By Gregory Clark, Illustrated by James Frise, December 9, 1933.
“How,” asked Jimmie Frise over the telephone the other evening, “do you like oysters?”
“Love them,” I replied.
“Come on over!” cried Jimmie. “Some- body has sent me a whole barrel of oysters from the maritimes.”
“In their shells?” I asked, excitedly.
“How else would they send them?” retorted Jimmie.
“Well,” I explained, “you see those jugs of naked oysters out in front of the grocery stores.”
“These are in the shells,” said Jimmie. “Come on over. I’ve selected about forty of the best ones and I’ve got them in the sink.”
“It’s only an hour since dinner,” I said, “but I’ll come over.”
There was Jim in his kitchen. His shirt sleeves were rolled up. And with a small brush he was scrubbing the shells of a sink full of the loveliest great big oysters you ever saw. Through the open back kitchen door I could see a huge barrel, foretelling feasts for nights, to come.
“Grab that other nail brush,” cried Jim, “take off your coat and lend a hand here. We’ve got to scrub them nice and clean under the tap first. And then we’ll open them up and we’ll each have a platter of twenty oysters in the ice box. How’s that?”
“Twenty is my lucky number in oysters,” I said, removing my coat.
With the cold tap running merrily and Jim and I scrubbing the coarse, rugged shells of the oysters, our appetites began to stir, even though it was only a little after eight o’clock.
“I wonder,” said Jim, “who the intrepid hero was who first ate an oyster?”
“It was likely one of our cave-men ancestors,” I said, “because eating oysters is as old as the hills. They find heaps of oyster shells in the ruins of ancient cities, and even in the caves in which primitive man dwelt.”
“Maybe,” said Jimmie, holding up and polishing a particularly huge oyster, “it was eating oysters that started man on the upward climb from the half gorilla to what we are to-day.”
“Perhaps we ought to feed oysters to those of us that are still gorillas,” I suggested.
Oysters Not Prepossessing
“Still,” said Jim, speculatively, “I’d like to know how the very first man came to eat an oyster, because, until you get to know an oyster, it isn’t a very prepossessing creature. You don’t feel drawn toward an oyster at first sight as you do toward a roast partridge.”
“I reckon,” I said, as I scrubbed a nice fat-shelled one, “that some poor starving cave man, or maybe it was a poor starved cave girl, was walking along the sea shore one day and she saw the sea birds digging the oysters out of the mud, when the tide was down, and dropping them from a height on to the rocks and then gobbling the cold, salty oysters when the shell broke. Probably, if it was a poor starved cave girl, she shuddered and closed her eyes as she gulped down the first one. Then, opening her eyes in astonishment and joy, she dashed down to the beach and grabbed huge armfuls of oysters, and rushed back to the rocky shore and cracked them open and guzzled them down. I bet one thing, and that is that the first person ever to eat an oyster probably holds the world’s record for the number eaten at one sitting.”
“I bet she was a nice girl,” mused Jimmie.
And when she returned to the cave,” I went on, “all swollen up with oysters, and beginning to look more beautiful already, everybody, caveman and cavewoman, began wondering at the marvellous improvement in her. Day by day, as she continued to eat her new-found food, she grew lovelier, her chin got bigger, the coarse hair all over her began to moult off, and inside of a year, she was walking upright all the time. Hardly ever walking on all fours.”
“The beginning,” said Jim, scrubbing away.
“And then the secret was out, and the whole cave colony started eating oysters, crying ‘oy, oy,’ hence the name oysters,” I recounted. “And this tribe became so strong and powerful that they conquered all the surrounding tribes. Of course, this is ages ago, Jimmie. Long before history began. But each tribe they conquered, they introduced to oysters, and so began the rise of man from a mere meat-eating beast to an oyster-eating epicure.”
“Let’s,” said Jimmie, “scrub up a few more. You could eat thirty, couldn’t you?”
“Make it the even three dozen,” I suggested.
So Jimmie went out to the barrel and dug out another heap of oysters for the sink.
