Marco Pierre White - oysters with Sauterne jelly

In the days that the mercurial Marco Pirre White used to cook in the French style he refined his way with oysters in the same genre. When he first made his name he served poached oysters back in their shells on a small bundle of tagliettelle garnished with caviar and sauced with a beurre blanc. He then rationalised the oyster for restaurant purposes at the Mirabelle to create an epic cold dish, the shell lined with a puree of spinach, the oysters poached lightly in Sauterne and gelatine and then set to cool in the shell, served garnish with crème fraiche and or caviar.

Roellinger - a scavenger's curry of oysters

Olivier Roellinger at Maisons de Bricourt in Brittany works closer to the water than the others and is a part of the oyster culture but sometimes features this daring dish on the menu using curry spices for the seasoning, embellishing a teaspoon of basic curry powder, with coriander, powdered saffron, turmeric all spice, cinnamon, dried green mango powder, just the sort of contents that might have spilled off a spice shipment smashed on the rocks off St Malo (but would not be out of place either in India where oysters are given a dry crumb coating seasoned with such spices and then fried or grilled quickly). Roellinger though conservatively uses less than a teaspoon to season his stock reduction.

Oysters with cabbage

Boil half a litre of white wine to reduce its volume, add chicken stock and 2 ml of the spice mix. Infuse 20 minutes. Separate four prime cabbage leaves, poach and then refresh in cold water and set aside. Cut two squid into strips and sear briefly in a non stick pan. Open the oysters and put the liquor in a pan separately
Heat the cabbage leaves in the oyster juice with some butter Reheat the wine and stock infusion, bind it with more butter
Place a cabbage leaf in a warm shallow bowl. Slip the drained oysters into the buttered infusion, which should be warm not boiling. Arrange the oysters in each cabbage leaf. Coat with the infusion, which has been enriched with oyster flavour. Garnish with the salad burnett, nori and lamb's lettuce.

Bocuse - oyster soupe Lyonnaise

Paul Bocuse, the legendary and avuncular totem of La Cuisine Francaise, manages to evoke both the classicism of a vichyssoisse with the local slant of adding grated Gruyere at the end but retaining the complexity of texture with fried bread. There is more than a nod here to a Marseille style fish soup with its Gruyere, croutons and rouille. Lyons, of course, would have been able to pick any ingredient it wanted trading north or south along the Rhone, so this Lyonnaise variation may genuinely be a reflection of approaches long past.

Oyster Soupe Lyonnaise


Sweat three leeks in melted butter till soft, about seven minutes Add four peeled and cubed russet potatoes, mix well, cover with six cups of water and simmer 20 minutes. Set aside. Fry some cubed bread for croutons
Liquidise the soup. Add a cup of cream and a grating of nutmeg and return to the pan
Add a quart of shucked oysters and their liquor and poach till they curl.
Lay the soup up in warm bowls, top with croutons, a sprinkle of Gruyere, parsley and paprika. Spoon chowder into soup bowls; top each with a few croutons and sprinkle with Gruyére, parsley, and paprika. Serve with any additional croutons, cheese, and parsley on the side.

There are other recipes, not dissimilar where the leek, often a favoured pairing, and potato are used as a sauce to serve in the shell with the oysters laid back on top and grilled, though these do not seem as well thought out as the Bocuse soup

Guerard - oysters with coriander and coffee

At Michel Guerard’s Eugenie Les Bains they are served freshly opened with a zest of ginger, coriander and a Chantilly of green (unroasted) coffee.

Lucas Carton - Belons with Bellota Bellota

At Troisgros in Roanne oysters are served warm with sorrel and cumin. At Lucas Carton in Paris - above - large Belon oysters are roasted in their sealed shells, and served with white butter sauce with nuts, toasts and Bellota-Bellota Spanish ham plus a glass of Manzanilla sherry to compliment the ham. Herein at least there is some homage to the Basques from around Arcachon where they are served on the shell with little crepinette sausages (truffled for Christmas), bread, and the local white wine Entre Deux Mers. Although that history has been hijacked by Bordeaux the proper progeny is to the Basques by dint of the chorizo and their specially grown peppers that signal the dish as Basque, not Bordelais.

Taillevant - oysters with truffles

The big French restaurants have all been tempted to set down their own essay on how to best treat the oyster, although there are no hints of ancient links to regions or styles, just the luxury of truffles or, as with the Duitch masters paintings before them, to exotic spices

Taillevant in Paris, serves four oysters parcelled up in buttered foil with two sliced scallops, truffles, sliced leeks, a splash of mineral water (!), the juice from the oysters, salted butter. Bake five minutes.

French gastronomy

The oyster takes it place in the pantheon of French gastronomy, but as Graham Robb points out in his Discovery of France, French provincial cooking was not of any repute until the last century or until it got to Paris and was enobled by the huge brigades of the kitchens of the royal households and exported as the cuisine of royalty across Europe.

