ONE hundred thousand oysters went to their doom, gallantly and unflinching, a week ago at the Guinness Galway Oyster Festival. The world might not yet have learned that this is a choice year for oysters, but it most certainly is. The pity of it all is that unlike the grape, the oyster cannot be bottled and stored, and precious oyster vintages be kept for future years, to be tasted and relished in less fortunate times. The time to eat oysters is now, always now, or not at all; and never was there a more blessed now than now.
Quite Superb Oysters
This year's Galway oysters are quite superb. They are fat without being fatty, which is often the condition of that intrusive Pacific oyster to be found throughout the year. In high summer it is an acceptable substitute, when the native oysters are busy about their sexual duties. But sometimes one finds oneself eating a Pacific oyster as it is in the middle of its own unpredictable season. It is like biting into a condom full of cold mayonnaise, or whatever. The effect is less than agreeable.
But this year's Atlantic oysters are fat but never fatty, and are lusciously nut flavoured in the way unique to the Atlantic oyster. Their texture is firm; soft to the tooth, but pluckily resistant in the way that I'd like to think I'd be if I were being eaten alive. Unlike my own modest cadaver, the Galway oyster yields a briny juice which washes through the mouth as you bite into it. The oyster might emit a protesting gurgle as it slides down one's throat - but then wouldn't you? - and then it is gone where all good oysters go, leaving behind it a powerful nut flavour and an even more powerful desire for more of same.
The shrewd observer will have noticed two features about a good oyster, as referred to above. One is that it is alive and kicking when it is consumed and two, that it has a nutty flavour. The two features are related. The regrettable habit of spraying lemon or tabasco on oysters came about in the olden days, when oysters could not be kept cool and might die within their shell. Eating a dead and mildly infected oyster can cause hallucinations, vomiting and distressed laundresses.
To test whether an oyster was alive or dead, oyster eaters would pour a drop of lemon Juice, or some other acerbic liked tabasco, into the soft flesh. If it puckers, it's alive, and consumable. If it stays as unflickering as the eye of Tutankhamen, eat it by all means; but don't be surprised if you wake up in the middle of Sunday mass, with a chainsaw in your hand and the bishop in neat little slices by the altar. Shellfish poisoning is the oddest poisoning there is. You can end up thinking you are Pope Pius XII, calling for nuns.
Stout Companion
But with modern refrigeration, and speedy transport of oyster from tide to tongue, there is no need to test its flesh, no need to put unnecessary testers, like lemon juice or tabasco, into the oyster flesh. For such oyster testers take away from the full nutty taste of purest Irish oyster. Eat it unadorned, unflavoured and perfect, and you will face only the slightest chance that you will cause any modifications to the college of bishops. There is only one proper Irish stout companion to proper Irish fat oysters, and that was being consumed in heroic quantities in Galway.
The odd thing about the oyster is its curious reluctance to be eaten alive - though this is the very reason why this ingrate is bred in such huge numbers every year. The only time I tried to open any number of oysters in a short time, I ended up in intensive care with a posse of priests chanting glumly at my bedhead and much wailing from the Pro Cathedral. I have never had much faith in this thing called decommissioning, but in the event of it happening just a little bit, I'd be grateful if the lads could spare me the odd RPG7 or two, merely as an oyster opener.
Others are made of more intrepid stuff. This year's Irish oyster champion is Gerry Grealish of Moran's of the Weir, perhaps the greatest seafood pub in Ireland. In less peaceful times, Gerry is the kind of fellow who disables tank columns using his bare hands and an oyster knife; now he whiles away the years between wars practising on oysters, a distant glint in his eye as in his mind, he prises a turret off its chassis and hurls it aside. I re emerged from his brief personal encounter with 2 1/2 dozens oysters, unbloody, unbowed and triumphant, while his opened oysters, bivalves in the air, were led off to a short lived captivity, concluded, one hopes, without the use of lemon juice.
It is with the greatest of defer that I suggest that four - or was it five? - bands and a single Macnas float do not constitute a parade within the meaning of the act. It was perhaps a little unfair of nature on the sunniest September in decades to rain on the oyster festival; but whatever it did, it did not rain on a parade. It fell instead on a few ambling players, and a few hearteningly unclad Macnas mermaids, with Neptune in his travelling oyster. A parade, it was not.
No doubt future oyster festivals will have longer and grander parades - for how much longer will they have Garreth Phillips? The festival rightly prides itself on its entertainers - the absurdly youthful Linda Martin, who must now be up to her tonsils in middle age, but doesn't look, sound or seem like it; and Margaret Heffernan, whose name suggests she will no, get many bookings from Mandate. Different woman. Less money. No tan. No gap. But great voice.
And there was Garreth Phillips. He is young - only 23, I hear - but is a quite superb singer of big band classic songs. He can take on Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Righteous Brothers numbers, ones you were sure could never be sung again by any other singer, and make them completely his. His range is astounding, his voice is strong and sure and true and sounds 10 years older than it is. It gets worse. He is absurdly good looking - one maturish woman at my table was only prevented from having her way with him on stage by a suicide bodyguard of trained oyster openers, oyster knives flashing. Has he ever made it to RTE? If not, why not?