““If that was your reason, Althea, you’ll have enough of ’em now to content you,” drawled the Captain. “They’ll drift past you like so many movin’ pictures--all sorts an’ kinds. There’ll be the woman in the pink hat who carries away the lump sugar in her handkerchief; an’ the sharp-nosed old maid from the Inn that drinks her tea so black you feel guilty lettin’ her have it. Then you’ll see the girl that fixes up her drink with lemon, cloves, ginger, an’ sugar like she was intendin’ to make it into sweet pickle. I can’t imagine puttin’ such a mixture into my tea. I’d as soon think of dishin’ spices into an oyster stew. Still, if that’s what city folks want, they’re welcome to it.””
A cook of roughly the same moment, setting down the same dish.
Take a shoulder of mutton, and roast it, and being half roasted or more, take off the upper skin whole, & cut the meat into thin slices, then stew it with claret, mace, nutmeg, anchovies, oyster-liquor, salt, capers, olives, samphire, and slices of orange; leave the shoulder blade with some meat on it, and hack it, save also the marrow bone whole with some meat on it, and lay it in a clean dish; the meat being finely stewed, pour it on the bones, and on that some stewed oysters and large oysters over all, with slic't lemon and lemon peel. The skin being first finely breaded, stew the oysters with large mace, a great onion or two, butter, vinegar, white wine, a bundle of sweet herbs, and lay on the skin again over all, _&c._
Sources: The passage is from Sara Ware Bassett, The Green Dolphin, free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. The recipe is from May, The accomplisht cook of 1660, also free in full. Both are in the public domain in the United States. The binding above is ours — plum cloth, oyster stamp.