Oyster stew from an early eighteenth century Irish kitchen manuscript.

The kitchen manuscript where this recipe appears is a sleeper, apparently unknown to most scholars. Marjorie Quarton published a transcript of the journal with commentary as Mary Cannon’s Commonplace Book: An Irish Kitchen in the 1700s in Dublin during 2010. Four servings.

• 2 dozen shucked oysters and their trained liquor
• about ½ cup white wine
• about ½ teaspoon anchovy paste
• about ¼ teaspoon or more cayenne
• juice of ½ lemon
• some whole peppercorns
• 2 Tablespoons unsalted butter
• 2 beaten eggs
• heaped Tablespoon chopped parsley
• heaped Tablespoon minced scallion greens
• toast

1. Combine the oyster liquor, wine, anchovy, cayenne, lemon juice and peppercorns in a saucepan and bring the mixture to a boil.
2. Reduce the heat to low, add the oysters and simmer them until their edges just start to curl.
3. Stir the butter into the pan followed by the beaten egg; do not let the stew boil or the eggs will curdle.
4. Serve the stew with scatters of parsley and scallion accompanied by toast.

Notes:

-Mrs. Cannon served her oyster stew “with some fryed Oysters and Lemmons soused.” To souse something is to cook it in vinegar and spice; a more pungent way than the Mediterranean to preserve a lemon.

-The cayenne and greens do not appear in the original recipe but salt does, and Mrs. Cannon also cooks the oysters much too long for twenty-first century taste.

-The Cannons were prosperous. More middling and working folk in Ireland, the vast majority of people, would not consider eating an oyster.

-Somewhat ironically then, this is the first recipe that Mrs. Quarton reproduced from the commonplace book. Its original guise:

                        “To Stew Oysters

Plump your Oysters over ye ffire, then straine them through a strainer and save ye Liquor. Then wash your Oysters well from ye Shells and putt them in a stewpan over ye ffire. Putt in their own Liquor, a little White Wine, some hole Peper, a little Salt, ye juice of a Lemmon and some Anchovies. Stew them until they be enough, then putt in a quarter pound of Fresh Butter with an egge or two beaten up and sett into it.Dishe them up with seppits round ye Dishe, with some fryed Oysters and Lemmons soused.”

-The original is simultaneously richer (all that butter) and more pungent (a lot of lemon juice and that soused lemon).