When British food writer (The Financial Times, The Guardian) and radio/TV food host Tim Hayward launched a new food quarterly, Fire & Knives, in 2010, he took the opportunity to stretch his own creative wings—as in this ruminative essay about a gruesome shellfish encounter.
It was where I’d planned to propose: a restaurant with rooms in a fashionable Norfolk coastal enclave. The target of my plans, the woman I hoped would agree to be my wife, was an American with an entirely understandable weakness for Englishmen.
Young as I was, I had a certain class. Part of our meal should definitely feature the magnificent local Brancaster oysters. The American, true to type, ordered hers cooked. She was a proud Southerner and had been consuming Crassostrea virginica since birth, served the hundreds of ways the Americans do. She had eaten oysters steamed in holes in the ground, stewed in rich cream, grilled over coals and under salamanders. She’d had them Rockefeller, in a po’boy, as a Hangtown Fry and tonight, perhaps in honour of her adopted country, gratinéed under a crust of Stilton and breadcrumbs.
I naturally feigned shock. As a well brought-up Englishman I knew my dozen Ostrea edulis should be eaten raw, from the shell, with lemon juice and the certain thrill of apothanatophagy.* But I was in a mood for compromise, and made my point by romantically exchanging an oyster towards the end of the meal. I must confess that the Stilton-topped one tasted really rather pleasant; though it somehow made my last raw one taste strange ... really very strange.
For a short period, at the very beginning of its life cycle, the oyster is mobile. The tiny ‘spat,’ clear and around the size of a baby’s fingernail, floats blissfully free until it finds some hospitable surface on which to settle. Countless billions never find lodging, ending their short lives as the anonymous biomass of krill. Others attach to unsuitable surfaces, fade and die. But those who wash into the salt marsh creeks of North Norfolk find solid homes and plentiful nourishment. Since the Romans were in charge, Brancaster’s natural beds have produced oysters of extraordinary quality that have been exported all over Britain and beyond.**
In more recent times the Brancaster beds have been managed. Oysters are one of the few products of the sea improved by farming and human intervention. By harvesting spats in the wild and bringing them to rest on prepared surfaces—rocks, stakes, even collections of old shells***—man has been able to improve the lot of the oyster. They can be protected from predation, moved frequently to prevent overcrowding and competition for food and, perhaps most importantly, the oysterman can exercise some control over what his charges are eating. The oyster lives by filtering minute particles from the water around itself, which it does with astonishing efficiency. In his marvelous book The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky relates how the oyster population of the waters surrounding New York could once, when at their fittest, filter all the water in the harbor ‘in a matter of days.’
We can assume that, in natural circumstances, the oyster would dine mainly on plankton. Yet, as less scrupulous oystermen have long realised, if oysters had noses they certainly wouldn’t turn them up at the organic matter that man produces. An oyster capable of joy* would be at its happiest consuming effluent: predigested food and its attendant bacterial passengers. So efficient is the oyster at filtering that it can strain and retain, amongst others, Vibrio vulnificus, Clostridium perfringens, Staphylococcus aureus, salmonella and Escherichia coli, a cheery collection capable of producing, with varying incubation periods, symptoms ranging from mild gastro-intestinal upset through gangrenous ulcerations** to, ultimately, death.
The point of our Norfolk oysters, of course, wasn’t purely tradition, honouring local cuisine or a decadent display of luxury. Oysters are romantic as hell, even coated in melted Stilton. There’s a long tradition that the oyster is in fact an aphrodisiac.
The modern explanation for this is the abundance of zinc in the oyster’s flesh—it’s sometimes quoted as the best naturally-occurring source in nature—and it also contains high levels of selenium and iron. One of the symptoms of zinc deficiency is impotence, so it’s only a short intellectual leap for the credulous believer in natural remedies to assert that oysters are therefore an aphrodisiac.***
Our forebears had no idea of the presence of trace elements like zinc, or their importance. Yet the myth of the aphrodisiac oyster is almost as old as their recorded consumption. Writers and philosophers of food mention their spectacular fecundity and a resemblance of the bivalve to genitalia, and then swiftly move the conversation, thereby never having to engage in the inconvenient discussion of exactly how this is so. The mussel, a mollusc with a symmetrical structure of inner and outer lips, a pert and bead-like ‘foot’ and, on occasion, an attractive seaweed beard could be argued to have some visual semblance, but no one claims the mussel as an aphrodisiac.
