Book Review: MFK Fisher's Consider the Oyster

The cover bears her photograph, a woman, young enough to be attractive in the eyes of society but old enough to possess some bit of wisdom. She wears a shimmery knit top, the kind one would wear to a cocktail party not a potluck picnic. Her hair is pulled back into a chignon and her eyebrows plucked within an inch of their life or perhaps gone all together and merely drawn on with a pencil to present the illusion of interest.

Yet even without this photograph, I would have had a similar mental picture of MFK Fisher simply by her voice in, Consider the Oyster, her collection of essays on, you guessed it, the subject of oysters. I would have imagined her in pearls with a martini in her hand describing her recipes of oyster- or ---in a plummy diction reminiscent of Martha Stewart before jail, before she became friends with Snoop Dogg and an old Hollywood actress that graced the films for the 30’s or 40’s. Her accent, of course, would be neither British or American in origin, but somewhere that hovers over the Atlantic for those who can afford to spend time in both places frequently enough.

Fisher begins this tone right from the beginning in her first essay, “Love and Death Among the Molluscs.” “Almost any normal oyster never knows from one year to the next whether he is he or she,” Fisher explains in her droll sort of way letting us know that “American oysters differ as much as American people, so that the Atlantic Coast inhabitants spend their childhood and adolescence floating free and unprotected with the tides…while the Western oysters lie within special brood-chambers of the maternal shell.”  She tells us right off the bat her preferences for both oysters and people. Of course, Fisher believes “the Easterners seem more daring.” (3-4)

The essay “R is for Oyster” begins with an epithet, which in this case, is a marker from a grave stone,

C. Pearl Swallow

He died of a bad oyster.

Fisher says, “The man’s name was good for such an end, but probably the end was not.” I see her take the olive out of her martini to nibble upon, giving her guests enough time to laugh heartily. She goes on the describe the long and miserable death but as one would give a dry cocktail party anecdote, “And, God, he was thirsty, thirsty…I’m dying, he thought, and even in his woe he regretted it, and did not believe it. But he died.” (15)

This conversational tone makes even recipes interesting as the preface to the recipe for Dried Oysters with Vegetables shows.

“Dried oysters, which can be bought at almost any Oriental grocery store in the is country and are very much like the smoked oysters people give you now at cocktail parties, excellent little shrived things on toothpicks which make your mouth taste hideous unless you drink a lot, which may also make your mouth taste hideous. “(34)

Fisher teaches both the writer and the conversationalist that you can never exhaust your subject, if you add a bit of yourself in the content.