The Inspector-General of Misconception Read Free

with the fundamental oyster flavour.
The eighth oyster is the time to take the leap to the sauce or vinaigrette.
Likewise with the ninth, sauce or vinaigrette.
The tenth may be taken any way you wish.
Likewise the eleventh.
The twelfth oyster is to be taken au naturel always, as a way of honouring the creature with whom you have been communing and to mark your departure from the dish.
    Now that regional oysters are often available at restaurants as a mixed plate, the order of eating is important. We suggest you seek the advice of your food and beverage attendant.
    Pacific oysters generally require sauce or citrus juice after the second oyster because sometimes the Pacific leaves a heavy footprint on the palate.
    We came across further troubling matters in thejurisdiction of national identity.
    We found that almost without exception, Australians claim ‘the best oysters in the world’.
    We also found that, central to the Australian identity and the Australian belief system, is the tenet that ‘Australia has the best seafood in the world’.
    Why was it that Australians would want to claim this as so important a part of their identity?
    Why of all the great achievements – our battlefield record, our fine civic arrangements, and the other wise components of our culture and nationhood – should we seize on this particular boast?
    Even if it were true, if there were a ‘measure’ by which seafood could be graded and ranked, or if we alone of all the nations of the world had a coastline and a fishing industry, it would not be to our credit as a culture.
    It would be our good luck but not something we could claim as an achievement.
    But it is true that cultures do boast of natural wonders which land in the lap of their birth place.
    But ‘seafood’?
    And to boast of having the ‘best oysters’!?
    We looked, firstly, at the claim that Australia had the best oysters in the world. Especially, that of Sydney people that the Sydney rock oyster was ‘the best in the world’.
    We sent out an AOA (All Oyster Alert) to Interpol and gastronomic authorities around the world and received an interesting result.
    All cultures think their oysters are the best in the world .
    Further, that all the reports received at Our Office about the worth of their oysters on a universal scale were from men.
    What had we stumbled on here?
    Readers will recall that in the examination of oyster abuse we confronted the oyster-eating inhibition which comes from the resemblance of the oyster to human semen.
    The most encouraging interpretation of the boast about having ‘the best oysters’ which our team could come up with was that the boast came from men whose gender esteem, at this point in history, was shaky.
    It would seem that men who are suffering an anxiety from the ongoing redefinition of the male role, at least still cling to a harmless primitive pride in their national ‘oyster’.
    That is, to spell it out, a pride in their own manly essence.
    We go too far you say?
    While on the matter of lubricity. The oyster more than most food (perhaps the fig, date and banana compete) is seen as a point where the human body and food symbolically meet.
    While we do not have any brief or jurisdiction about the cooking of oysters, we do wish to place on record a dish invented by the late John Abernethy, one of our great publishers – the barbecue dish of the Abernethy Oyster Sausage.
    The Abernethy Oyster Sausage is a dish where the beef butchers’ sausage is half-cooked, taken from thebarbecue and slit open, oysters are placed along the slit, and the sausage returned to the barbecue until fully cooked.
    It is eaten in the hand.
    The phallic sausage absorbs the oyster flavour, and creates something resembling the flavour of the vagina running with sperm. One might speculate that it provides something for everyone’s taste.
    (Oh, have we said something wrong, again?)
    It is only natural to