Oysters

The first time I ate an oyster, I described it as like eating a lump of seawater but interesting.

Now I am very happy making my way through a dozen oysters as a pre-starter, preferably with a glass of Pastis with ice, the clear drink turning milky with the addition of water. I used to do this in the town of Meze which looked on to the Bassin de Thau, a sea lagoon where oysters were farmed.

One time in Meze, friends staying with us came up with the idea that for lunch, we should have oysters on the beach. Away they disappeared on their errand. Our friends returned with a large pannier of oysters together with several lemons. My mother, an expert, was press ganged into opening them all. After a while, we children were sent away with a handful of oysters each to bash them open on the rocks. I recall thinking that sand and oysters do not mix.

On my brother's wedding day, we were not in Meze but in a village outside Winchester. This was for a pre-wedding lunch for the groom and family. One of the starters was "six oysters". So I ordered "six oysters". What arrived were six plates of six oysters. Thirty of the oysters were accordingly sent back but the bill (which I failed to check before settling up with my father's credit card) still charged for the six plates.

Raw is how I like eating them best although an oyster gratinee is a fine thing as well. I have never tried tinned oysters but they come recommended in one of Susan Coolidge's Katy books as having a remarkable flavour all of their own - a tinny flavour if I remember rightly. Another of my favourite literary references to oysters comes in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass" and the Tale of the Walrus and the Carpenter:

"But answer came there none,

And this was scarcely strange for they'd eaten every one."

Reading that poem is one of only two occasions when I have ever felt sentimental about eating oysters.

The other was when I was Christmas shopping in the Conran shop where there is or used to be an oyster bar. I stared at a delightful sight: a mother, a godmother or an aunt taking out an eight-year-old for a plate of oysters. Both adult and child appeared utterly absorbed in eating and I resolved that one day I would do the same thing.