Consider the oyster (New edition)

The celebrated American food writer M.F.K. Fisher pays tribute to that most delicate and enigmatic of foods: the oyster.

She tells of oysters found in stews and soups, roasted, baked, fried, prepared a la Rockefeller or au naturel - and of the pearls sometimes found therein.

As she describes each dish, Fisher recalls her own initiation into the 'strange cold succulence' of raw oysters as a young woman in Marseille and Dijon, and explores both the bivalve's famed aphrodisiac properties and its equally notorious gut-wrenching powers.