“It’s a long cry,” said Jim, as we started in scrubbing the new lot, “from the cave-men sitting in the tidal mud guzzling oysters to shipping a barrel of oysters a thousand miles, in a refrigerator car, to the descendants of the cave-men standing beside fresh running water out of a tap, in a modern kitchen.”
“Lit with electricity,” I said.
“And with a mechanical ice box to chill them,” said Jim. “But isn’t it funny how few new things to eat we have discovered? I guess our ancestors were great explorers in the realm of food, even if they didn’t discover North America until just lately.”
“With my delicate stomach,” I said, “I shudder to think of some of the things my ancestors must have eaten.”
“Or tried to eat,” added Jim.
It was now nine o’clock.
“Well,” said Jim, gazing fondly at the huge pile of beautifully scoured oysters heaped on the drain board beside the sink, “let’s open them.”
“Where’s your oyster knife?” I asked.
“I’ve no oyster knife,” said Jim. “I got a couple of screw drivers. They’ll do.”
He produced two screw drivers, a short one and a long one, from the pantry drawer. And he laid out two large platters on the kitchen table.
“No cheating now,” said Jim. “Take them as they come, large and small. And we’ll each fill our own platter.”
I picked up a chubby one. I looked for a good place to insert the screw driver. But an oyster is a very deceitful creature. Instead of having one clear-cut crack down its side, it has itself concealed with a half a dozen or more cracks, each one of which looks like the right one.
I shoved. Scraped. Tried here. Tried there.
“H’m,” said Jimmie. I looked at him, and he was standing over under the kitchen. light, narrowly examining his oyster.
“They’re awfully tight, aren’t they?” he said.
“It’s a trick,” I explained. “Once you find the hinge, it’s nothing to open them. I’ve seen a good oyster bartender open a dozen in two minutes. Just like that.”
“Have you ever opened any yourself?” asked Jimmie.
“I seem to have,” I said, “but I can’t recall.”
“Your unconscious memory, from your cave men ancestors,” said Jim, laying his oyster down and coming over to watch me. I laid the oyster down on the drain board, pressed with all my weight on one hand, while I gouged with the screw driver.
“Try the other side,” suggested Jim.
I turned it over and tried the other side.
The screw driver slipped and I gave myself a nasty gouge on the hand I was pressing with.
“Ouch!”
Jim got the iodine and some gauze upstairs and bandaged my left hand.
“I’ll get the hang of it,” said Jimmie, taking my place at the drain board.
He took a fresh oyster. It had a more innocent look than the first one. Jim studied it. He placed the screw driver against the most vulnerable point. He shoved. He twisted. He wiggled and jabbed.
“Ouch,” said Jimmie. He had cut himself. So I bandaged him.
“What we need,” I said, “is an oyster knife.”
So Jim went to the hall and telephoned half a dozen neighbors, but none of them had an oyster knife.
Jim came back and with the screw driver, he chipped off the edge of a new oyster, a still more childish and smooth-faced one. And then he peered along the chipped edges. But there was no sign of any relaxation.
It was now nine-twenty o’clock.
“If we are going to have an oyster supper,” said Jimmie, “we ought to get busy and open some of these.”
“It was your suggestion,” I reminded him.
Bending down and jamming the oyster firmly against the corner of the wall and the drain board, Jim inserted the screw driver, and slowly, relentlessly, he shoved and twisted the blade of the tool at the place in the oyster shell where there is a kind of hollow.
“Nnnhhh!” he grunted.
The screw driver slipped. Jim’s hand slammed up against the corner, with the oyster and screw driver hopelessly mixed up in the collision. And there was another hunk of skin off his one good hand.
“Bandage me,” said Jim. “Now I’m out of action!”
So while Jim stood by with two bandaged hands, I, with my remaining hand, decided to approach the problem with intellect rather than with physical force.
I sorted through the pile of oysters, seventy-two of them, all scrubbed and ready for the feast, until I found one that seemed the silliest, goofiest, Oliver Hardy1 sort of an oyster in the whole heap.
Placing it in the corner of the drain board, with its back to the wall, I crept the screw driver into its hinge, and with a slow, prying pressure, I suddenly got a slight squirt of juice out of the edge.
