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Oysters in Oil
Drain and season nice large oysters. Dip them first in bread crumbs, then in eggs, and back in the crumbs again. Fry in smoking hot olive oil.
Four lines of instruction that assume a cook who already knows how to shuck, drain and fry. The details worth pinning down are the coating order, the oil, and how briefly oysters actually want to be in the pan.
- Dry the oysters firstDrain them in a sieve, then blot on a towel until the surface is barely tacky. Wet oysters shed their crumbs in the pan and spit in the oil.
- The coating order is deliberateThe coating order -- Crumbs, then egg, then crumbs again is what the text says, and it works: a first dusting of crumbs gives the egg something to grip on a slick shellfish. Flour works as well or better for that first layer if the crumbs slide off.
- "Smoking hot" is too hotTake this as 365-375F, tested with a crumb that sizzles and browns in about thirty seconds. A plain refined olive oil holds this range without turning acrid, while extra-virgin is more likely to smoke and taste scorched.
- Two minutes, no moreLarge oysters need only until the crust is deep gold, roughly 90 seconds to 2 minutes total, turning once. Held longer they tighten into rubber and weep liquor into the coating.
- Season the oyster, not just the crumbs"Season" here most likely means salt and pepper; a little cayenne and a squeeze of lemon on the drained oysters before crumbing carries much further than seasoning the breadcrumbs alone.
- Fry in small batchesSix to eight oysters at a time; the recipe gives no depth, but a shallow pan with about an inch of oil suits it. Crowding drops the temperature and gives you a pale, greasy crust.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity. A pint of shucked oysters, depending on size, will run roughly 16 to 24 and serves four.
Fried oysters turn up constantly in American cookbooks between the 1870s and the First World War, when Chesapeake and Gulf oysters were cheap, shipped inland packed in ice, and sold by the quart from barrels and city oyster cellars. The distinguishing note here is the olive oil: fat of some kind is usual in these recipes hough impto impression rather than any full survey, lard, butter or drippings seem the commoner choice, and specifying oil at least suggests cooks who kept oil for salads. The oyster sandwich itself had a long life in this period, from the fried-oyster loaf sold on the Pacific coast to the crumbed oysters tucked into rolls for picnics and late suppers.