by Kate Lister
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2 ‘Proverbs 9:17 Commentaries: “Stolen Water Is Sweet; And Bread Eaten In Secret Is Pleasant.”’, Biblehub.Com, 2018
3 Judith Harris, Pompeii Awakened: A Story Of Rediscovery (London: Tauris, 2007), p. 121.
4 ‘Exeter Book Riddles’, Anglo-Saxon Narrative Poetry Project, 2018
5 Martial, ‘Epigrams. Book 14’. Tertullian.Org, 2018
6 Athenaeus, The Deipnosophists, vol. VI, trans. by Charles Burton Gulick (London: Heinemann, 1927), p. 493.
7 Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, Histoire Abrégée De Différens Cultes, 2nd edn (Paris, 1825), p. 285.
8 Richard Payne Knight and Thomas Wright, A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and its Connection with the Mystic (London: Spilbury, 1865), p. 158.
9 Quoted in John Raymond Shinners, Medieval Popular Religion, 1000–1500: A Reader (Toronto: UTP, 2009), pp. 451–53.
10 Ibid., p. 455.
11 Ibid., pp. 451–53.
12 Geoffrey Chaucer, ‘The General Prologue’, in The Canterbury Tales, ed. by Jill Mann (London: Penguin Books, 2005), p. 26.
13 Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Linda Gale Jones, Handbook to Life in the Medieval World, vol. 3 (New York: Facts on File, 2008), p. 134.
14 Ibid. Theodore of Canterbury (AD 602–690) had a slightly different take on this in his penitential and warned of women baking their husband’s semen into his bread to increase his libido. Jacqueline Murray, Love, Marriage, and Family in the Middle Ages: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 46.
15 George Peele, The Old Wives’ Tale, ed. by Patricia Binnie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 75.
16 Richard Brome, A Jovial Crew, ed. by Tiffany Stern (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 122–33, 30–1.
17 John Aubrey, Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme (London: Folklore Society, 1881), pp. 43–44.
18 Natasha Hinde, ‘Blogger Bakes Sourdough Using Yeast from Vagina, Internet Explodes’, Huffpost UK, 2018
The Food of Love
A History of Oysters
Oyster, n. A slimy, gobby shellfish which civilization gives men the hardihood to eat without removing its entrails!
Ambrose Bierce
Possibly the most well known and enduring of all the aphrodisiacs, the oyster has occupied a special place in our hearts and stomachs for a millennium. Quite why this fishy, lumpy mollusc, swimming in its own fluids and resembling something one might clear from the back of the throat during flu season, came to be the go-to love food is a matter of some debate. Did you know that oysters have eyes? Eyes! But first things first – do they work as an aphrodisiac?
In 2005, it was widely reported in the press that ‘science’ had finally proven that the oyster is an aphrodisiac.1 However, this is not quite true. Professor George Fisher and a group of researchers from the US and Italy presented their research on the aphrodisiacal properties of marine bivalves to the American Chemical Society. Two years earlier, the same team had published research that suggested D-aspartic acid (D-Asp) and N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) stimulate the release of sex hormones (e.g. progesterone and testosterone) in rats.2 The 2005 research detected the presence of D-Asp and NMDA in some molluscs, namely mussels and clams. From this, the team theorised that this could produce an aphrodisiacal effect in humans when eaten.3 Crucially, the research did not cover oysters, and there were no human studies conducted to back this up – it is all theoretical. But a good story is a good story and the press leapt on these findings, proclaiming ‘raw oysters really are aphrodisiacs, say scientists!’4 Except they didn’t. There is no scientific evidence at all that oysters raise anything other than your toilet seat should you get a bad one. Having said that, oysters are incredibly good for you. Not only are they ridiculously low in calories, they are a powerhouse of zinc, copper, vitamin B12, vitamin C and lean protein. Interestingly, a man loses between one and three milligrams of zinc every time he cracks his oysters (so to speak), so the famed molluscs are an ideal snack to replenish sperm reserves.5 Oysters may well be very good for you, but a marine Viagra they are not.
