Cooked Oysters

One of the earliest cookbooks, Taillevent’s Le Viandier, gives a recipe for oysters that, in typical medieval fashion, contains a collection of spices including saffron, ginger, cloves, cinnamon, and graines de paradis (a kind of pepper grown in Africa, used today in Moroccan and Tunisian cooking). The body of the sauce is provided by white wine held together with bread and puréed peas, a touch reminiscent of modern sauces held together with vegetable purées. Later recipes for cooked oysters, those that start to appear in cookbooks written in the seventeenth century, are more typical of modern French cooking. The spices are replaced with indigenous ingredients such as capers and herbs like thyme and chives. Bread continues to be the thickener of choice, usually in the form of bread crumbs (called chapelure), but lard, the favorite cooking fat of the Middle Ages, is supplanted by butter, and oyster stews (ragoûts) are used as accompaniments to or integral parts of an amazing variety of other seafood, meat, and poultry dishes.