Escoffier, writing in 1907, only offers a dozen or so preparations (as against 30 or more for lobster) and none of them derive from the French provinces. He was typically extravagantly as in a puff pastry canapés filled with caviar and topped with an oyster as garnish. Lemon shrewdly goes with both. More recently, but from the same source, The Larousse Gastronomique rampantly pairs oysters with the full gamut of French sauces as if they were any other kind of fish and their main purpose was to glorify the cook’s true art of making sauces – Americaine (shellfish), Colbert (fried), Nantua (with crayfish), Normande (mushrooms and cream), Florentine (spinach), Mornay (cheese), Polonaise (horseradish), and also as a soufflés, gratinated, on skewers, in barquettes, in pastry cases, all of which reinforces the sense of glut and abundance inherited from an earlier era and an increased vocabulary.
Spinach is the most logical and usual accompaniment because of its supportive iron and any variation on egg, butter, and cream formed into an emulsion and cooked off in the shell under the grill has become a standard modern culinary shorthand.

Goyinges down the river...

For the men, traders and freemasons of the middle ages drinking and banqueting together must have been a much looked forward to activity. The oyster acquired a kind of social status. In Colchester, the town accounts had to be carefully doctored to make sure that just how much eating and drinking was done at public expense did not show up in the books.

The local historian Gurney Burnham trawled the old books and receipts and wrote in 1893: “The sagacious town clerks of the past so compiled the records of Corporation proceedings that one would hardly suspect that nearly all the twon’s revenues were spent eating and drinking”.

The town had a fair on October 9 for Saint Denys from as far back as 1318. The Colchester Oyster fair still carries on today. Poetically, Denys, is the patron saint of Paris. He was sent by the Pope to convert third century France but was beheaded at Montmartre, the hill of martyrs, and then reputedly picked up his head and walked off still preaching a sermon, so the choice of name was a symbolic recognition of events on the other side of the water.

This however was far from being the only feast day. There were to be meals at public expense on the annual election of the bailiff and mayor in August, and then the new mayor had to have a celebration dinner at the end of September. And there were dinners for quarter sessions, for the magistrates, for the audit (twice a year) for the opening of the fisheries and the closing. And another for the venison feast, and for the subsidy dinner, and on public and royal holidays and the quarterly allowance day which was when the rents were paid. By 1520 there were so many dinners and banquets for the oyster traders and freemen of Colchester that nearly all the proceeds of the oyster company were being spent on eating and drinking. In 1563 the mayor tried to put a brake on the flow of funds and ordered that no future election dinner should cost more than 40/1, no law dinner more than 20/- and no allowance dinner more than 10/-, although how much notice anyone paid is anyone’s guess

Lavish menus survive in the accounts, or at least what was paid for the ingredients, which presumably were often supplied by the freemen themselves anyway. In 1617, the freemen bought

Six sirloins of beef 20/1
Five fat pigs 3/6
Six coople of rabbits 6/-
Four barrels of beer 32/-

In 1648 they spent 12/- on oysters for 195 guests and ended up with plum tarts, pear pies and paid the cookes £1 and spent a whopping £3/19/10 on pipes, tobacco and wine.

Sometimes the oyster purchases were discreetly disguised in the books as “two goyinges down the river”. Carriage was “always costly” although it may have been creative accountancy because on one occasion sending a man and a horse to Brightlingsea for oysters was charged at 4/- and another to pick up the same amount of oysters it was charged at 60/-.

Another odd one, because oyster knives don’t have to be sharp, is

“Grindinge ye oyster knife 6d

At another dinner in 1645 they purchased

Boiled fishe 3/-
Green oysters 6/-
Stewed oysters 4/-
Oyster pies 5/-


The Corporation was never ungenerous and through the millennia, notes of its gifts, invariably oysters, to the court houses and to kings and prime ministers are plenty. The assizes only had to sit at Chelmsford and the judges were assured of basket or two. Henry VIII took some to his meeting in Calais with Emperor Charles V. Later Elizabeth I’s ministers were solicited for favours with nipperkins of oysters. Centuries on and Disreali, as prime minister, even received the gift but had the grace to write to say thank you: “Your oysters are worthy of Roman emperors…I am ashamed to add, I devoured most of them myself”.

Oysters with stout

Writing about oyster stouts several years ago, Michael Jackson made it clear (”Heaven sent - downing oysters by the pint“) there is a balance to be struck, be it stouts with oysters included or in finding the right stout to go with oysters.

"A stout must lean to the dry side if it’s to accompany oysters. Despite its fullness of body, Guinness’s Dublin-brewed, strong (7.5 per cent) and quaintly named Foreign Extra Stout does the trick. especially if it is lightly chilled. The regular bottled or canned stuff is arguably too sweet and the jury is out on the draught version.
Murphy’s and Beamish are barely dry enough, but there is a case for the peppery, spicy Cain’s Superior Stout, from Liverpool. I have long loved the toasty, faintly anise-like porter from Harvey’s of Lewes, East Sussex.

"The earthy intensity of stout is a perfect foil for the gamey brineyness of oysters. Disraeli once wrote of an election celebration: "I dined at the Carkon, on oysters, Guinness and boiled bone...In the early Victorian period, porters and stouts were everyday beers, and oysters a bar snack as commonplace as peanuts today. Porter dates from the early to mid-1700s, and is characterised by the use of highly kilned malts.."