Chincoteagues, Willapoints, Blue Points, Olympias, Portugaises, and Whitestaples. Oysters sizzled in butter, simmered in cream, boiled in their own juices, baked with breadcrumbs, broiled over rock salt, roasted whole, thrown on grills, chopped into soups, mashed into bisques, fried with eggs, stuffed into turkeys, and served raw on the half shell over beds of shaved ice. Oysters eaten in Whittier, Doylestown, New Orleans, Toulon, Dijon, Marseille, Nuremberg, Liverpool, and Geneva. Oyster history, oyster biology, oyster recipes, oyster fiction, and oyster sex.
In Consider the Oyster, M.F.K. Fisher considers the oyster from every possible angle. Despite its seemingly small topic and slender girth, this remains one of her best-known books, partly because it inspired David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster” and partly because its prose is every bit as succulent as its protagonist. Fisher writes, “There are three kinds of oyster-eaters: those loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster; those who will eat them raw and only raw; and those who with equal severity will eat them cooked and no way other.” She belongs to group one. If you don’t belong to any of the three, please give this book to someone who does.
Fisher encountered her first raw oyster as a teenager. At the Bishop’s School in La Jolla (pseudonymized as Miss Huntingdon’s School for Girls in a chapter in her memoir The Gastronomical Me), she was offered “Eastern oysters, fresh oysters, oysters still in their shells” at the annual Christmas party, a formal affair in which girls danced with girls and the air vibrated with adolescent crushes. She eyed the oysters with alarm. When she slid one into her mouth, Fisher writes, “I knew that I must down it, and was equally sure that I could not.” She swallowed it only when a popular older girl led her onto the dance floor. To her surprise, she was attracted equally to the girl and to the Blue Point. “Oysters, my delicate taste buds were telling me, oysters are simply marvelous!”
Of course her first oyster was linked to a crush. It has been said that M.F.K. Fisher “writes about food as others do about love, but rather better.” The two intertwined throughout her life and her work. In my opinion, Consider the Oyster is her sexiest book. It’s true that oysters are decidedly not an aphrodisiac in her tale of a young man who, to prepare for a date, consumes seven dozen oysters over the course of an increasingly uncomfortable afternoon and stands the girl up. But Fisher’s very debunking of the aphrodisiac myth—which springs from “an oyster’s odor, its consistency, and probably its strangeness”—is erotic. (Let’s face it. Eating a raw oyster is not unlike oral sex.) Fisher reserves her most voluptuous writing for the oyster itself, an androgynous hero/ine who leads a life of “stress, passion, and danger.” During his first year,
this oyster—our oyster—is a male, fertilizing a few hundred thousand eggs as best he can without ever knowing whether they swim by or not. Then one day, maternal longings surge between his two valves in his cold guts and gills and all his crinkly fringes. Necessity, that well-known mother, makes him one. He is a she.
Later, if the water is warm, the oyster will be excited into ovulation by the “little potent flood of milt” from a young male, and the cycle will continue until her “chilly, delicate gray body slips into a stewpan or under a broiler or alive down a red throat.”
Just as Fisher loves oysters both raw and cooked, she loves them both high and low. In a pinch, oyster stew can be made with tinned oysters. Raw oysters can be served with beer or even fermented buttermilk; if wine is available, Chablis is best, but “I have had Pouilly-Fuissé, various kinds of champagnes nature, a pink Peau d’Onion, and both bottled and open wines of Anjou with oysters in France, and whether they were correctly drunk or not, I was.” The recipes range from Oysters à la Bazeine, which include truffles “cut into the shapes of dolphins, crabs, and other sea-monsters,” to Hang Town Fry, which is accompanied by breakfast sausages and shoestring potatoes.
Who knows? Some readers may actually try to carve their own truffle sea monsters. But Consider the Oyster is not really about cooking; like all of Fisher’s work, it’s about imagining. Admittedly, when I read about the “steaming buttery creamy oyster stew” of Fisher’s childhood, ladled from a bone china tureen and served with hot buttered toast, I immediately—because, sadly, there were no oysters in the house—made myself some hot buttered toast. However, I got even hungrier, in a way that transcended food, when I read Fisher’s description of “the most delicious oysters I never ate”: the oyster loaf her mother ate in the 1890s, at a midnight feast in a girls’ boarding school. Made by the village’s best baker, swaddled in a white napkin, smuggled into the dorm under a chambermaid’s cape, devoured by half a dozen giggling students wearing flowered wrappers, this oyster loaf, about which Fisher had heard stories as a child, allowed her not only to imagine something toothsome but to picture her mother as a daring transgressor. It was her “spiritual taste-buds,” not the oyster loaf, that led her to write in this chapter (which happens to be my favorite): “There are stories that in their telling spread about them a feeling of the Golden Age.”
