Dave Wood

“Why, then when the world is mine oyster, which I with sword will open.” ~William Shakespeare

“He was a bold man who first ate a [raw] oyster.” ~Jonathan Swift

Not only bold, Jonathan, but HUNGRY as well. My great grandad’s daily diary is full of accounts of attending church and community events once the railroad came to town with kegs of shucked oysters from out east, which when stewed with milk, cream and butter (of which the early settlers had plenty), must have pleased the palates of pioneers who had made the long trek from New England out here to the oceanless boondocks. And furthermore, lacked freezers as well as the stuff to put in them, and thus, made a monument out of whatever was available.

At my grandad’s house, Christmas Eve would not be complete without steaming bowls of stew shimmering with a butter slick and sprinkled with those cunning little round crackers, the most edible ones made by Nabisco/Premium.

My Norwegian-American stepmother shied away from the mollusks, but always served the stew on Christmas Eve out of deference to my father. When she passed on, it saddened me to see that my widowed but stiff upper-lipped father who couldn’t boil water forced to heat up a can of ersatz “oyster” stew with one lone shred of oyster afloat and pretend it was “just fine.”

It wasn’t difficult to persuade my German-Polish Beautiful Wife to convert the Christmas menu from rock-hard pfefferneuse and sweet coffeecake heavy with poppyseed buns to Wood oyster stew because during our courtship, she almost drove me to bankruptcy ordering raw oysters at Oceanaire in Minneapolis (which charged four bucks per oyster!) and couldn’t stop eating the ones slightly cooked in melted butter at roadhouse in Virginia.

I used to think my great-grandad had a great thing going in the 19^th century when he only paid $5 for a wooden keg that held at least five quarts of these baubles, but then I realized that was the same price he had paid for 5 acres of fertile bottomland.

Last month after shopping around, G.P.B.W. paid $32 for two pints of the slippery ones, numbering about 15 to the pint, at a local supermarket, which only sold “Essential” crackers.  When she was that deep into the project, she kept on shopping around and finally found the premium variety at Ptacek’s.

Life ain’t cheap, nor is it easy in this Brave New World of ours.