time, no boiling time for the vinegar, and no instruction to seal or process the jar. The single proportion given, a cup of vinegar to a quart of liquor, is not enough to build a safe procedure on.
- If you want pickled oystersUse a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority or a modern seafood cookbook, one that specifies vinegar strength, cooking temperature and refrigerated shelf life.
- Reading the older terms"Scald vinegar well" means heat it to just short of boiling; "whole peppers" are whole peppercorns, not chillies; a "stone jar" is a glazed stoneware crock, a standard nineteenth-century pickling vessel.
Pickled oysters were one of the great cheap foods of nineteenth-century North America, and cookbooks of the 1870s and 1880s routinely carry two or three versions, as the numbered variants here suggest. Oysters were dredged in enormous volume from Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic seaboard, shipped inland in barrels and later in tins and refrigerated rail cars, and sold from stalls and cellars in cities that had no local shellfish at all. Pickling in spiced vinegar bought a few extra days and made a keepable relish for supper tables and cold sideboards. Recipes of this kind were contributed by name -- Mrs. Carl Hammond is one of the contributors the book collected -- and they read as reminders rather than instructions: a cook who already knew how oysters behaved needed only the proportions of the liquor. The unstated context is a cold cellar and quick consumption, both of which vanished with the domestic refrigerator, along with the oyster beds that made the dish so ordinary.