title: Oyster Cookery: Sixty Ways to Dominate That Delectable Little Delicacy
author: Joe Daniels
description: Joe Daniels is listed in the book as "The Magic Chef". His picture graces the back cover. Shown sitting on his dock schucking an oyster at his oyster farm on Mats Mats Bay, Joe was a lover of the "delectable little delicacies", as he referred to them. Now deceased, Joe's legacy lives on in this 64 page book with his recipes poetically pinned to each page like psalms to inspire the oyster gourmet.
zlib_text: _NEW YORK, 1860_
  
   **1**
  
   _T_ he first oyster restaurant in New York City opened in a dingy basement on
  Broad Street in 1763, and from that point onward oyster cellars sprang up all
  over Manhattan, selling millions of “the succulent bivalves” to diners of
  every social class. Visitors to the city were invariably struck by the sheer
  number of these establishments, where—as one British tourist wrote—“oysters as
  large as a lady’s hand are to be had at all hours, either from the shell . . .
  or cooked in twenty, or perhaps, forty or a hundred different ways. Oysters
  pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried, and scalloped; oysters made into
  soups, patties, and puddings; oysters with condiments and without condiments;
  oysters for breakfast, dinner, and supper; oysters without stint or limit.” In
  the cellars of Canal Street, patrons could gorge on all-you-can-eat oysters,
  raw on the half shell, for six cents. By 1842, as the popular historian Mark
  Kurlansky notes, “about $6 million worth of oyst