Don’t Let A Little Bacteria Ruin Your Fun
As Jonathan Swift once said, “He was a bold man that first eat an oyster.”
And then that night, he became a nauseated man with bad gas and a nagging case of Mollusk’s Revenge.
Don’t get me wrong. I am a big oyster man. I love to eat oysters, raw, from the shell. I have been known to slurp down a dozen or two at a sitting, which is why I am also intimately familiar with post-oyster syndrome.
In fact, just a few weeks ago I was wondering why I was feeling a little bit peaked, a little bit poorly, a little bit paralyzed down the left side of my body, when I remembered that I had eaten 12 oysters the size of Cornish game hens the night before.
Could it have been the oysters, I wondered? So I looked up oysters in my handy Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition, and I found the following passage:
“Anyone eating raw shellfish from any area runs a risk of gastrointestinal infection and the diarrhea, nausea, abdominal cramps and vomiting that go along with it.”
Well, thank goodness. It couldn’t have been the oysters. Nothing there about being paralyzed for life.
Still, sometimes I wonder whether it’s such a good idea to eat a food item so intimately connected with the words “bacteriology” and “toxicology.” However, I feel about oysters the same way I feel about cheese, eggs and baby-back ribs. I don’t care how dangerous they are. I plan on eating them until I’m dead.
The big problem with oysters is not that they are intrinsically, you know, poisonous, although they do spend their lives sucking on silt at the bottom of the harbor. The real problem is that they are eaten raw. There’s a good reason we cook most of our food. Cooking tends to kill off many of the major disease groups, which is why, ever since the E. coli scare, fast-food hamburgers are flame-broiled under the exhaust ports of Jupiter missiles.
I understand this, yet I still believe that cooking a good oyster is a sin. Nothing is quite so sensuous, so subtle, so slimy as a raw oyster sliding down your gullet.
Some of you may not understand the sheer pleasure of opening and eating a raw oyster, so let me grab a nice cold one off its bed of ice and describe the process step-by-step:
First I grasp the oyster in my left hand, an oyster knife in my right hand. I thrust the tip of the knife into the line where the two shells meet and I … excuse me for a moment. 911? There’s this oyster knife buried in my palm. No, I have no idea how it got there. Say, not to be any trouble or anything, but could you bring the “Jaws of Life,” too, because I have this oyster I need opened …
(Three hours later, fully recovered) OK, where was I? I take the professionally opened oyster, using care to preserve the precious oyster liquor in the bottom shell.
Then I sprinkle a drop or two of Tabasco on the oyster. Or I might choose to enjoy this luscious bivalve au naturel. I tilt the shell up and slide what is essentially a gray gob of goo into my awaiting mouth. Ah! The flavor! I have always thought of it as having a fresh, clean taste like a garden cucumber although if you had a cucumber that looked like this you’d dump it down the garbage disposal, pronto. Anyway, I would also describe the flavor as “conveying the distilled essence of the very ocean itself,” although, then again, so does a sea gull.
Finally, there’s the texture. Many people hate the texture, on the grounds that food should be distinguishable from mucus. However, this silky, slippery texture is what we true oyster-lovers treasure, partly because of the velvety smoothness, and partly because we don’t actually have to chew it more than about twice. We can just send that oyster right down the old esophagus, like the Jamaican bobsled team careening down the mountain.
Of course, if I’m lucky, the Jamaican bobsled team won’t try to careen back up the mountain.
Anyway, I hope that gives the uninitiated a taste of the glories of the oyster. Maybe now you can better understand why Shakespeare, when looking for an image to describe exultation, said, “The world’s mine oyster.”
Exactly. World, oyster, same thing. For those brave enough to devour them, both slide beautifully down the gullet, except of course when they make you nauseous.
, DataTimes