Consider the Oyster - Couverture souple

'An oyster leads a dreadful but exciting life.'

The celebrated American food writer M. F. K. Fisher pays tribute to that most delicate and enigmatic of foods: the oyster. She tells of oysters found in stews and soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared à la Rockefeller or au naturel and of the pearls sometimes found therein.

As she describes each dish, Fisher 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.

'Her writing makes your mouth water.' Financial Times

'Fisher's oysters are never just oysters but also symbols of refinement, simplicity, viscerality, death, class, and despair... we might take a clammy, saline gulp of that rhetoric for ourselves.'Ruby Tandoh

'Poet of the appetites.' John Updike

'The most re-readable of all prose stylists.' Bee Wilson

'The greatest food writer who has ever lived.' Simon Schama

Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher (1908-1992) was one of the greatest American food writers of the twentieth century. She is the author of 27 books of food, travel and memoir, many of which have become classics. Her books include The Gastronomical Me, Serve it Forth, How to Cook a Wolf, With Bold Knife and Fork, and a recently rediscovered novel, The Theoretical Foot