Only cry ‘Oysters!’”
Epitaph on a Colchester Man’s Grave
If you have eaten an oyster at Colchester or Faversham, in August, fresh from the sea; or a melting native at Milton, the best oyster in the world, in October; a Helford native in Cornwall; Whispered Pandores and Aberdours at Edinburgh, on the “Feast of Shells,” one hundred for a shilling, dripping in Prestonpans sea-water; Carlingfords and Powldoodies, of Burran, at Dublin; or even a Jersey oyster at St. Heliers, you know what an oyster should be.
These are the words of wisdom, written some thirty years ago by Herbert Byng Hall, a gastronomic writer of some eminence, who had made a special study of the Oyster, and wrote thereon learnedly and con amore.
Somehow or other there is something persuasively and personally intimate in one’s relations with an oyster, or with a couple of dozen oysters, for that matter. One does not feel the same sentimental regard for the pig that provides one with one’s morning rasher of bacon that one does for the merest preprandial oyster. And this feeling of friendship, almost intimacy, is always to be found in the writings of those who dilate upon “the breedy creatures,” as Christopher North called our illustrious bivalves in the “Noctes Ambrosianæ.”
Dr. Kitchiner, for instance, says: “Those who wish to enjoy this delicious restorative in its utmost perfection must eat it at the moment it is opened, with its own gravy in the undershell; if not eaten absolutely alive, its flavour and spirit are lost. The true lover of an oyster will have some regard for the feelings of his little favourite, and contrive to detach the fish from the shell so dexterously that the oyster is hardly conscious he has been ejected from his lodging till he feels the teeth of the piscivorous gourmet tickling him to death.”
There are other instances innumerable of a certain dainty touch in dealing with oysters. Contact with them seems to engender humour, good nature, and a tricksey spirit. Huxley called oysters “a delicious flash of gustatory lightning”; and there is a story told of the great master, G. F. Watts, who was challenged by Millais and Leighton to produce a humorous picture, whereupon he painted a primitive man and woman on the seashore. The woman is looking with awestruck admiration at the man who has just swallowed an oyster. The man himself appears very doubtful as to the result. The picture was called “B.C. The First Oyster.”
It was originally said in a very old number of the “North British Review,” that “he must have been a very bold man who first swallowed an oyster.” An old legend assigns the first act of oyster-eating to a very natural cause. It is related that a man walking by the sea one day picked up an oyster, just as it was in the act of gaping. Observing the extreme smoothness of the interior of the shell, he insinuated his finger between them that he might feel their shining surface, when suddenly they closed upon the exploring digit, with a sensation less pleasurable than he anticipated. The prompt withdrawal of his finger was scarcely a more natural movement than its transfer to his mouth. It is not very clear why people (including babies) when they hurt their fingers put them into their mouths; but it is very certain that they do, and in this case the result was most fortunate. The owner of the finger tasted oyster juice for the first time, as Elia’s Chinaman, having burned his finger, first tasted crackling. The savour was delicious; he had made a great discovery; so he picked up the oysters, forced open the shells, banqueted upon the contents, and soon brought oyster-eating into fashion.
That tender personal regard for the innocent oyster, which I have just referred to, is very manifest in one of the most widely known poems in the English language. I mean Lewis Carroll’s “Walrus and the Carpenter.”
“O Oysters, come and walk with us!”