Home › The World's Kitchen › Baltimore Fritters
Baltimore Fritters
Plunge twelve freshly opened large oysters in boiling water for five minutes, drain, then cut in very small square pieces and place in a bowl. Drain on sieve a half pint cooked corn and add it to oysters with half teaspoon chopped parsley, three tablespoons flour, one raw egg, the yolk of another, a half gill cream, saltspoon baking powder, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, saltspoon grated nutmeg, and sharply mix with wooden spoon for five minutes.
Thoroughly heat three tablespoons leaf lard in a large frying pan, take up a heaping tablespoon batter and with aid of a finger drop it into pan. Proceed as rapidly as possible with the rest and fry for three minutes on each side, or until a nice golden colour, lift up, dry on a cloth and use as directed.
A Chesapeake oyster-and-corn fritter from a book that assumes a professional kitchen and a full pantry of small measures. Most of the work is in getting the oysters right and the fat hot enough.
- The oysters come firstFive minutes in boiling water will shrink and toughen oysters badly. They need only 20-30 seconds, just until the edges ruffle, before draining and chopping; they finish cooking inside the fritter.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a scant 1/4 tsp each of baking powder and nutmeg, and about 1/2 tsp pepper, which is assertive but deliberate in an oyster batter.
- GillA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of cream is 1/4 cup. Use heavy cream; cream at this date was unstandardised and often richer than modern light cream.
- Half pint cooked cornOne cup. The recipe says to drain a half pint of cooked corn on a sieve, so the measure is taken and then drained. Fresh kernels cut from the cob and briefly boiled are closest to the original; drained canned corn works, but pat it dry or the batter loosens.
- Leaf lardThe fat from around the kidneys, prized for its clean flavour. Ordinary lard, or a neutral oil, does the same job. Three tablespoons is a shallow fry, not a deep one, so the fritters should be dropped as flat rounds rather than balls.
- Mixing for five minutesThe long beating with a wooden spoon is what gives these body with only three tablespoons of flour. It is not a light muffin batter, and overmixing is not a concern here.
- Heat and timingThree minutes a side assumes a moderate fat temperature; the recipe gives no figure and says only to heat the fat thoroughly. Test with a spoonful first: if it browns before the centre sets, pull the pan back.
- Yield and "use as directed"The recipe states no yield, but a heaping tablespoon of batter apiece from this quantity makes considerably more than a dozen fritters. The closing phrase indicates the fritters are a component used elsewhere in the book; served on their own they want lemon or a tartare sauce.
Oyster fritters belong to Baltimore and the wider Chesapeake in the way that chowder belongs to New England: the bay's beds were still producing oysters in great quantity in the years around 1900, though harvests had peaked in the 1880s and were already declining, and they remained cheap enough that they turned up chopped into batters, stuffings and croquettes rather than being reserved for the half shell. Pairing them with sweet corn is a habit of long standing, the same instinct behind oyster-and-corn chowders and "corn oysters" (corn fritters shaped and seasoned to imitate the real thing, a name often said to come from their use when oysters were out of season), which were a staple of American cookbooks generally. The recipe's precision about saltspoons and gills, and the closing "use as directed," are typical of the period's cookery writing: a component set down for a home audience without much of its original context.