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Oyster Fritters
Finely chop twenty-four large, freshly opened oysters. Place in a bowl, add two ounces flour, half teaspoon each baking powder and freshly chopped parsley, crack in two eggs, adding three tablespoons cold milk; season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, mix for five minutes. Heat three tablespoons lard in a large frying pan, and with the aid of a spoon drop the preparation into the pan in round cake forms of two inches in diameter; fry for three minutes on each side, remove with a skimmer and thoroughly drain on a cloth. Dress on a dish with a folded napkin over, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve.
A plain oyster fritter batter, thin enough to spoon rather than pipe. Two details in the original need translating, and one instruction is worth ignoring.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is about half a teaspoon. That is assertive but correct for oysters, which need pepper to read as anything other than sweet.
- Two ounces flourWeight, not volume: roughly a scant half cup of all-purpose. The batter should just bind the chopped oysters, not coat them, so hold back a spoonful if your oysters are lean and add it only if the mixture will not hold a mound.
- Drain the oystersTwenty-four large oysters carry a great deal of liquor, and the three tablespoons of milk assumes they have been lifted out of it. Drain them before chopping, or the batter will slacken and spread in the pan. Reserve the liquor for a sauce or chowder.
- Mix for five minutesDo not. Five minutes of stirring builds gluten and turns the fritters tough and bready. Combine until no dry flour shows, half a minute at most, and cook the batter promptly.
- Fat and heatLard is a good choice for flavor; a neutral oil works as well and tolerates more heat. Three tablespoons in a large pan gives only a shallow film, so add more if you want the fat to come partway up the fritters. The recipe gives no temperature; aim for a heat that browns a two-inch fritter in about the three minutes a side it allows. If they colour much faster than that the pan is too hot and the centers will not cook through.
- DrainingSubstitute a wire rack or paper towels for the cloth. Fritters left sitting on a flat surface steam their own undersides soft.
- Yield and servingProbably sixteen to twenty small fritters, depending on how generously you spoon them; enough for four as a first course. The folded napkin is period plating, and would have helped absorb grease; a warmed platter does the job with less laundry. Lemon wedges or tartar sauce are the usual modern accompaniment.
Oyster fritters belong to the era when oysters were cheap and abundant on the American coast rather than a luxury: Chesapeake and Long Island beds supplied barrels of them to inland cities by rail, and cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries treat them as an everyday ingredient, to be scalloped, panned, curried or, as here, chopped and stretched with flour and egg. Chopping rather than battering whole would have had the effect of making a small quantity go further. The stiffly formal finish, a folded napkin on the platter and a garnish of parsley, reads like the plating vocabulary of professional hotel and restaurant service of the period.