Oyster moments
Simon Courtauld
ikt the beginning of this month, after two weeks in south-west France (where I came across several fish unknown in this country), it was good to get back in time for the seafood festival on Mersea Island, in Essex, where we enjoyed the first Colchester native oysters of the season. A few more slipped delectably down with our seafood platter at the nearby Company Shed — bring your own wine, bread, mayonnaise — which was still doing good business well after four o'clock on a glorious afternoon.
This so-called European oyster, cultivated in England mainly in Essex, Suffolk, Kent and Cornwall, is sold only between September and April; in summer the roe may give it a milky appearance and a rather dull taste. It is rarer than, and more than twice the price of, the Pacific or Portuguese all-year-round oyster, which grows to maturity more quickly and is widely available. In France these oysters have various names, depending on where they have been gathered: belons and arrnoricaines from Brittany. fines de claire usually from the Charente further south. I was interested to see oysters from Oleron being sold in a market in the Lot last month — interested because my family lived on the Ile d'Oleron, off La Rochelle, until expelled, along with all Huguenots, by Louis XIV towards the end of the 17th century. (Oleron is known not only for the number and quality of the oyster beds which surround the island, but also for the fact that it was the last place in France to be liberated in 1945.) How to describe the pleasure of eating a raw oyster? Spoilsports might wish to mention that you are eating the intestine, liver, gills and stomach of a hermaphrodite, but that is quite irrelevant to the lotus-oystereater. Eleanor Clark, in her classic, almost poetic book, The Oysters of Locmariaquer
(on the southern Brittany coast). mentions 'that little stimulus on the palate' provided by an oyster. 'You are eating the sea, only the sensation of a gulp of sea water has been wafted out of it by some sorcery.'
The 'true oyster moment', as it has been called, can only be properly experienced by tipping the contents of the half-shell into your mouth — without a fork, without tabasco sauce or vinegar, and even, if it is a native oyster, without any lemon juice or pepper. No one would seriously argue — would they? — that there is a better way of eating oysters; but some people are in the habit of doing strange things with them. I cannot see the point of adding oysters to steak and kidney pudding, or of wrapping them in bacon and calling them angels on horseback. (A prune wrapped in bacon makes a much more satisfactory savoury.) A French recipe recommends eating a fried chipolata sausage immediately followed by an oyster, then repeating the questionable exercise 12 times. Why, I cannot imagine.
If you must cook oysters, use the foreign ones. Several recipes involve grilling or baking them, with grated cheese, which does not appeal to me, though I should say that I have never tried the combination. But I do remember enjoying oysters Rockefeller in the city, New Orleans, where the dish was invented. Chopped spinach, parsley, spring onion and crispy bacon are combined with breadcrumbs, salt and paprika and cooked in butter. The mixture is then placed on the opened oysters, browned briefly under a grill and moistened with a little Pernod. The Americans do unfortunately have other ways with oysters, which may involve smothering them with tomato ketchup or cooking them with cream and curry powder. I have just tried a few of the cheaper oysters briefly poached, with spinach and beurre blanc — not bad at all; and I quite like the idea of oysters fried in tempura batter with a mayonnaise containing wasabi (Japanese green horseradish).
But let's get back to the joys of eating raw oysters. There is not much point in thinking longingly back to those Dickensian days when 200 oysters could be bought in London for four shillings, and Sam Weller made his remark about poverty and oysters, commenting that, 'the poorer the place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters ... here's a oyster stall to every half-dozen houses'. One should, however, allow oneself an occasional oyster blow-out. I recall a three-hour drive westwards across Ireland, one day in late April, to Moran's pub to catch the last of its famously good oysters before the season closed. They were still being served, and we were still relishing those oyster moments, with the assistance of pints of Guinness, as the light began to fade over Galway Bay.
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