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
- Combine the oyster liquor, wine, anchovy, cayenne, lemon juice and peppercorns in a saucepan and bring the mixture to a boil.
- Reduce the heat to low, add the oysters and simmer them until their edges just start to curl.
- Stir the butter into the pan followed by the beaten egg; do not let the stew boil or the eggs will curdle.
- 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).
Seppits, or sippets, are small slices of toast.