Skip to main content
Main

Oysters Fried in Boiling Lard

Fried oysters in lard, seasoned with pepper and flour, served hot.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Oyster and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 25% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,582 recipes. Both carry hexanal, which smells grass, green. The science ↓

Oysters Fried in Boiling Lard

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Drain the liquor from the oysters and dry them with a napkin.

  2. Season the oysters with pepper and dredge them in flour.

Fry

  1. Heat the lard in a deep pan until very hot.

  2. Fry the oysters in batches until they are brown, about a few minutes.

Drain and serve

  1. Remove the oysters with a slotted spoon and place them in a colander.

  2. Sprinkle a little coarse sea salt over the oysters and serve very hot.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Oyster + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,582 recipes

    Shared aroma: hexanal (grass, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Oysters
Main ingredient; their moisture cooks inside the coating while the outside browns.
Flour
Dry coating that helps the outside turn crisp and brown in the hot fat.
Lard
Frying fat that transfers heat quickly and gives the coating its browning and crispness.

The step that matters

Fry in batches in very hot lard. Adding too many oysters at once drops the fat's temperature, so the coating absorbs more grease and turns soggy instead of browning crisply.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

More fried oysters recipes

Mock 7Breaded 4Philadelphia 3 See all 440 →

You might also like

Mock Oyster SoupMock Oyster Soup21 recipesCorn FrittersCorn Fritters6 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipes