Someone Else's Oyster Stew

I know that you feel it too. We’ve come to the end of another year. A designation as arbitrary as anything I can think of. 

In truth, “a year” is a human construct meant to help us organize our thoughts and feelings. We need structure, more than almost any other species on this rock (ants maybe have us beat), and we decided, somewhere along the way, that it made sense to segment our time into easily digestible chunks. Chunks we can call “great,” or “unremarkable,” or “absolutely cursed.” And, as always happens, at the end of said easily digestible chunk of time, we are encouraged to look back at our accomplishments, our failures, at the things we loved most, or the things we think we’ll always remember. This year, I’d like to encourage you, if I’ve ever convinced you of anything, to throw that idea out the fucking window.

Like Joan Didion leaving New York, saying “Goodbye to All That,” with respect to my eternal literary hero: fuck all that. Truly, fuck all that.

If we know anything at all, after the years we’ve managed to live through so far, it’s that, in reality -- that terrible space we have had to violently remind ourselves back into for months -- at midnight on January 1st, when our internal calendars and digital calendars and analogue calendars slip unremarkably from 2020 to 2021, whether we toast gleefully or somberly, whether we rage-dance in our living rooms or sleep through it, everything that has been totally and unrelentingly fucked will remain so. Totally and unrelentingly fucked. To quote one of my father’s favorite acronyms, “FUBAR.” Fucked up beyond all recognition.

There. Doesn’t that feel better? To just admit it and get it over with? 

Sure, have hope. Oh my god, by all means, have hope. Unless you can’t, which would be understandable. Or, be filled with unholy rage. Let that rage radicalize you. Let it shove you out the gate. Let it make you protect people more vulnerable than you, by any means necessary. By all means. But you — you there, wrapped in the blanket on the couch — do you feel hopeless? Do you feel lost? Do you feel unmoored? Are you having trouble imagining things getting any better ever again? Do you feel rage, and hope, and sorrow, and regret, and gratitude, and still feel like none of them are enough to make you take off the blanket?

Same here, friend. I don’t really know what to do about it, but I do know where to start.

Like M.F.K. Fisher, tied for first place with Didion for “things I wish I’d thought of,” I really and truly believe there is only one viable place to begin: “First we eat, then we do everything else.”

I know that sounds dumb as hell in a year with this much collateral damage. But I trust her. She lived through a global pandemic, the Great Depression, loss of loved ones, and came out on the other side with that purely distilled philosophy.

“First we eat, then we do everything else.”

Today, I was digging around for one of her many oyster stew recipes in “Consider the Oyster.” I have, of course, either lent or given away every copy of it I’ve ever owned, anxious for everyone to get to feel the feeling of reading it for the first time. I was looking for it, because I think that soup (DUH) is where we start. Instead, I found a copy of “With Bold Knife & Fork.” In it, a chapter about soup — as a fortifier, as palliative care, “as the main course of a long, gabby supper, with plenty of pumpernickel and ripe cheeses, or after a lengthy session of music and more talk, when people begin to feel a predawn intimation that they are not immortal.”

She goes on, immediately, to describe the best soup she ever ate, in April or May of 1921. 

Let us, my dear ones, be extremely honest about this one thing: if I had read this sentence in 2019, it wouldn’t have meant much to me. It would have registered as old-fashioned, and as a nod to fewer vaccines, less-understood epidemiological research, and as a sign of how many goddamned siblings she had. Today I read that sentence and it fucking leveled me. By 1921, the specter of the 1918 H1N1 pandemic would still have been looming. The shock of the experience would still feel palpable. After the third wave of that global pandemic in late 1919, her parents were afraid, like everyone would have been, that it could start all over again at any moment. 

But then, on day five, once she’s drunk as much watered down juice as her fever needed to break, she smells beef broth wafting up from downstairs. Her dad comes home from work and gives her a “bone cracking hug.” She despairs, afraid that might be all she gets for the day, once she hears everyone gather for lunch in the dining room. 

She eats the first few bites with a spoon, then, knowing it’s what her mother intended, she picks up the giant bowl with her little hands, and tips it back, and gulps it down like “half-drowned cow or sailor will suck at the air.” She knows that, fortified by two hugs, one kiss, and a kitchen-bowl of soup, she is on her way back to normalcy. That there will be more of each of them soon. 

She goes on to get on airplanes and steam ships, to eat lavish meals in the peaks of the Alps, to cook arguably more satisfying ones on a single hot plate in a cramped apartment in France with one of the loves of her life, to have children, to live in California, to publish books, to be all the way alive. And so will we, eventually. But first, we have to eat something. 

This is not M.F.K. Fisher’s oyster stew recipe. In fact, I suspect that she would tell you that her recipe wasn’t hers. This recipe was Mischa’s when he fed it to Kiah on his porch the other day. Then, it became Kiah’s when she made it for us on Christmas Eve. Next, it will be yours, when you feed it to someone who is hungry, and cold, and maybe a little unmoored. 

There are as many versions of this stew as there are oyster shells. I’ve always used cream for the stew until now, and I balked at the coconut milk. I was suspicious right up until I ate it — the first few bites with a spoon, to extract each oyster in the steaming mug, and then, with two hands, like a half-drowned cow.

Kiah’s Oyster Stew

1 pint freshly shucked oysters and their liquor 4 shallots, minced1 head garlic, minced6-ish sprigs thyme2 14oz. cans coconut milksalt and pepperolive oil

Sauté shallots in a bit of olive oil over medium heat, until they soften up and turn translucent. Add garlic and thyme, and cook until the garlic is fragrant, but not brown. 

Add coconut milk, and heat until it just starts to boil. Whack the heat way down to a gentle simmer, and add the oysters and their liquor. Cook only until the oysters are warmed through, and just starting to curl around the edges. 

Taste before you season (oyster liquor is just very special salt water, you may not need any extra) with salt and pepper. Spoon a few oysters into each mug or bowl, then pour the hot soup over them. Serve absolutely immediately.

You’re reading “Soup and Despair,” a weekly newsletter by Sarah Flynn and Rebecca Orchant. It’s about food, feelings, and surviving the dark times. If someone forwarded you this email, it’s because they love you and they want you to eat. You can subscribe to it too!