Book Review: Consider the Oyster
If you see oysters and have a stomach-churning reaction, this book may be the cure.
Let us all thank M.F.K. Fisher for asking so politely that her readers “consider” the oyster. This slim (only 96 pages!), yet potent book, like its protagonist, is a must read merely for the pleasure of learning the evolution of your oyster before down the hatch it goes.
If you are enduring winter’s last gasp like we are down in Texas, I offer this book recommendation to you in the hopes that it tempts your senses with sunshine and brine and sea.
Fisher opens with a brief, witty history of the short life of an oyster (titled Love and Death Among the Mollusks) followed by numerous eloquent descriptions of oyster recipes. Raw, stewed, served with crusty brown bread, used in creamy soups, Fisher describes different oyster traditions from San Francisco to Boston.
Never having eaten oysters, I closed the book halfway out the door on my way to the nearest oyster bar. Fisher describes in such lemony detail a meal of raw oysters and white wine that you are almost sure to have a Goliath-sized craving by the time you close the back cover.
We should all indulge the author and contribute to the well-being of the oyster community. She asked so nicely, after all.
An excerpt from Consider the Oyster:
An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life. Indeed, his chance to live at all is slim, and if he should survive the arrows of his own outrageous fortune and in the two weeks of his carefree youth find a clean smooth place to fix on, the years afterwards are full of stress, passion and danger.
