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Fried Oysters, Tartare Sauce
Place twenty-four large freshly opened oysters on a plate. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, turn them well in the seasoning; then lightly roll in flour, slightly dip in beaten egg, and lastly roll in fresh bread crumbs. Place in a frying basket and fry in thoroughly boiling fat for five minutes. Lift them up, drain on a towel; sprinkle over a half teaspoon salt, dress on a hot dish, and serve with a Tartare sauce, in a sauce bowl separately.
A plain deep-fried oyster, and the only real problem with it is the clock. Everything else is straightforward breading work.
- Five minutes is far too longAn oyster is cooked the moment its edges ruffle. At 375F a crumbed oyster needs 60 to 90 seconds, two minutes at the outside — long enough to colour the crust. Five minutes gives you a rubber pellet in a dark shell.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is usually reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, though period sources also give an eighth; on the quarter-teaspoon reading two of them is half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive but workable for oysters; the total salt across the recipe is a full teaspoon for two dozen.
- "Thoroughly boiling fat"Fat does not boil; the phrase means fat hot enough to shimmer and haze, around 370-380F. Below 350F the crumbs drink oil, and above 400F they scorch before the oyster warms through.
- Dry the oysters firstFreshly opened oysters carry liquor that will slide the flour straight off. Drain them and blot on a towel before seasoning, and reserve the liquor for a chowder or the sauce.
- Skip the frying basketBreaded food welds itself to wire. Lower the oysters in a few at a time with a spider or slotted spoon, or the crust will stay behind in the basket.
- Fry in batchesTwo dozen at once will pull the fat temperature down sharply. Three or four batches, letting the fat recover between them, keeps the coating crisp.
- The tartare sauceThe book assumes you have it elsewhere: mayonnaise with capers, chopped gherkin, shallot or onion, and parsley. If you make the mayonnaise from scratch, use pasteurised eggs, as it is never cooked.
- YieldTwenty-four oysters serves four as a first course, or two as a main with bread and lemon. Fried oysters do not hold; serve them as each batch drains.
Fried oysters belong to the period when oysters were cheap food rather than luxury food. Through the nineteenth century the beds of the Chesapeake, Long Island Sound and the Thames estuary supplied them by the barrel, and cookbooks of the era seem to treat two dozen oysters as a fairly ordinary quantity in patties, or crumbed and fried like this. The pairing with sauce tartare points to the professional French kitchen this book draws on: sauce tartare is a mayonnaise derivative that appears in the classic repertoire as the standard accompaniment to fried fish, though the origin of its name is obscure. The five-minute frying time reflects an era of guesswork over deep fat, before thermometers were common household equipment.