Dave Wood

“It was a bold individual indeed who was the first man to eat an oyster.”  Jonathan Swift, “Polite Conversation,” (17367-1767-1845)

Swift was a memorable and much-read satirist, but our family ignored his sage advice when it came to that slippery bivalve. I have evidence in the Wood family archives that my great-grandad Dave (1840-1927) bought oysters by the wooden nail-keg and had them shipped from the East Coast all the way to the Wisconsin frontier, relished them at family gatherings and prayed over them at church suppers, where, at $5 a barrel, they provided my ancestors a profitable fundraiser for their fledgling churches.

My grandad continued the tradition, as did my widowed father, who cooked only one meal a year. On his last New Year’s Eve, I caught him slurping jerry-rigged oyster stew, heating up a 6-ounce can of tinned little Japanese oysters drowned in a bowl of tepid half and half and garnished with little octagonal oyster crackers manufactured by the one and only—and I emphasize only—Nabisco. Poor Dad, he was one who always “made do.”

We recently continued the tradition this Christmas after my Beautiful Wife returned from the supermarket with a plastic container of oysters swimming in their “snot,” as Dad called it. A half pint, for which she paid $14.95, or a buck apiece. (If oysters and Lutefisk prices keep going up area churches will be forced to replace them with 2-inch-thick Filets Mignon or Jumbo scallops prepared a la Coquilles St. Jacques at their annual shindigs!

And it’s not only New Englanders like the Wood clan who hold onto their celebratory oysters. I recently watched the heart-warming former Wisconsin county agent Jerry Apps on Wisconsin Public TV wax eloquent about his German-American mom. Her recipe was exactly like the one I inherited from my Yankee mom:

• Sauté a pint (or quart!) of shucked oysters in as much butter as you dare, until the oysters begin to curl.
• Add one pint of whole milk and one pint of half and half (what the hell? It’s Christmas!)
• Season with salt and pepper.

Jerry didn’t say he sprinkled generously with Nabisco oyster crackers, but he always reminds us that his mother knew what she was doing, so she probably was as fond of the red, white and blue package as I am.

No, not “as I am,” but “as I WAS.”

For when B.W. arrived home with dollar per oyster oysters, the butter, the milk and the crackers, I cooked up the stew and was very annoyed to discover that Nabisco oyster crackers ain’t what they used to be, once they’re dropped into the liquid. The once crunchy baubles turned immediately into mush. ESSENTIALLY (pardon the double entendre) disappearing into the golden whiteness of the broth. Nabisco! What hast thou wrought? In the words of the Joe McCarthy prosecutor, “Have you no decency?”

But I guess that’s the way the cracker crumbles. A few days later B.W. brought home some excellent cured lutefisk to go with Mrs. Olsen’s Lefse, from Gonvick, Minn., which is, unfortunately, not the good stuff, which is Countryside, from Blair, Wis., where 20 Norse ladies hand roll circular sheets to an elegant and speckled thinness. That made by the lady from Gonvick was thick, spongy, cut into inauthentic rectangles, pale in taste and hue. It might more rightly be called “Mrs. Florsheim’s, suitable for soles, not souls.” 

Oh, well. I must conclude “the world’s [not always] mine oyster which I with sword will open,” —William Shakespeare, “The Merry Wives of Windsor” (1597).