Oysters to Oysterage

Garlic butter oysters from the Hanami Japanese Restaurant at the Vancouver Airport. Pan-fried with mushrooms.. not bad.. even better were the gyoza and California roll. A pleasant change to see an airport restaurant managing to serve nice food to a captive market!


A beautiful day on the Aldeburgh seafront.


Dog-friendly town, Aldeburgh.


We did our best to liberate what cheeses we could from the overloaded display at Lawson's Delicatessen: Suffolk Gold, Mrs Temple's blue cheese, St André - a vignotte lookalike - and a wedge of Manchega. Lots of nice looking sheeps' milk cheeses on offer too, and you can fill your bottle of olive oil from a silver keg in the back. Hours of fun.


Here was my welcoming committee to the Butley Orford Oysterage. Some big fat grilled sardines, who followed a very tasty oyster soup - thick and creamy with chopped oysters adrift in its scalding depths.


If you can think of it, they smoke it at Richardson's Smokehouse. Some of their fish in preparation, below.

Not talking about poetry and not eating oysters

I enjoy talking prosody or fine technical points in the context of a workshop, but otherwise I'm not a one to want to discuss poetics with all and sundry. On this matter I was glad to find a kindred spirit in WS Merwin, who made a few seemingly timeless points when his 1956 collection Green With Beasts was made Poetry Book Society Choice:

"I don't usually like literary conversations, though I deeply enjoy talking with writers other than poets about the practical side of getting things written. I like talking with some people about particular poems: though I think that in such conversations all I usually do is to try to describe a quality that excites my enthusiasm in a poem. I do not like writing about poetry... Above all I do not like trying to generalize about poetry...

...I think that one of the dangers of modern poetry has been a tendency to become inbred. Its small audience enhances the danger. It even seems possible for some poets to write as though critics, even particular schools of critics, were a fit and sufficient audience for poetry."

He then makes

"one of the few general statements I feel safe in making about poetry. It is a mystery. It is a metaphor of the other mysteries which comprise human experience. But, like some other mysteries, it gives us a feeling of illumination - one mystery giving us a name by which to know another."

I've been feeling some illumination from reading a collection of writings by MFK Fisher called The Art of Eating. Her prose is exquisite. In The Well-dressed Oyster she begins, firing on all cylinders and out of both barrels:

"There are three kinds of oyster-eaters: those loose-minded sports who will eat anything, hot, cold, thin, thick, dead or alive, as long as it is oyster; those who will eat them raw and only raw; and those who with equal severity will eat them cooked and no way other.

The first group may perhaps have the most fun, although there is a white fire about the others' bigotry that can never warm the broad-minded."

One suspects her allegiances lie with the second group.

"..almost every oyster-eater who does not belong whole-heartedly to the third and last division, would die before denying that a perfect oyster, healthy, of fine flavor, plucked from its chill bed and brought to the plate unwatered and unseasoned, is more delicious than any of its modifications. On the other hand, a flaccid, moping, debauched mollusc, tired from too much love and loose-nerved from general world conditions, can be a shameful thing served raw upon the shell."

At least we have her words to savour, in lieu of a leisurely oyster harvest on the beach, since red tide has robbed us of some of our summer fun.

Smoked Oysters

So. The poets (and prose writers and artists) gathered together last night at the writers and artists colony at St Peter's Abbey admired the Fanny Bay smoked oyster dip (made from oysters I bought while last staying at The Cottage at Fanny Bay) and here is the recipe, which I tweaked as follows: instead of one tin of oysters, I used two. I added a dollop (couple of tablespoons) plain yogurt, a squeeze of lemon, a bit (half tsp) of minced lemon rind.

Instead of fresh, I used dried minced onion and dried parsley leaves, and as it sat for about an hour before we ate it, everything had time to soften up nicely I thought. It all seemed to go down equally well with french bread or chips.

I don't think the Fanny Bay smoked oysters are as oily as other tinned commercial ones I've seen, so you might want to drain the oil off those if it looks like you'll be swimming in it.