M. F. K. Fisher

Fisher pays tribute to one of the most delicate and enigmatic of foods--the oyster--in this gastronomical classic, originally published in 1941 and now reissued as a sumptuous jacketed paperback. Includes 28 recipes and descriptions of various regional styles of preparation.

Consider the Oyster

Fisher asks us to do more than just consider the oyster, she asks us to analyze its life and death, the ways it is a love language in itself and the ways it is repulsive.

The book is a tragedy and a comedy at once, ‘a gastronomic masterpiece!’. You now love oysters (even if you hate oysters). Fisher’s writing is funny and modern, and you wouldn’t believe it had been written by a woman in the 40s.

I’m ashamed to have thought oysters were only meant to be slurped from their shells off a cold bed of ice. I found myself stashing recipes away like nuts, trying to figure how I could work oysters into my three-a-day. Cornwall here I come..

Jacqui Spears

Fisher asks us to do more than just consider the oyster, she asks us to analyze its life and death, the ways it is a love language in itself and the ways it is repulsive.

The book is a tragedy and a comedy at once, ‘a gastronomic masterpiece!’. You now love oysters (even if you hate oysters). Fisher’s writing is funny and modern, and you wouldn’t believe it had been written by a woman in the 40s.

I’m ashamed to have thought oysters were only meant to be slurped from their shells off a cold bed of ice. I found myself stashing recipes away like nuts, trying to figure how I could work oysters into my three-a-day. Cornwall here I come..

Walked into something special with this one. All at once it’s witty, it’s dry, it’s funny, yet somehow solely focused on the subject matter of oysters. She tells of true travel and experience, with such deep understanding of individual idiosyncrasy’s. Which, in todays world may have come from an extended sabbatical or year abroad. But in 1940?? truly impressive. 

Her words make one want to spend the summer touring the new england coast, or french riviera. Yet, the slighted commentary and subtly all-too-accurate jabs have me preferring to spend an evening in a bar or pub with her for company. 91 pages written in 1940. Who would have thought?? 

connor arnette

Walked into something special with this one. All at once it’s witty, it’s dry, it’s funny, yet somehow solely focused on the subject matter of oysters. She tells of true travel and experience, with such deep understanding of individual idiosyncrasy’s. Which, in todays world may have come from an extended sabbatical or year abroad. But in 1940?? truly impressive. 

Her words make one want to spend the summer touring the new england coast, or french riviera. Yet, the slighted commentary and subtly all-too-accurate jabs have me preferring to spend an evening in a bar or pub with her for company. 91 pages written in 1940. Who would have thought?? 

M. F. K. Fisher, whom John Updike has called our “poet of the appetites,” here pays tribute to that most enigmatic of ocean creatures, the oyster. As she tells of oysters found in stews, in soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel—and of the pearls sometimes found therein—Fisher describes her mother’s joy at encountering oyster loaf in a girls’ dorm in the 1890s, recalls her own initiation into the “strange cold succulence” of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve’s famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers. Plumbing the “dreadful but exciting” life of the oyster, Fisher invites readers to share in the comforts and delights that this delicate edible evokes, and enchants us along the way with her characteristically wise and witty prose. “Consider the Oyster marks M. F. K. Fisher’s emergence as a storyteller so confident that she can maneuver a reader through a narrative in which recipes enhance instead of interrupt the reader’s attention to the tales. She approaches a recipe as a published dream or wish, and the stories she tells here...are also stories of the pleasures and disillusionments of dreams fulfilled.”—PATRICIA STORACE, The New York Review of Books “Since Lewis Carroll no one had written charmingly about that indecisively sexed bivalve until Mrs. Fisher came along with her Consider the Oyster. Surely this will stand for some time as the most judicious treatment in English.”—CLIFFTON FADIMAN

Consider the Oyster

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