Oysters

As I slid into the dark wooden booth next to Dad, he slid half of his fried oyster sandwich over to me and ordered a second one for us to share.

Photo by Ben Stern on Unsplash

When Daddy wasn’t at his desk on the old-fashioned balcony overseeing the customers and salespeople in the family store, he was out on Hull Street talking with the other shopkeepers, an activity which was considered goofing off by my hardworking mother, and grandmother and my chronically dissatisfied uncle. They didn’t get it that this genial reaching out gave him a sense of himself as a worthwhile person, fulfilled his need for companionship and informed his ability to be a good and creative provider. It was from his cohorts he got the goods on where to get the juiciest peaches, the sweetest corn, and the excellent sides of beef he bought directly from the farmer. He was amiable. He liked to talk. 

People liked to talk with him.  

 Meyer’s Dry Goods Store carried men’s, women’s and children’s clothing, shoes, and hats, fabric, yarn and sewing notions. At closing time my mom, would rouse me from where I was waiting in the three-chair shoe department drawing on discarded shoeboxes to pass the time, and send me to Onesti’s Grill to find my father. Scooting down to the end of the block on my mission, I pushed open the heavy door of  door of the small restaurant and was engulfed in the delicious aroma of Southern Cooking. As I slid into the dark wooden booth next to Dad, he slid half of his fried oyster sandwich over to me and ordered a second one for us to share. 

I learned to eat oysters to please him. Seated on high stools at the oyster bar at Ruge’s Hotel in downtown Richmond, Dad and I stuffed ourselves with the bounty of the nearby Chesapeake Bay as fast as the white jacketed server behind the counter could expertly open them.  

At first, I only pretended to like them raw to get his approval, but it didn’t take long for me to cultivate a fondness for the sweet briny taste of the ocean.  

When we each had eaten a dozen oysters on the half shell, another dozen was opened and plopped into a battered saucepan. Adding a splash of milk and a generous slab of butter, the saucepan was held under a live steam jet just long enough to melt the butter and heat the milk but not long enough to overcook the oysters, preserving their tenderness. Poured into white crockery bowls... it was the food of the gods!

Some Saturday nights after closing the store Dad would arrive home with a bushel basket of steamed hard-shell crabs pulled out of the bay a couple hours before. I was hardly old enough to sit up on my own when he taught me how to open a crab properly, discard the “dead man,” (the part you weren’t supposed to eat) and consume the delicacy within. Along with this culinary delight, I basked in his approval. 

Daddy liked to cook but never in the kitchen. In preparation for the annual fall reunion of my mother’s cousins from North Carolina,  he began at dawn tending a huge black iron pot hanging over an outdoor fire filled with corn, okra, tomatoes, lima beans, and chicken for his famous Brunswick Stew.  Red faced from the heat he stirred the giant pot with a boat oar.  

Although the recipe for Brunswick Stew handed down by generations of southern cooks typically calls for it, he never added squirrel.  

In a family that had long since dropped the dietary laws, and despite his having been born and raised in an area that is the essence of the Old South, he was after all the son of Russian Jews. He never added squirrel … he considered too country.