SOME LITERARY OYSTERS

Here is Herman Melville in Moby Dick: ‘Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.’

OK, I understand the metaphor, but in what conceivable sense do oysters observe the sun?  Even in 1851 when Moby Dick was published, it must have been common knowledge that oysters don’t have eyes with which to do any observing.

But then in The Walrus and the Carpenter, 1872, Lewis Carroll gave them hands and feet, and I suppose ears.

"O Oysters, come and walk with us!"
The Walrus did beseech.
"A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk,
Along the briny beach:
We cannot do with more than four,
To give a hand to each."

And here’s Raymond Chandler writing in what I think is a faux-self-deprecating way about his first novel The Big Sleep, 1939 ‘My story is just another detective yarn that happens to be more interested in people than in plot, to try to stand on its own legs as a novel with the mystery a few drops of Tabasco on the oyster.’

 And here is the person I consider to be the greatest literary oyster eater: Isaak Dinesen, 

who accrding to legend consumed only oysters, grapes and Champagne, which I thought wouldn be the worst diet, though apparently not - at the time of her death she was suffering from malnutrition (and a few other unpleasant things as well) 

She did write however, in ‘The Deluge at Nordeney.’  

“Do you know a cure for me?"
"Why yes," he said, "I know a cure for everything. Salt water."
"Salt water?" I asked him.
"Yes," he said, "in one way or the other. Sweat, or tears, or the salt sea.”

The last of these is also the brine in oysters.

THE ANNOTATED CHEESE

I’ve been reading Alice in Wonderland, more correctly Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  I’d like to be able to say ‘rereading’ but I can’t really, because I’ve never actually sat down and read it from beginning to end.  I suspect not all that many have.  It's one of those books where people pick out their favorite bits.

And it seemed to me that it was food, food, food all the way – the Madhatter’s Tea party (obviously), the Lobster Quadrille, the stolen tarts, the treacle well, the mock turtle, Father William and his goose, 

and of course all the drink me business, and the eating of the mushroom that made Alice change size.  

No doubt this must say a great deal about Victorian tastes and desire for food but I’m not absolutely sure what.  Presumably Lewis Carroll and Alice Liddell were well-fed at a time when not everybody in Britain was.  It seems to be rubbing it in.

To be honest with you I was reading Alice with a plain text in one hand and Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in the other.

Much has been said, some of it by me, about the problems of annotation, and Gardner’s special problem as an American explicating for other Americans is that he explains a lot of stuff that doesn’t need explaining for an English reader.  And inevitably there are some things that could do with a lot more explaining.

And one of these things is the Cheshire Cat.  Gardner says ‘We know that Cheshire cheese was once sold in the shape of a grinning cat. One would tend to slice off the cheese at the cat’s tail end until finally only the grinning head would remain on the plate.’

Well, do we know this?  I certainly didn’t.  A lifetime’s obsession with cheese, with Cheshire as one of my favorites, has never brought me this bit of information.  And in any case I can’t picture this cheese cat, was it moulded in three dimension?  It certainly sounds like it from Gardner’s description, but how many cat moulds would a cheese maker need in order to produce them in any quantity?  It's not like a butter mould where you can press one out and move on.  Or was there a whole class of 19th century English cheese carvers?

A root around in the books in the Psychogourmet Library, and indeed the internet, reveals nothing whatsoever about this cat-shaped cheese.   Alan Davidson in the Oxford Companion to Food  has a lot to say about Cheshire cheese (Domesday Book, Gerard, giant American 300 pound political cheeses) but nothing feline.

Anybody got any views or further info on this?