FUN WITH BIVALVES

 

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).

 

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.

 

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.  

 

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?

 

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.