In honor of St. Patrick’s Day I have packed four Irish ingredients into one tasty little appetizer — oysters, cabbage, Guinness stout and Colman’s Mustard.
What’s that? The skeptics among you are claiming that fully half of those ingredients — the oysters and Colman’s — are ringers? Not so. And here’s why.
In search of inspiration, I dove into a shelf’s worth of Irish cookbooks. Much to my surprise, oysters kept bobbing to the surface. So I concluded that the Irish love oysters. Unfortunately, they tend to love them most when they’re swimming in cream, a fate to which I would never consign them.
Here in America we like our oysters fried. But I no more intended to fry these guys than to bathe them in cream. Not only is deep-frying unhealthy, it’s also messy and far too much trouble.