Consider the Oyster

There is a man in California who used to know George Sterling and Jack London and such foggy minor gods, and who now, inevitably, has become to the young coastal yearners almost as mythical as his dead friends. He holds what might be called soirees, and malicious critics suspect, not too silently, that his famous booming laugh and his broad quips at these parties, which a few years ago would still be called Bohemian, contain almost as much corn as they do bourbon. Nevertheless he is no worse than any valiant shadow, and when he is alone, free for a few minutes from the midgelike clouds of admiring college people who usually surround him, his voice grows quiet and his face sags and he talks to himself out loud of other days.

“Hang Town Fry,” he’ll say, tenderly and practically at the drop of a hat. “Hang Town Fry!”

Then, when he doesn’t say any more, you realize that he is at last serious, if not sober, and you ask him, “What about it?”

“What about Hang Town Fry? You don’t know? And you call yourself a San Franciscan? Why, it’s the best food that ever sat before misbegotten man, and early in the morning with a hard day ahead, or before that when you’re wondering why you did it, or at night for a nice supper with your girl . . . Why, Hang Town Fry . . . I remember once . . .”

Then, for a few minutes or seconds before the part he has been playing so long submerges his real thinking self, and smudges all the outlines into those of a campus character, you see what this big deaf lost man must have been, one night down near the Ferry Building when he ate Hang . . . Town . . . Fry. . . .

This is the way it was made, if his beer-joint had a decent Chinese cook as they all did in those times. Why it was the best thing in the world to him you can never know, but the recipe is good, and his private sensual delights need not affect your own more immediate pleasure, some night with a friend or two and a chafing dish, for instance:

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Hang Town Fry (from the Sunset Cook Book)

Drain and pat dry 2 dozen medium-sized California Eastern [!] oysters, season them with salt and pepper and roll first in flour, then in beaten egg, and then in fine white bread-crumbs. Put them into a hot frying-pan with melted butter, and fry to a golden brown on one side; before turning them over pour over all 4 or 5 whole eggs beaten light. Let cook a minute, then turn over and brown on other side to color them just as desired. The resulting dish will look like an egg pancake with oysters mixed in. Serve 2 or 3 links of tiny browned breakfast sausages and shoestring potatoes with Hang Town Fry.

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From “Consider the Oyster,” by M.F.K. Fisher, North Point Press, 1988. Copyright 1941, 1954. Printed with permission of John Wiley & Sons Inc.