jacktellslies

In creating the world, evolution, that god multi-limbed beyond reckoning, saw fit to create the oyster, to take a sharp, bastard little rock, and to fill it with food. Yesterday an older gentleman asked me to shuck a few for him, and, in his infinite wisdom and kindness, he tipped me fairly extravagantly for the service. In his honour, I'd like to tip my hat to the oyster once more.

I've told you of their lovemaking. To review, here we have gender-deviant molluscs who engage in orgies massive enough to influence entire ecosystems. Good. Now, if I may, I'd like to speak a bit about the eating of them.

The most ancient of human settlements found on earth thus far are marked by mounds of shells, opened and bearing scars, the evidence of some of our first experiments with tools. The lure of flesh has been the spur of the mind of many species to breed intelligence at the same time that the chemical properties of protein itself are required for the development of more complex brains. Shellfish was, I imagine, a reasonably reliable source of the stuff in a time when exceptionally few things were reliable. They are old allies. We owe them much.

Remember in eating an oyster, please, the hands that opened it for you. Despite all of my less than cautious waving about of knives, oysters are more likely to hurt me in my toiling than nearly anything else. Opening them involves pressing a blunted knife into a small crevice between their two shells and twisting. Oysters, as I mentioned, are sharp, and the knives are likely to slip and wound. I nearly always have a gash or a transitional scar on the flesh of my palm or on a knuckle as a result of their affections. I don't mind it. I'm speeding their death; the scratch is only fair. (More fair, perhaps, if it was worn by the one who would devour it, but then why would the world need fishmongers?) But remember when you drink one that it is most likely the result of a blood sacrifice. Be kind to your servants, and appreciate the fact that we've suffered for you. When was the last time someone young, and perhaps attractive, and maybe a bit rough bled for your account? Taste it, along with the salt.

It's hardly the only sacrifice. The oyster represents one of the few creatures that the human beings with whom I associate swallow live, and whole. I recommend meditating on that before taking one, really savouring the fact that you, at that very moment, are about to take a life, and then perhaps to take another five or more. Taste in its wet flesh the fact that this little god will die that you might live. The resulting endorphin rush alone is worth the price.

This brings us to the taste: their flavour depends largely on the waters from which they were drawn, and thus, in sampling oysters, one can tour the brackish waters of the world. They're salty things, and fleshy, and if someone were to tell you that it doesn't remind them, pleasantly I hope, of fellatio, then they're either liars or Puritans.

My fellow fishmongers and I swallow them illicitly in the back room. We'll open them all together, or one of us will be kind enough do the honours for the others. It's spectacular: the help, filthy and rushed, gathering in a circle for a stolen moment, for the sacrament, for the pleasure of it. We take them with borrowed lemon and cocktail sauce or we'll take them as they are, exploring their charms and faults, the nuances that set them apart from their kin. I've been served oysters by a pretty boy in a restaurant nicer than anything I deserved. They were delivered to me on a bed of sea salt, big coarse grains in a mound across the plate. I've tasted them in a bar in New Orleans, opened by old, dark, swift hands. He shucked six dozen in the time it would take me to whisper my way into nine, and I am, if I may say it, reasonably skilled.

Enjoy the flesh you taste tonight, my darlings, whatever form it may take.