“Un voyageur anglais, transi de froid, arrive dans une hôtellerie de village où il n’y avait d’autre feu que celui de la cuisine, dont la cheminée était gardée par un grand nombre de voyageurs arrivées avant lui. Pour se faire faire place, il usa d’un stratagème assez original. Il avait aperçu en entrant quelques cloyères d’huîtres. Il dit au maître de la maison, ‘Monsieur, avez-vous des huîtres?’ ‘Oui, Monsieur, et de très-fraîches.’ ‘Faites-en porter une cloyère à mon cheval.’ ‘Comment, Monsieur, est-ce que votre cheval mange des huîtres?’ ‘Oui, Monsieur; au surplus, faites ce que je dis; s’il ne les mange pas, d’autres les mangeront.’
“Le maître obéit, et les voyageurs allaient voir un cheval manger des huîtres—qu’il ne mangea pas. Pendant ce temps, le nouvel arrivé prend place au feu. Le maître de retour lui dit, ‘Monsieur, je savais bien que votre cheval ne mangeait pas d’huîtres.’ ‘Eh bien, non,’ dit l’Anglais, ‘je les mangerai; ces messieurs ont quitté leur place, je la garderai; ainsi à tout cela, il n’y aura rien de perdu.’ Et, en effet, il vida la cloyère sans quitter le coin du feu.”
This is a quotation, apt enough, I think, from “La Gastronomie pour Rire, ou Anecdotes, Réflexions, Maximes, et Folies Gourmandes,” par César Gardeton, auteur du “Directeur des Estomacs,” Paris, 1827.
As a useful recipe for oysters, I should like to refer to an extract from a letter from Swift to Stella; it runs thuswise:—
Lord Masham made me go home with him to eat boiled oysters. Take oysters, wash them clean; that is, wash their shells clean; then put your oysters in an earthen pot, with their hollow side down; then put this pot, covered, into a great kettle with water, and so let them boil. Your oysters are boiled in their own liquor, and do not mix water.
If oysters have to be cooked at all, which is a doctrine I do not support, then the above seems as good a way as any other. Really good oysters are, anyhow, too precious to be cooked, but should be degustated in puris naturalibus.
A story which I venture to think apocryphal is quoted by W. R. Hare in a curious little book, “On the Search for a Dinner,” published in London in 1857. Speaking of dining in Paris, he refers to the celebrated restaurant the Rocher du Cancale, and relates how an English “Milord” drove up to the establishment and ordered (and ate) a hearty meal of twenty-nine dozen oysters; after which Milord died suddenly—and no wonder! They carried him down with great difficulty to the carriage. The groom, on seeing his master’s body arrive, exclaimed, with great coolness, “It is the third time that Milord gives himself the pleasure of dying of indigestion.” “He will not die a fourth time,” answered the patron, with sorrow. Milord was buried at Père-la-Chaise. His facetious friends deposit every year by the remains of the defunct an enormous quantity of oyster-shells. The tomb is about five-and-twenty yards from that of Héloise and Abélard. On a slab of black marble the following epitaph is inscribed: “Here lies ——, dead for the third time in a duel with the oysters of the Rocher du Cancale.”
I confess that I have not had the curiosity to verify the tombstone.
Brillat-Savarin has an oyster anecdote to the effect that he was at Versailles in the year 1798 as Commissary of the Directory, and had frequently to meet the Registrar of the Tribunal, M. Laperte. The latter was so fond of oysters that he used to grumble about never having had enough to satisfy him. Being determined to procure him that satisfaction, Brillat-Savarin asked Laperte to dinner, and the latter accepted. “I kept up with him,” says the host, “to the third dozen, letting him then go on by himself. He went on steadily to the thirty-second dozen—that is to say, for more than an hour, as they were opened but slowly—and as in the meantime I had nothing else to do—a state quite unbearable at table—I stopped him just as he was beginning to show more appetite than ever. My dear friend,” I said, “it must be some other day that you have enough to satisfy you; let us now have some dinner.” We took dinner, and he showed all the vigour and hunger of a man who had been fasting.
These oyster-gorges are, however, mere epitomes of vulgar gluttony. There is no more gastronomic satisfaction to be got out of thirty-three dozen than out of the conventional two dozen. In fact, doctors rarely prescribe more than one dozen at a time.