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Pickled Oysters
To While in good condition a quantity of them may be pickled or converted into catsup for use later on. pickle two hundred good-sized oysters, pick over and wash them. Put them with the strained liquor into a saucepan and bring to the boiling point. Dip out the oysters, rinse them in cold water; drain and set aside. Skim and boil the liquor for five minutes; add to it one pint of vinegar, two dried red peppers, two dozen cloves, four dozen peppercorns, two inches of stick cinnamon, one small blade of mace, and boil for five minutes. Put the oysters into two-quart glass jars, pour over them the boiling liquor and seal.
This is a shelf-stable seafood preserve made by pouring hot liquor over cooked oysters and sealing the jar, with no processing and no measured acidity. That combination is the reason it cannot be recommended today.
- The sealed jar is the problemOysters are a low-acid food, and sealing them hot in glass creates exactly the oxygen-free environment in which Clostridium botulinum spores germinate and produce toxin. Boiling liquor does not destroy those spores; only pressure processing or a reliably acidified brine holds them in check, and this recipe provides neither.
- The acidity is unmeasured and dilutedOne pint of vinegar goes into an unspecified volume of oyster liquor from two hundred oysters, which could easily be a quart or more of near-neutral, salty liquid. The finished pH is unknown and very likely above the 4.6 threshold that makes a sealed preserve safe, so this is not a true pickle in the food-safety sense.
- Vibrio and the brief heatingOysters are brought only to the boiling point and then rinsed in cold water, which is closer to a scald than a thorough cook, and they are handled again after heating. Lightly cooked oysters are associated with Vibrio vulnificus and V. parahaemolyticus, though the boiling liquor poured over them in the jar would kill such non-spore-forming bacteria; the botulism risk above is the more serious objection.
- No storage instruction at allThe recipe ends at "seal" and says nothing about refrigeration or how long the jars keep. Pickled oysters of this period were generally kept in a cold place and eaten within a fairly short time rather than stored indefinitely; read as a modern canning recipe, which is how the sealed jar invites you to read it, it is dangerous. If you want pickled oysters, use a current tested recipe from a food-safety authority.
- Terms in the textA "blade of mace" is one piece of the dried aril of the nutmeg, perhaps half a teaspoon crumbled. "Catsup" in the opening line most likely means oyster ketchup, a thin savoury sauce, not the tomato condiment. Two hundred oysters is a quantity that assumes a household buying shellfish in bulk.
- The garbled first sentenceThe opening line has been mangled in typesetting: it should read "To pickle two hundred good-sized oysters..." with the note about catsup belonging to the surrounding text. It is left as printed.
Pickled oysters were one of the standard American ways of moving a glut of cheap shellfish inland and forward in time. Through the nineteenth century oysters were a working-class staple in East Coast cities, dredged by the barrel from the Chesapeake and New York's own beds and sold from cellars, carts and saloons; kegs of pickled and spiced oysters travelled by rail and were a familiar item on supper tables and in the Christmas season. The spicing here — cloves, peppercorns, stick cinnamon, mace, dried red pepper — is close to the warm blend English cooks had used for pickled and "collared" fish since the seventeenth century, though the dried red pepper is not part of that earlier English mixture. The recipe also marks the moment this book was written: by 1900 domestic glass jars with screw or wire seals were cheap and ubiquitous, well before the bacteriology of botulism in home-canned low-acid food was understood in the 1920s.