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My First Oyster

myfirstoyster.jpgTell us about your first time!

Share your first time having an oyster story with us by emailing info@theoysterman.com.  If we choose to publish your story on TheOysterman.com we will send you an Oyster Revolution T-Shirt.


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The Art of Eating an Oyster



The Oyster, perhaps more than any other food, is a feast for the senses. First of all, its a feast for the eyes. Oysters served icy cold on a platter of shaved ice in a circular pattern with bills outward like petals of a flower and with light dancing brightly on the meats and juices, are beautiful unto themselves, needing no garnish to attract the eye or imagination.

Forgo the fork.  Pick up the cold, damp, wet, rough shell. As if your fingertips had taste buds, your salivary glands perk up in anticipation.  You are already starting to taste the oyster.  As you lift the oyster to your mouth, pause momentarily to breathe in the fresh clean smell of the sea.

Tilt your head back; close your eyes; slurp in the oyster and its juices. If the oyster has been iced down before opening and is minutes or less off the shucking knife, the oyster is as cold and vibrant as an icy gust of wind at a winter's low tide. Before concentrating on the taste, experience the sensation that M. F. K. Fisher, the doyenne of oyster poets, referred adoringly to as the oyster's "strange, cold succulence" and what novelist Tom Robbins likens to "French-kissing a mermaid."

Carefully chewing the oyster, your palate becomes inundated with a variety of distinct tastes that come in succession. If the oyster is well fed, plump, and firm, the first taste is sweetness from the glycogen, which the warmth of your mouth is already breaking down into sugars.  The sweet taste dissipates quickly; then comes a succession of brine, various mineral, algal and other mollusk flavors on the tip, sides and finally on the back of your tongue and the soft palate in the back of your mouth.  Each oyster has a unique line-up of flavors.  The most intriguing, the most difficult to describe and the most important taste when it comes to combining a wine or ale, is the aftertaste or finish---those flavors that linger after the oyster is swallowed.  The aftertaste of an oyster is part sensation--an enlivening of the tongue, cheeks and roof of the mouth.

Wash down the oyster and invigorate the mouth with a brisk, dry, clean-finishing white wine or a malty porter or stout. A bite of a crusty light rye bread, like the French pain de seigle, to neutralize the taste buds, and then on to the next oyster.

Whether eaten with a new friend, before a business venture, a romance, a meal, a marriage, a new year...think of oysters as a beginning, a prelude to a wonderful  experience about to happen..

Written by Jon Rowley b. 1943. d. 2017


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Trust Me You Will Love Them

By Bobby Lax: Tofino, British Columbia

They are not for everyone.  Oysters are slimy, awkwardly chewy, salty, creamy during spawning and if eaten raw, pretty much still alive. 

If you have ever had a bad one you probably would have immediately spit it out hoping to never experience such a blitzkrieg on your senses again. 

If oysters are for you though, their consumption alone is cause for celebration.  Your mouth will rejoice in their delicacy and brininess. 

This is followed by the body buzz only an oyster so naturally provides.  Life is richer when they are near.

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The Shell Game

Written by: Dee Hobsbawn Smith     Published by: Swerve Magazine (04/29/05)

The transition from hand to mouth, from living to lunch, became too much for one oyster lover.

I met the most famous bivalve the summer we lived like Gypsies. We were already used to packing up and moving every year or two from air force base to air force base. This time, when we arrived on Vancouver Island from northern Alberta, our parents pitched a tent on Kin Beach, outside of Comox, while we awaited our new house. For five kids, it was paradise. The tent was snugged in a quiet little dell, fronted by a stand of Douglas firs, behind the high-tide driftwood and the blanket of kelp that washed up against the logs. Digging through the damp seaweed, avoiding washed-up starfish and sand dollars and scuttling tiny crabs to extricate a piece of bull kelp was an act of bravery for new coastal dwellers. Chasing brothers, snapping the kelp like a whip, was pure pleasure. (more)
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Go on, you know you want it

Your first oyster is a rite of passage comparable to your first sexual experience, says Lisa Hilton. She should know - she did both one year on holiday in France. Now a confirmed addict, she trawls Paris in search of salty, sensuous pleasures.

During a memorable summer in Agde, in the South of France, I lost my virginity and ate my first oyster. One experience left me feeling mysteriously adult, sensually alive in a way I never had before, full of the promise of the future. The other involved a tent and a Dutch bloke who worked in a record shop in Rotterdam. Perhaps it was no accident that the two events coincided, since the association between oysters and sex has been so hackneyed as to become an embarrassing cliché.

A friend tells me he cringes when ordering them on a date as it seems shamingly obvious, but since the cliche exists it seems best to get it over with briskly (rather like losing one's virginity).

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