A Little Nip And Shuck

Tom Parker Bowles has only two rules when it comes to native oysters: keep ’em raw and keep ’em coming. However, with numbers in decline, he’s having a rethink

OYSTER,’ sneers Ambrose Bierce in The Devil’s Dictionary. ‘A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilisation gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails.’ It’s safe to say he wasn’t a fan and he’s not alone, because these blessed bivalves don’t exactly make it easy.

There’s the wretched business of cracking them open, an age-old skill that combines the guile of a cat burglar with the brute force of a circus strongman. then, once you’ve forced the hinge apart, the contents are hardly attractive. A greyish, gently wobbling mass of phlegmy flesh, which can look disconcertingly like the contents of one’s handkerchief. After a particularly nasty infection of the bronchial tract. ‘He was bold man that first ate an oyster,’ said Jonathan swift. He sure bloody was.

However, like the artichoke, with its thistled defences, or the sea urchin, clad in wicked spikes, that potentially perilous excavation is worth every last sweaty second. the oyster may not win any beauty parades, but, as 1,000 woolly-eared self-help books never cease to tell us, it’s what’s inside that counts. And that flesh is most certainly sacred—if not divine.

Come the first days of September, you’ll find me paying tribute, with bowed head and bent arm, before a battered zinc platter. A platter heavy with sparkling crushed ice, upon which perch a dozen Colchester No 2s. Or perhaps West Mersea. Natives both, they are the indigenous, wild Ostrea edulis, with flat, delicate shells. they’re rarer—and thus more expensive—than their burlier cousin, the ‘rock’, ‘Pacific’ or Crassostea gigas. Flavours may be bold, but they’re never brutish.