How do you pat an oyster?
This is a question I ask myself in "R" months, usually after polishing off a plateful of oysters that have been covered with crumbs and fried. Even though it is fried, the dish is called "patted oysters." It shows up in a sprinkling of restaurants and church suppers around Maryland.
Recently I phoned around the state asking a handful of oyster cooks on both sides of the Bay Bridge exactly how they patted their oysters.
Susie Bruno, day manager of Bo Brooks restaurant in Northeast Baltimore, described a multi-stage process of "praying, bleeding and more praying" that the restaurant staff uses to transform mere mollusks into patted oysters.
"You cup the oyster in your hand," Ms. Bruno began. "Then you dip your hand into some cracker meal that has a little salt and pepper in it.
"You flip the oyster back and forth in your hands until the meal sticks to the oyster," she said. "You hold your hands the way you do when you are praying. I guess you're praying that cracker meal doesn't fall off."
Next, she said, the oysters sit in the refrigerator until their juices // drain, a process she called "bleeding."
"You let them bleed in the fridge for two to three hours," she said.
After the bleeding, it is time for praying once again, patting the oysters with more cracker meal.
Finally, you drop the coated oysters in hot oil and cook them quickly, about five to six minutes, until they are golden brown.
A patted oyster is larger and has less batter than an oyster fritter, Ms. Bruno said.
"You use your big oysters, your medium and selects for patted," she said. "Fritters are smaller and covered in a batter, almost like a pancake batter, then fried."
In Towson, Doris Przylepa, a mother of five, spoke of a slightly different type of patted oyster that she has cooked for the past 20 years.
Her patted oysters, she said, are dipped in a beaten egg, then rolled in bread crumbs, not cracker meal. Moreover, the bread crumbs are homemade, not store-bought. One of her steps in making patted oysters, Mrs. Przylepa said, is to toast bread in the oven, then reduce the toast to crumbs.
"You put a little salt and pepper in the crumbs," she said. "Not a ton. You fry them in a little grease, a little butter or margarine." For Mrs. Przylepa, the key is the gentle touch. Not too much seasoning, not too much breading. Not too much cooking.
When you eat a patted oyster, she said, you should taste the oyster, not the breading.
"You should know," as she puts it, "that you are really eating an oyster."
Over on Tilghman Island, Alice Harrison, matriarch of the family that presides over the Chesapeake House restaurant and a seafood-packing operation, said that during her 90 years in Maryland she has heard the term "patted oysters" used two ways.
One, she said, referred to an oyster that had been patted with bread crumbs and fried.
The other kind of patted oyster is made by taking two small oysters, "patting them together," then cooking them as one serving, she said.
In Grasonville, Robert Brittingham, chef at the Fisherman's Inn restaurant, told me he also knew of two styles -- "the old way and new way" -- of making patted oysters.
Mr. Brittingham, 27, said he learned the "old way" while he was growing up on the Eastern Shore. It called for both "bleeding" the oysters and dipping them in an egg wash consisting of eggs and milk. Sometimes the juices from the raw oysters were put in the wash as well.
The oysters were then dipped in flour or in crumbs before they were fried. The trouble was, Mr. Brittingham said, during the cooking process many of the oysters slipped out of their coatings.
When Mr. Brittingham cooks patted oysters at the Fisherman's Inn, he employs a new, no-slip style, one that uses special bread crumbs.
He dips the oysters in a wash of egg, flour and water, then coats them in what he called "Oriental bread crumbs."
"They are bigger than bread crumbs . . . more like bread chips," he said.
These bread chips give the oysters a coating similar to batter found on tempura, Japanese batter-fried seafood. Then the new-style oysters are fried in hot canola oil.
Mr. Brittingham acknowledged that the old style of cooking patted oysters is rich in Eastern Shore tradition.
But the new style, he said, is more efficient. Once they latch onto the oysters, the bread chips rarely let go. And so, he said, virtually every oyster that starts out raw, ends up patted.