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 for this recipe, I dove into a shelf’s worth of Irish cookbooks. Much to my surprise, oysters kept bobbing to the surface. So I concluded 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.