Can We Talk 2

Oyster Stew

         It is an old custom in my area to have oyster stew on Christmas morning. Oysters are considered expensive, so it was a splurge to have them for breakfast instead of dinner. Once I would occasionally run into people who had the same custom, but it is getting harder to find such people. I guess it's dying out. But for me and my brothers, it is an absolute must.

         I've become something of a snob about it. Since becoming an adult I have encountered people who have varying recipes. Ours is very simple. You cook the oysters with all the juice in butter until the edges shrivel up. You add salt and pepper and milk. Period. End of recipe. Never let the milk boil. Others will thicken it with a little flour or add onion to the butter and oysters or even a tiny bit of grated carrot. No, no, no. I guess ours is the poor man's version. We keep it simple. My mother's folks and my father's folks cooked it this way. They were city people and country people; their paths never crossed. Mom also knew about red eye gravy and coffee gravy--the hobo's version that wasted nothing, but was fast and easy to catch the early morning red eye train.


         We became oyster snobs, too. When I was kid, all the local oysters were from the Chesapeake Bay. That became polluted and the oysters were over harvested. So for the last decade, at least, there have been no Chesapeake or Potomac oysters due to the ban. The Bay is cleaner now and the oyster beds are growing back, but there are severe limits still. So we can get oysters from lower on the coast of the Atlantic, but those are rare. For the most part, we now use Gulf oysters, usually the Louisiana side rather than Texas. Occasionally, you can get San Francisco oysters, but they aren't the same quality. You only get those if you can't get any others. They are only packaged in San Francisco and may have come from elsewhere along the coast. So they have to be frozen to ship east.

         If you're going to fry oysters, you definitely want the larger, premium ones. Atlantic or Gulf oysters, if possible.

         I remember my grandfather, in his seventies by then, peppering his oyster stew until there was a black coating on top. My other grandfather always added more salt, but he could get away with that, since he had Addison's Disease which doesn't allow the body to hold salt. (He actually took a salt supplement every day of his life, like a swimmer.) We are not snobby about crackers. You can use saltines or oysterette crackers. as many or as few as you like. Grandpa with the pepper had to have the little oyster crackers. No one in my family butters their crackers, like my husband and a former boss did. We crumple saltines, like we used to crumble Oreo cookies in ice cream, before they started making ice cream with cookie crumbs already in it.

         It just doesn't feel like Christmas to us until we have at least a little bit of oyster stew.