‘OYSTERS ARE more beautiful than any religion,” I said airily, paraphrasing and pseudo-plagiarizing Saki and E F Benson in one breath. “Nothing matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster. We wear them when they are beautiful and we eat them when they grow tumours.”
I have necked oysters from Whitstable and Maldon to Bourbon Street, New Orleans. And schucked them everywhere from Chesapeake Bay to Hiroshima and from Bateman’s Bay, New South Wales to Liverpool, near the Wirral.
But the indisputable home of oyster one-upmanship is Brittany. The locals are fiercely partisan about their favourite sons and daughters. They shall never concede defeat. Cancale will never give way to Galway. Oysters are a passion on the Emerald coast of north Brittany and Cancale is the main stronghold.
“Non,” the man on the seashore said. “Not Galway. Breton. Ici!” He stabbed a finger pointedly down at the pebbly beach by his galoshes. “Here is the home of the oyster. The capital!” His dogma came with a strong whiff of low tide and a Franglais soupçon of Hercule Poirot.
Cancale is certainly the place to go for anyone who likes to get into boasting contests about bivalves and indulge their obsession with molluscs.
The harbour town in the bay of Mont St Michel, 10km east of St Malo, has 7km of oysterbeds, an oyster co-op which exports to more than 50 countries worldwide and a Musée de l’huître. Here, for €7 you can learn all about oysters and their hectic trans-sexual lifestyles.
You can’t move in Cancale for oysters or oyster-philes. Every shop along the front sells them in all different shapes and sizes, from the flat Plate de Cancale to the deep Greuse and the sweet Fine de Claire. Ladies in Wellington boots cut them open for degustations down by the lighthouse. All the restaurants (apart from the crêperies) stock the soft-bodied delicacies. Huge piles of discarded oyster shells are used as seabreaks and seawall reinforcements in Cancale. Here, you can’t avoid getting into heated, oyster-related arguments of the “My saliva-glands-are-more-practised-and-my-palate-is-more educated-than-yours” kind.
The man on the seashore watched me as I tipped the oyster into my mouth, letting its retractable foot, colourless blood and delicious three-chambered heart slide down my throat. He waited for my verdict as I drank another, straight from the sea.
“Bon!” I said tactfully. He frowned. “Très bon,” I said diplomatically.
He asked me if they were better than Galway oysters. He put me in a very tight spot. “Peut-etre!”
He slapped me heartily on the back. And then, resuming his earlier Gallic nationalistic seaside stance, pointed again down at the beach. “C’est le site très remarquable du gôut! Un site extraordinaire!”
I thought of Galway. And we agreed to differ. We also agreed there is more to Brittany than oysters, as there is more to Galway than oysters.