Smokey Mountain Breakdown

This is the last month that traditionally you could safely eat oysters, though there were many a hot summer afternoon that I, as a barefoot child on the Carolina coast, would sit on the dock with a hammer and eat them right out of the shell.

You are either going to love this post or hate it. That is the nature of oyster love. It is either a mad passionate love affair or an utter revulsion. Those of you in the latter category should just turn away now and allow the rest of us to revel in our kinky oyster fetish. Don't hate us for it. It's an irresistible compulsion. We can't help it that we love oysters. We just do.

My mother was a small woman but you needed to stay out of her way at an oyster roast. She could eat her weight in the things. I learned the love by her side as the men would lift the shovel-fulls of steaming mollusks from the fire. They would put them in wet crocker sacks and cover them with sheets of corrugated tin. She would stand there with a glove on one hand, her personal oyster knife and some Spanish moss.

Gently she would show me how to tuck that knife into the back of the shell to pop open the oyster, wrapped in the moss and held with the gloved hand. When I was little, she would just pass the "easy" ones over to me. At the end of the night we would critique whether they had roasted them too long or just right. Just right was where they were hot, but barely distinguishable from a raw oyster. Before the frills curled.

Bluffton is famous for its oysters. They aren't the huge meaty Apalachicola things. They are smaller and more delicate and infinitely more flavorful. The long dead factory on Daufuski Island used to ship oysters to the King of Prussia. They are that good. You can still get those oysters from the Bluffton Oyster Company run by my childhood friends, the Toomer family. Of course, it is much different today than it was when I was growing up. You used to be able to call ahead and ask for a gallon of oysters shucked but not washed. The washing removes the sea brine...something a true oyster lover greatly appreciates. My sister and I would squabble over who got to eat the tiny little parasitic oyster crabs if we were lucky enough to find one.

Oysters were a winter staple of my childhood. They appeared on the table at Thanksgiving in my mother's cornbread oyster dressing. They were served in oysters and rice with bits of crispy bacon and chutney. They were served in oyster pies and pan roasts. And we all loved the tradition of having an oyster cocktail...a bowl of raw oysters topped off with cocktail sauce and a bit of Tabasco.

But the recipe I'm sharing with you today is one of the standard and easy comfort foods of my childhood. I can't remember a time that I didn't love the warm salty-sweet taste of cream and oysters together. There would be a thin film of butter floating on top to enhance the richness.