Few foods prompt a stronger reaction. Offer round a plate of plump, creamy oysters, nestling in their half shells, bathed in their own salty juices, and people will literally recoil as you approach. You might as well be offering sprouts to six-year-olds.
I know this because I was a longtime recoiler. Just the thought of that quivering meat, the gnarly packaging, the rawness – in fact, let’s be honest, the aliveness – of the oyster, was enough to make my face scrunch into the oyster-hater’s “Eugh” of horror. Give me a freshly boiled crab and a mallet: fine. A pile of steaming mussels: no problem. A pot of prawns, briefly barbecued, their beady eyes and whiskers still attached: delicious. Vibrant sashimi: gorgeous. But oysters? No thanks.
Then, earlier this year, I reconsidered. Who writes off foods they’ve never tasted? (Apart from six-year-olds faced with sprouts.) I was going to eat an oyster – the only question was where. I’m convinced that part of the reason people don’t eat oysters is because they don’t want to try a food in public they suspect might make them gag, but neither do they want to break into horny shells at home with only meagre knife skills and a tea towel for protection.
So my first – a Pacific oyster – was shucked by a fishmonger, gingerly carried home, then devoured a couple of hours later. (Oyster-lovers, I know this is not the ideal situation. But neither is the paranoid possibility of retching in a restaurant.) One tip, three chews and a good swallow later, I was a convert to these divisive, sweet-salty specimens.
Which effectively makes this my first British native oyster season. Many of the oysters on sale in the UK are Pacifics, perfectly delicious and available all year round. But from late September to March, you’ll also see stunning native oysters making their way on to menus: prized bivalves from Colchester, Whitstable, Loch Ryan and Falmouth.
“Native oysters can be fairly small and quite shallow – it’s not a deep shell,” explains Annie Sibert, a Cornish fishmonger turned cookery teacher. “When you open a good one, the body of the oyster pretty much fills the shell, and there’s a nice lot of juice – we call it liquor – in there.”
The minerals in the water the oyster has grown in make a difference to its taste, in the same way the flowers a bee visits will change its honey. Sasha Ziverts, the head chef at Soho Oyster House – run by the Wright brothers, who, along with two other restaurants with great seafood, also run the Duchy of Cornwall oyster farm – compares British natives to fine wine. “They have a great mineral flavour, and the depth of flavour is a joy. They’re a fantastic thing for Britain,” he says.
Sibert is, unsurprisingly, a fan of her local natives, Fal oysters, which are harvested only by traditional sailing vessels, and last year received PDO recognition. They have a particular tender taste, she explains: “When the oyster is lovely and fresh, that sweet seawater taste stays with you.”
This weekend she will be once more judging the shucking competition at Falmouth Oyster festival, an annual celebration marking the start of the oyster-dredging season. It is serious stuff: the molluscs must be shucked, cut loose from their shells and turned, ready to tilt into eager mouths. “One tray arrived with blood all over it from where a fisherman had nicked himself. It’s quite a heated competition,” Sibert says.
That is not, perhaps, the perfect dressing for an oyster. What you should eat with these ivory morsels – besides a sip of stout or champagne – depends largely on how good they are. Purists swear by nothing at all. Others agree with a drop of lemon or Tabasco, a dribble of mignonette sauce. Ziverts serves his with top-quality kizami wasabi or a spicy-sweet chilli jam.
There is also the question of how to eat these slippery customers. You want the liquor as well as the meat, so tip the contents of the shell into your mouth. Then, using your tongue, push the oyster against the roof of your mouth – you’ll realise at this point it is firm, rather than slimy, and any panic should subside. Both Sibert and Ziverts are firm on chewing: you must. At least two or three times.
“Yes, you should chew! That oyster has grown for four years, from the riverbed to the plate; that’s quite a long time. There has been a lot of care and attention spent on that,” says Ziverts. “You’re breaking up the muscle. There’s no gooey liquid in there.”
He would recommend a Jersey oyster for first-time guzzlers: a Pacific, rather than native, oyster, it is “extremely clean, low in minerality and high in freshness of the seawater.” And for those who still can’t face the textural challenge? You can cook oysters, of course, though you’ll need to choose big specimens and be very quick with the heat. Sibert adds an oyster briefly cooked in melted butter to the top of a lobster risotto; Ziverts fries plump Colchester oysters in a tempura batter.
Me? I’ll take mine as it comes out of the sea – firm, salty-sweet and as fresh as possible.
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