Consider the Oyster was published on September 11, 1941. Its jacket had a drawing of five oysters, a tureen, and an assortment of herbs. It cost two dollars. Dozens of newspapers and magazines reviewed it, including The New York Times, which called it “gay, pleasant and instructive” (though it referred to its author as “Mr. Fisher”); the San Francisco Chronicle, which called it “exceedingly well written”; and The New Yorker, which noted that it had “done full justice to the mild and modest mollusk” and especially commended the chapter “dealing with the fabled powers of the oyster to promote more and better venery.”
The last reviewer was my father, Clifton Fadiman, then The New Yorker’s book critic. He was also the one who said (about Fisher’s next book, How to Cook a Wolf) that Fisher wrote about food as others write about love. He wrote reviews of several more of her books, all of them laudatory, and the introduction to a collection of her work. They became friends.
After my father died, I found eighteen letters from M.F.K. Fisher in his files. (There would doubtless have been more had he not, in his younger days, routinely thrown out all letters as soon as he responded to them, including a multipage drunken rant from Ernest Hemingway.) In one, she wrote, “By now it seems plain that you are the only person in the world who has read anything I’ve written in the way I most hoped for. You have always made me feel the way I want to feel, or at least wish and hope that I may.”
I read a lot of M.F.K. Fisher when I was growing up, but it was not until twenty years ago, when I started teaching “The Flaw”—a harrowing story about love, war, and food from The Gastronomical Me—in one of my writing classes, that I became interested in her life. Among other things, I learned the circumstances under which Consider the Oyster was written.
By 1941, of course, World War II had already spread across Europe and Asia. Fisher acknowledges that she was writing about oysters “while incendiary bombs fell and people I knew were maimed and hungry.” But she had a more immediate crisis to deal with, and a more immediate reason for undertaking this book.
Her second husband, the artist Dillwyn Parrish, was gravely ill with a rare circulatory condition called Buerger’s disease. When they’d met in 1933—in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake in Laguna, California, during which the ground literally trembled—they were both married to other people. She considered Parrish her only true love. His left leg was amputated eight months before their wedding, after which they sailed for Europe to close up their apartment in Switzerland and stock up on painkillers unavailable in the United States. On their return, they paid $2,750 for a ramshackle cabin on ninety acres in the San Jacinto Valley, southeast of Los Angeles, hoping that the warm desert climate would relieve some of Dillwyn’s phantom limb pain. They called it Bareacres, after Lord Bareacres, a down-on-his-luck character in Vanity Fair.
Fisher wrote in her journal, “We think everything about Bareacres is right, good, proper, and completely satisfying.” During their three years there, Parrish played Haydn sonatas on the piano, made doors for their cats, designed a kennel for their dog, had a large window installed in his studio, built an easel, and painted. Fisher planted flowers and cooked good food, which they often ate outdoors. But although Fisher became expert at injecting Parrish’s narcotics, his pain was excruciating and his doctors told him there would be further amputations—first his right leg, then probably his arms. He stopped asking her to hide the bullets for his revolver. She knew he was going to take his life, but not when. On August 6, 1941, she was awakened by the sound of a shot from outside the cabin.
Fisher had spent much of their last year at Bareacres writing about oysters: short, funny, sensual pieces that she read aloud to Parrish. I asked Kennedy Golden, Fisher’s younger daughter, who was born five years after Parrish’s death, what she knew about the origins of Consider the Oyster. She wrote, “I do recall hearing my mother speak—not to either of her children, with whom she never spoke of that time in her life, but to interviewers and adults outside of our family—about her desire to bring some lightness to Dillwyn’s life. A distraction from his agony and her realization that their time together was limited. I do not know, but can envision her reading her words to Dillwyn in his studio as he painted endlessly, or on the patio on long hot desert nights. Perhaps even in his bed after giving him his nightly injection for pain.”
Fisher describes pearls as “built in what may be pain around the bodies that have crept inside the shells.” Consider the Oyster, which she dedicated to Dillwyn Parrish, is a pearl: something lovely and gleaming that both eased his suffering and would not have existed without it.