The assertion that the oyster (which, with the best will in the world, resembles something that’s been hawked onto the pavement by a phlegmy vagrant) is in any way reminiscent is not only insulting but unromantic to the point of misogyny.
As we climbed the dark and winding stairs to the hotel bedroom it was not the aphrodisiac qualities of dinner that were affecting me. I appeared to be running a temperature, I felt dizzier than the wine should have made me and there was something very unpleasant going on in my stomach.
Under ordinary circumstances, food is moved down the alimentary canal by a rhythmic contraction of the muscles around it. Vertical and horizontal bands tense in an alternating wave that moves the bolus of food into the stomach in the same way your Mum got the tangerine into the toe of your Christmas stocking. This is an entirely unconscious and instinctive process, triggered once food is placed in the mouth and chewed, as is the staggeringly powerful muscular churning of the stomach itself. It’s called peristalsis.
If the body detects that a poison or other noxious material has been ingested, it has another instinctive and uncontrollable response.* Throwing the process into reverse, it forces the entire stomach contents back up and out—what medics call antiperistalsis, though most of us have found more robust terms for it.
The first sign of anti-peristalsis for most people is stomach cramping as muscles begin to spasm, and a sudden and unusual wash of saliva into the mouth: perhaps an emergency attempt at lubrication. This was what I felt as I entered the room, ignored the four-poster, heaped with enticing feather pillows and pristine white linen, and moved with some speed past my beloved to the bathroom, where I knelt, hugged the bowl and puked like a dog.
Though I’m in no hurry to relive the event, I think it’s important we understand here precisely how painful, degrading and humiliating this experience was. I had never known this level of violence in vomiting before or since. The cramps were painful enough to make me cry out. Though my stomach was empty within minutes, waves of nausea were to bring me back to the bathroom at ten-minute intervals throughout the night to void matter I couldn’t begin to identify. After the first hour I remember little save that I completely lost control of my bowels and ended up curled on the floor of the bathroom, weeping into a pool of myself. The bed was destroyed, the room was a scene of unimaginable filth and by the time I could move again my debasement was absolute.
Strange as it may seem, we did end up married. It worked quite nicely for over a decade and I wasn’t put off oysters. I kept trying—over and over again. I wanted so badly to be able to suck down plates of raw natives. Yet at every attempt, if I could choke them past my tongue I’d throw them back up again minutes later. After a few years, I grew to like cooked oysters. Gratinéed in dozens of ways and particularly poached in cream, in the great oyster stew of the Carolinas where the fatty deposits partially melt into the cream, giving a hint of sea-taste with an insanely rich, mouthfilling texture. A while later I began to take my food writing seriously and kept chasing up the truth about the oyster. I spoke to toxicologists who assured me that there was no poison that a single bad oyster could leave in my body even days after the event, let alone decades. I studied every kind of crazed food allergy theory, interviewed numberless quacks and could find no one willing to assert there was anything in an oyster that could provoke a true allergic reaction as a direct result of a single bad experience. Could my system have created some sort of antibodies? To the toxin maybe, but not to clean, uncooked oysters as a species.
I still couldn’t eat raw oysters, and I couldn’t find any way to explain why.
You’ve probably been expecting that an essay about food poisoning and oysters would feature Heston Blumenthal sooner or later and you’re not wrong ... though not in the way you might perhaps have suspected. For many years now Blumenthal, and other chefs who experiment at the very outer edges of gastronomy, have been following sensation beyond the mouth. Food satisfies appetite and delights the tongue but, as Blumenthal and others are discovering, it does so much more. It provokes emotion, triggers memory, it can create confusion and disgust. In fact, most of what happens when one sits to eat isn’t taking place in the mouth, but way back up inside the brain.
Many of Blumenthal’s early experiments played with sweets. It’s an odd thought, but if you were to take a cross-section of British people you couldn’t guarantee that they had all experienced the flavor of our national blue cheese or our local oyster; but, due to the sudden arrival of highly marketed sweets and new chemical flavourings, you could be sure that anyone who was at school between the mid 70s and the early 80s would know what a Flying Saucer tastes like. That unique mouth and tongue sensation as the ricepaper dissolves and the cheap sherbet floods the mouth is a ubiquitous shared experience for several generations. Ubiquity and uniqueness make it a powerful culture-wide mental anchor to the British.* How could an experimental chef resist any food that could immediately and with complete sureness transport everyone who ate it directly back to their childhood? It’s Wonka-esque.
