The Hungry Poet: My life in Food — Scrunching Oyster Shell in Bristol with Chekhov

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1903 illustration of a moment from Anton Chekhov's 'Oysters' by Alexander Aspith

All at once I began biting something hard, there was a sound of a scrunching.

“Ha, ha! He is eating the shells,” laughed the crowd. “Lit- tle silly, do you suppose you can eat that?”

from ‘Oysters’ by Anton Chekhov

You’d think that eating oysters would be a Proustian moment for most food writers. Maybe they were standing by the sea on a sunlit evening, or sitting at a little café on an upmarket seafront with a chilled glass of Chablis. Indeed, the location of my first oyster (and I can remember it well) was in a first-floor apartment on the Royal York Crescent in Clifton, Bristol, overlooking the Avon and the southwest. In fact, there was something about that view that made you feel like you were looking out over the edge of the world itself, such was its situation and elevation.

I’d only been living in Bristol for about a month – where I moved to take up an English teaching post at Bristol Grammar School – and got invited to my head of department’s birthday. I loved working with David; up until that point, I don’t think I’d ever met anyone so civilised before, and working with him was an education in itself, not just about literature but culture, music and food. Before I met him I’d never eaten sourdough bread, bouillabaisse, triple cooked chips or oysters. He possessed, in short, taste. There are certain people you meet in life who introduce you to certain foods or ways of cooking or eating that improve things or make you look at it differently, and he was one of those people.

Anyway, that evening, I’d made a terrible faux pas in reading the invitation wrong and turning up too early. However, it turned out I could be of use: I was given a box of oysters to shuck. Now, you might think it strange that someone who comes from Northern Ireland and has a taste in food hadn’t eaten oysters until that point in his late twenties, but that tells you everything you need to know about the limits of my culinary upbringing. I can remember being given a knife and finding it incredibly difficult to prise these molluscs apart, without hacking one of my fingers off. 

Anyway, I was shown and it got easier the more I did it, even if I did work at a much slower rate than the others. I did a bad job, though, with more than a few bits of shell shrapnel ending up in some of the oysters, but I didn’t manage to inadvertently fling any up the wall or out of the window, so I regarded my attempt largely as a success.

I remember the weight of the oyster in my hand, its grey and white shell, and how it suggested both lightness yet toughness, a kind of oceanic titanium. Then I remember eating it out of the shell and that intense flavour of pure sea and the odd texture that slips down the throat and is gone. I think I liked it, but to this day I’m not so sure. To be honest, I haven’t had oysters since that day back in 2012, which doesn’t speak of my dislike of them, just my social circumstances and inclination – usually for meat. What I wasn’t so keen on though was the remnant of shell that I found, in the words of Chekhov, scrunching between my teeth. It was reminiscent of egg shell in that the more you chewed it the bigger the sensation became in your mouth, and yet there was no other polite way to rid yourself of that shell but to swallow. The people around me were amused as they could see my face gurn with each chewing motion. But I learned my lesson. 

Reading this short story by Chekhov recently I was reminded of that warm September evening scrunching oyster shell around my mouth in that elegant apartment overlooking Bristol. In the story, a boy is begging on the street with his father, fainting with hunger and in a mild hallucinatory state because of it. He reads aloud a sign for oysters on a restaurant and some passersby take him to the restaurant and feed the boy oysters, before mocking him as he eats the shell and all. He then remembers waking up with ‘a terrible thirst’, ‘heartburn and the strange taste in my parched mouth.’ It’s a tale of class, the mockery of one class over another, with the boy’s ignorance of how to eat an oyster symbolic of the difference in class, and, with the father’s regrets of not simply asking for money, also a story about parenthood and father/son relationships. It’s a tragic story, told with Chekhov’s usual detached tone and poetic eye. 

The word shibboleth means ‘A custom, habit, mode of dress, or the like, which distinguishes a particular class or set of persons.’ I can’t help but feel that shucking an oyster is one such shibboleth, separating those who know and those who don’t, those who have and those who have not. Certainly in Chekhov’s story the poverty of the father and son limit them from the education, the know-how of eating an oyster. This doesn't stop the boy in the story though dreaming of what an oyster might be, look like and taste like. It’s a wonderful passage of writing with Chekhov at his imaginative best. He writes of the boy imagining the oyster as such:

I imagined to myself a creature like a frog. A frog sitting in a shell, peeping out from it with big, glittering eyes, and moving its revolting jaws. I imagined this creature in a shell with claws, glittering eyes, and a slimy skin, being brought from the market. . . . The children would all hide while the cook, frowning with an air of disgust, would take the creature by its claw, put it on a plate, and carry it into the dining-room. The grown-ups would take it and eat it, eat it alive with its eyes, its teeth, its legs! While it squeaked and tried to bite their lips. . . .

While the oyster may symbolise decadence and luxury, I’m not sure there’s another type of food on earth that represents freshness or intensity of flavour in the way the oyster does. The fact we have to fight with our shucking knives to break into it is perhaps a symbol of how we must earn the flavour we access, to be rewarded with, as Heaney writes in his poem ‘Oysters’, a ‘palette hung with starlight’.