Some say, and if you ask me, they say it far too often, ‘It was a brave man who first ate an oyster.’ (The quotation comes in various forms and is attributed to a wide variety of people).
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| Ed Ruscha, of course. |
I’m not saying it’s untrue, but my feeling is, it was a brave man, or woman, who first ate just about anything. Imagine pulling a leg off a sheep and thinking that would be good to eat.
And how about potatoes? They’re dirty, misshapen, subterranean lumps that you can barely get your teeth into until they’re cooked.
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| Anges Varda, who else? |
Or maybe it wasn’t a question of bravery but of desperation. We have to imagine that there was a lot of trial and error in the eating lives of early man. ‘Hey, those laburnum flowers look good, I’ll bet they’re really tasty.' And so on.
In my family as I was growing up the only person who ever ate oysters, and only when we had a day at the seaside, was my grandmother. Nobody joined her. It was just another weird thing that my weird grandmother did.
I was well into my twenties before I ate my first oyster, bought from a stall in Bridlington. It really didn’t require any bravery. It was great. I’ve been eating them ever since.
And then a week or so ago we spotted some oyster plates in the local antiques emporium. Resistance was useless.
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| Photo by Caroline Gannon, who else? |
Of course having acquired some oyster plates, we needed to acquire oysters. This was June, and there used to be a big fuss about not eating oysters when there wasn't an R in the month, but nobody seems to pay attention to that anymore, certainly not my fishman.
Saturday night, what could be better than half a dozen Malden oysters served on elegant, if slightly kitsch, glass plates?
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| Photo by Caroline Gannon, who else? |
Living well is definitely the best revenge, which is another one of those things that people say far too often.
