I first have to admit that I am 100% not the target audience for this book.  In fact, I would never have picked it up, except that it came in my gigantic doorstop sized collection of books by M.F.K. Fisher (The Art of Eating, which collects Serve It Forth, Consider The Oyster, How To Cook A Wolf, The Gastronomical Me, and An Alphabet for Gourmets).  It is, as you may have guessed, an entire book about oysters.

The book is short (only about 60 pages in my edition), and about half recipes, and half discussion of oysters.  The recipes are of necessity limited in scope and number.  After all, there is only so much that you can do with an oyster.  You can bake it, boil it, batter and fry it, turn it into soup, and make stuffing with it.  And of course you can open and eat it raw, which is the course that Fisher advocates.

I will just own up and admit that I don't really care for oysters.  Or clams, actually.  I don't like the rubbery texture.  I'm not actually sure why anyone DOES like the rubbery texture, but I have learned to accept the fact that clearly people do.

If Consider The Oyster suffers from a lack of things that can be done with oysters, it benefits from M.F.K. Fisher's gift for writing.  Despite the fact that I don't like oysters, have no interest in oysters, and am incredibly unlikely to ever need a recipe for oysters, I read the entire thing.  Partly because I was hoping to figure out why people like the damned things.

We may as well talk about the sex connection now.  Fisher's description of oysters could fairly be called "voluptuous," and of course they are also widely renowned as an aphrodisiac.  Presumably this is a form of magical thinking which results from the similarity between an oyster and the female anatomy.  (I have always thought this connection was both revolting and horribly unfair, since oysters are both cold and rubbery.  How is that a compliment?)

M.F.K. Fisher was bisexual, and some biographers have seen fit to draw dotted lines between Fisher's love for oysters, and her relationships with women.  Is that fair?  Or even reasonable?  I can't say - I have only read it third hand as a cited source, "so and so said in their biography of Fisher that…"  Maybe it is less insulting in context.  Hard to say.

Although admittedly, Fisher relishes talk about the oyster's fluid understanding of gender.  (All oysters begin life as males, but some of them become female later in life.)  Is Fisher talking about her own perception of gender?  Is she having a coded discussion about bisexuality and gender roles in modern society?  It made me wish that Fisher had been born later in the history of the world, because constantly having to read between the lines can be tiresome.

Regardless of all of the above, if you like oysters even a little (which is to say, more than I do), then Consider The Oyster should be mandatory reading for you.  I enjoyed it, which means that someone who actually likes oysters can't help but like it.