Consider the Oyster

By M.F.K. Fisher

M. F. K. Fisher, whom John Updike has called our “poet of the appetites,” here pays tribute to that most enigmatic of ocean creatures, the oyster. As she tells of oysters found in stews, in soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel—and of the pearls sometimes found therein—Fisher describes her mother’s joy at encountering oyster loaf in a girls’ dorm in the 1890s, recalls her own initiation into the “strange cold succulence” of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve’s famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers. Plumbing the “dreadful but exciting” life of the oyster, Fisher invites readers to share in the comforts and delights that this delicate edible evokes, and enchants us along the way with her characteristically wise and witty prose.

“Consider the Oyster marks M. F. K. Fisher’s emergence as a storyteller so confident that she can maneuver a reader through a narrative in which recipes enhance instead of interrupt the reader’s attention to the tales. She approaches a recipe as a published dream or wish, and the stories she tells here...are also stories of the pleasures and disillusionments of dreams fulfilled.”—PATRICIA STORACE, The New York Review of Books

“Since Lewis Carroll no one had written charmingly about that indecisively sexed bivalve until Mrs. Fisher came along with her Consider the Oyster. Surely this will stand for some time as the most judicious treatment in English.”—CLIFFTON FADIMAN

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hauraki Publishing
• Release date: Oct 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781787201262

M.F.K. Fisher

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908–1992) was one of the greatest American writers of the twentieth century. At the age of twenty-one she moved from America to France, where she tasted real French cooking for the first time, and it inspired a prolific writing career centred on a new way of thinking about food and travel. She was a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Gourmet and Vogue, and is the author of twenty-seven books of food, memoir and travel, many of which have become classics. These include Consider the Oyster, How to Cook a Wolf and The Gastronomical Me.

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Text originally published in 1941 under the same title.

© Pickle Partners Publishing 2016, all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electrical, mechanical or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

CONSIDER THE OYSTER

BY

M. F. K. FISHER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 6

LOVE AND DEATH AMONG THE MOLLUSCS 7

A SUPPER TO SLEEP ON 10

Oyster Stew 11

Oyster Stew 11

Butter Crackers 12

R IS FOR OYSTER 14

THE WELL-DRESSED OYSTER 17

Baked Oysters 17

Tartar Sauce 18

Oyster Gumbo 19

Oysters à la Foch 19

Oysters à la Bazaine 20

TAKE 300 CLEAN OYSTERS 21

A LUSTY BIT OF NOURISHMENT 23

Dressing for Turkey or Other Fowl with Oysters 24

Oyster Stuffing 24

Oyster Catsup 25

Dried Oysters with Vegetables (Ho Tsee Soong) 25

Oysters Rockefeller 27

Sauce for Oysters Rockefeller 27

French Creamed Oysters 29

Roast Oysters 29

Roast Oyster Sauce 30

Grilled Oysters 30

PEARLS ARE NOT GOOD TO EAT 34

To Make a Pearl 36

THOSE WERE HAPPY DAYS 38

Pain d’huitres 39

Oyster Loaf 40

SOUP OF THE EVENING, BEAUTIFUL SOUP 41

Cream of Oyster Soup 41

Oyster Soup 42

Oyster Bisque 42

Oyster Bisque 43

Oyster Soup (Number 2) 44

LOVE WAS THE PEARL 45

MY COUNTRY, ‘TIS OF THEE 48

AS LUSCIOUS AS LOCUSTS 51

Hang Town Fry 52

Oysters and Onions 52

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 54

DEDICATION

For Dillwyn Parrish

He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.—Polite Conversation, JONATHAN SWIFT

LOVE AND DEATH AMONG THE MOLLUSCS

...Secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster.—A Christmas Carol, CHARLES DICKENS

An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.

Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion, and danger.

He—but why make him a he, except for clarity? Almost any normal oyster never knows from one year to the next whether he is he or she, and may start at any moment, after the first year, to lay eggs where before he spent his sexual energies in being exceptionally masculine. If he is a she, her energies are equally feminine, so that in a single summer, if all goes well, and the temperature of the water is somewhere around or above seventy degrees, she may spawn several hundred million eggs, fifteen to one hundred million at a time, with commendable pride.

American oysters differ as much as American people, so that the Atlantic Coast inhabitants spend their childhood and adolescence floating free and unprotected with the tides, conceived far from their mothers and their fathers too by milt let loose in the water near the eggs, while the Western oysters lie within special brood-chambers of the maternal shell, inseminated and secure, until they are some two weeks old. The Easterners seem more daring.

A little oyster is born, then, in the water. At first, about five to ten hours after he and at least a few hundred thousand of his mother’s eggs have been fertilized by his potent and unknown sire, he is merely a larva. He is small, but he is free-swimming...and he swims thus freely for about two weeks, wherever the tides and his peculiar whims may lead him. He is called a spat.

It is to be hoped, sentimentally at least, that the spat—our spat—enjoys himself. Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cement-like stuff. If he thought, he might wonder why.

The two weeks up, he suddenly attaches himself to the first clean hard object he bumps into. His fifty million brothers who have not been eaten by fish may or may not bump into anything clean and hard, and those who do not, die. But our spat has been lucky, and in great good spirits he clamps himself firmly to his home, probably forever. He is by now about one-seventy-fifth of an inch long, whatever that may be...and he is an oyster.

Since he is an Easterner, a Chincoteague or a Lynnhaven maybe, he has found a pleasant, moderately salty bottom, where the tides wash regularly and there is no filth to pollute him and no sand to choke him.

There he rests, tied firmly by his left foot, which seems to have become a valve in the immutable way of all oyster feet. He devotes himself to drinking, and rapidly develops an enviable capacity, so that in good weather, when the temperature stays near seventy-eight degrees, he can easily handle twenty-six or-seven quarts an hour. He manages better than most creatures to combine business with pleasure, and from this stream of water that passes through his gills he strains out all the delicious little diatoms and peridia that are his food.

His home—we are speaking now of domesticated oysters—is a wire bag full of old shells, or perhaps a cement-coated pole planted by a wily oyster-farmer. Or perhaps it is what the government describes winningly as a particularly efficient collector, which is made from an egg-crate partition coated with a mixture of lime and cement.

Whatever the anchorage (and I hope, sentimentally again, that it is at least another shell, since

Reviews for Consider the Oyster

[anamuk_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was looking up some information about oyster preparation and this little book kept cropping up. Something I'm very glad about as this elongated essay or perhaps pean to the oyster is fantastic. We learn about the tricky life of the oyster the best ways to stew & fry it. How to make it grow pearls and how the author once found one herself. Scattered through out are recipes several of which require a reasonae purse and a good measure of gastranomic bravey. Finally we are given advice about what to drink with our oysters.

[carioca_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This book is an epicurean classic. Fisher mixes tales of the bivalve delicacy with food advice, food history, recipes and so on - all the while engaging in charming, elegant and witty prose. I consider this to be one of the most unexpectedly surprising books in my little library.

[laytonwoman3rd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Quite a gem; part natural history, part cookbook, part social commentary. The writing is elegant, witty, and seductive. This book whets the appetite for oysters, and other pleasures as well.

[lycomayflower · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fisher talks about oysters--how to cook them, what people think of them, her own memories of where and when she's eaten them (or only imagined doing so). And the result is somehow wonderful, charming, and insightful. Also, I could stare at the picture on the front of my copy for approximately forever. Something about the posture, the poise. Recommended.