“Hurray!” I shouted.
Another pry and twist.
And there, in its pearly glory, lay the, oyster, open and above board.
We beamed on it. We held it under the light. We smelled it. Boy, how cool and lovely it smelt!
“Let’s eat it right now,” said Jim, “to give us courage!”
“How could we both eat one oyster?” I exclaimed, scornfully.
“You take that round fat bit,” said Jim, “and I’ll take the ears, or whatever that crinkly part is.”
“Nothing doing,” I stated. “I eat an oyster whole. You won’t catch me dissecting any oyster. I’ve got the hang of it now, and in no time I’ll have the platters filled.”
But I was sanguine. I had to pass up three more before I got another one open. And after I got it laid bare, five more defied me before the accident happened.
It was very brief and simple. My hand slipped. And there was I with my right hand cut, too. And Jimmie was bandaging it, after a dash of iodine.
“Now,” said Jim, “where do we go? We’re both out of action.”
Because, really, you can’t open oysters with your hands wrapped up like a hobo’s feet in winter. “Let’s eat these two to start with, anyway.”
So Jim ate one and I the other, with careful and delicate applications of lemon juice, salt, pepper and ketchup.
“Mmmmm,” we said. Glurp. Plop. The oysters were ours.
We both tried to continue the opening, with our bandaged hands, but somehow we were too clumsy.
The Original Way
“I tell you,” cried Jimmie. “Let us resort to the ancient and original way of opening them. The way our cavemen ancestors, the discoverers of oysters, did!”
“How’s that?” “With a hammer!” said Jim. “They used rocks. But we’ve got hammers. Don’t tell me there isn’t some advance in civilization.”
So Jim got a hammer and a big heavy monkey wrench.
We laid the oysters on the drain board. But that only made big ugly nicks in the wood, and he was afraid his wife might complain.
“In the cave days,” explained Jim, “what a wife thought didn’t matter.”
He went outside and brought in two bricks, which we washed thoroughly, and then, squatting down on the kitchen floor, like the men of old must have done along the tidal shores, Jim and I proceeded to open oysters. It is not, I might say, the correct way. After hitting the oyster eight or ten times too lightly, you hit it one awful smash too hard, and there you have oyster squashed all over the brick, with broken shell imbedded in it.
After half an hour’s pounding, which caused neighbor’s dogs to howl and no doubt a lot of the neighbors to come and peer out their back windows, Jim had five oysters that were recognizable as such, and I had four. Of course, they weren’t on the half shell. We had to pick up the remains as best we could and carry them to the tap and wash off the brick dust and pick out the shell fragments. And then we put them in a tumbler. So to all intents. and purposes, we had those naked oysters such as you see in front of the grocery stores.
Anyway, such as it was, we held our oyster supper, after putting the rest of the seventy-two back in the barrel.
They went pretty good, too, although there was a mild flavor of iodine, and some slight trouble with shell splinters, and if there is any trick trickier than holding an oyster in your mouth while you feel around for a shell splinter with a bandaged hand, I don’t know it.
“This proves one thing,” said Jimmie, as we sat back from the feast. “And that is, we aren’t the men our ancestors were.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Every man to his trade. All we’ve got to do is go and take a few lessons from some chef.”
“From what I’ve seen of the art of opening oysters,” said Jim, “I imagine it is a life’s work. Maybe they have high-paid officials in the restaurants. Oyster openers. With fancy costumes. Maybe oyster opening is one of those family secrets, handed down from father to son.”
“It’s quite an art,” I said, imagining I felt a sharp stab inside of me from a splinter I had not detected.
“The problem is,” said Jim, “what am I going to do with all that barrel full of oysters?”
“You’ve got a lot of friends,” I reminded him. “They would just love a couple of dozen oysters, fresh from the sea.”
“I guess that’s the solution2,” said Jimmie.
Editor’s Notes: This story was repeated on February 17, 1940 as “Sea Shells”.
- Of the famous Laurel and Hardy duo. ↩︎
- Or just buy an oyster knife… ↩︎
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