The connections between smell/taste and memory are as deeply embedded in the lizard brain as any other instinct. The reason chefs are so attracted to experiments with food and emotion is the surety of triggering this entirely reflex reaction in the consumer. And it’s in this power of taste memory, this involuntary, limbic response, that the mystery of the oyster lies.
The oyster is the only thing we eat raw and alive. Everything—from the scratchy sharpness of the shell against the bottom lip, the iodine sea-smell of the juices, the cold tang of the flesh against the tongue, the wriggle of the mollusc, the involuntary shudder as it goes down—conspires to make eating a raw oyster a unique experience. The ritual surrounding it, the anticipation, the myth, the cost, the tales and the expectation form a complex structure of feelings around the moment of eating that’s totally and completely unlike any other.*
If, in my mind, that unique experience is forever connected at the most basic mental level with humiliation and pain, is it any wonder that my mind tells my body to reject it? I could no more control the urge to gag than I could control my salivation at the sight of a steak. I am as reprogrammed as one of Professor Pavlov’s dogs. And yet, because the way we prepare oysters in Britain is so set in stone, it only takes the slightest deviation for the trigger sensations to be utterly different. Twenty seconds under a broiler and the oyster’s power as a trigger is lost—the experience of eating it is irretrievably different.
All of which leads to a tantalising thought about that other great quality of the oyster.
Imagine if the first time you’d experienced an oyster, it had been on a romantic date. Imagine that incredibly special gustatory experience was not connected in your mind to lavatory-hugging loss of control, but to resultant pleasure. Imagine that the same was true of your next plate of oysters too. Imagine in fact, that eating an oyster became connected in your mind with that other great instinctive, limbic drive—sex—as powerfully as it is with vomiting in mine. How would eating an oyster make you feel? For me it’s too late, but is it not possible that for others at least, oysters might actually be an aphrodisiac?
In 1941 M.F.K. Fischer published Consider the Oyster. Depending on how you look at it, it was either a short book or a familiar essay of brilliant digressions and observations on the oyster and her personal response to her favourite food.
In 2004 David Foster Wallace wrote “Consider the Lobster” for Gourmet magazine, which, depending on how you look at it, was either a brilliant first person report on a Maine lobster festival or a familiar essay of brilliant digressions and personal observations on everything from lobster physiology to the morals of tourism.
These two pieces are the bookends of my favourite food writing and I urge you to read them both. DFW intended his title as an acknowledgement of MFK’s brilliance and I’ve swiped the brilliant idea of footnotes from DFW.
This piece is, in large part, homage to them both.
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*I know. There isn’t a real term for it but ‘eating that which isn’t dead’ seemed to work nicely.
**When pulled from the water the oyster shuts itself up tight and carries enough of the sea with it to survive for weeks. It’s this characteristic that has made them so useful to city dwellers. Oysters packed into a barrel could be transported miles inland, stored unrefrigerated beneath the bar and still be spanking fresh when cracked open. It’s likely that our predilection for eating oysters raw descends directly from a time when a wriggling, feisty bivalve, spitting lemon juice back in your eye was the surest guarantee of freshness a townsman could rely on.
***Known as ‘cultch,’ a word I’ve been trying to work into conversation every moment since I’ve read it.
*Robbie Burns envied the oyster, which ‘... knew no wish and no fear.’
** It was this which recently robbed Michael Winner of much of his leg.
***Were this reasoning actually true, we could toss the Viagra and get the same effect from licking a galvanised bucket, so it’s not an idea that gets much of a nod from doctors. But in today’s climate of superstitious belief in alternative hokum, it’s regularly touted as the ‘scientific’ explanation.
*The alimentary canal is served and controlled by a nervous system so rich, complex and autonomous that it is sometimes referred to as ‘the second brain.’ The Enteric Nervous System or ENS comprises many more neurons than the spinal cord. In humans the ENS communicates with the Central Nervous System via the vagus nerve, but can continue to function independently if the connection is severed. Yes, your stomach has a mind of its own. Really primitive creatures have never evolved anything beyond an ENS. Most of them survive by straining nourishment from the medium they inhabit. Conveniently, the most obvious example of this is the oyster.
*It is no coincidence that Blumenthal is reputed to be a devotee of neurolinguistic programming.
*It’s noticeable that, though many people express strong likes and dislikes for particular foods and drinks, it is those with unique flavours and textures that are associated with instant revulsion. Few who’ve been poleaxed by tequila can ever go back to it. An ‘off’ boiled egg or a carton of unexpectedly sour milk can scar for life.