Illustrations of six types of shellfish – muli (oyster), madao (razor clam), xian (clam), beng (freshwater mussel, clam), xianjin (a kind of clam) and zhenzhu mu (pearl oyster), from Li Shizhen’s pharmaceutical encyclopaedia Compendium of Materia Medica, 1596.
Oysters are a very old food, and their shells have been found at multiple Palaeolithic sites around the world. Tools for opening oysters and oyster shells that were found within a fossil reef at the Red Sea coast of Eritrea were dated to around 125,000 years old.6 There are many different types of oyster, and they are found throughout the world’s oceans. Oysters are ancient, plentiful and may be the original fast food. But why are they sexy?
Botticelli’s famous painting of the birth of Venus shows the goddess riding a scallop shell, not an oyster. Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, 1486.
A likely reason is that oysters came to be associated with the Greek goddess of love, Aphrodite (and later, Venus). Aphrodite was supposedly born from the sea. According to the Greek poet Hesiod (c.700 BC), Aphrodite rose up out of the waves, fully formed, after Uranus’s testicles were thrown into the sea by Cronus.7 Hesiod doesn’t mention molluscs in this story, but in Renaissance paintings such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c.1486), Aphrodite is shown standing atop a scallop shell, and this may be where shellfish acquired a sexy reputation – and it’s not just molluscs.
Sparrows were also associated with Aphrodite, and like oysters, they came to be regarded as a potent aphrodisiac in the Classical world. Even the Kama Sutra gives a number of recipes to inflame the passions that use sparrow eggs.
The chataka is the common sparrow. Take the juice of their eggs, mixed with rice and cooked in milk, then mix with honey and ghee. When eaten, one’s sexual prowess is so enhanced that one can possess an unlimited number of young women.8
The belief in the stimulating effects of sparrow brains persisted for hundreds of years. According to Culpeper’s The Complete Herbal (1653) ‘The brain of Sparrows when eaten provokes the lust exceedingly’ – but back to oysters.9
It’s not clear if the ancient Greeks and Romans regarded oysters as an aphrodisiac, but they certainly thought of them as a luxury item. The Emperor Clodius Albinus was allegedly capable of sinking four hundred of the slippery blighters at one sitting.10 Pliny the Elder writes about oysters being served up covered in snow at the most opulent banquets.11 The Romans thought oysters were good for a number of ailments (ranging from indigestion to skin complaints), but there’s little mention of their sexual benefits. For that, we have to jump forward to the early modern period, because it’s here that oysters really come into their own as the culinary come-on food.
‘Oyster’ has been slang for the vulva since the sixteenth century. It’s not hard to see why, really.
In 1566, Alain Chartier asked ‘why were Oysters consecrated by the auncient to Venus? Bycause Oysters doe prouoke lecherie’.12 Indeed, by the Renaissance, oysters are frequently turning up in medical texts as an aid to ardour. For example, Felix Platter’s A Golden Practice of Physick (1664) recommends oysters to cure a ‘Want of Copulation’, when ‘there is none or small pleasure in the act’, and Humphrey Mills describes pickled oysters being served to customers in brothels in 1646.13
But perhaps the most obvious reason for the oyster’s association with sex is its resemblance to the vulva. The soft folds of pink salty flesh and nestling pearls made for an obvious comparison, and ‘oyster’ has been slang for the vulva since the sixteenth century. John Marston made bawdy jokes about ‘yawning Oystars’ in 1598.14 In The Parson’s Wedding (1641), T
homas Killigrew writes ‘he that opens her stinking Oyster is worthy of the Pearl’,15 and that debauched scamp, Rochester, penned the following lines in 1673:
Arch’d on both Sides, lay gaping like an Oyster.
I had a Tool before me, which I put in
Up to the Quick, and strait the Oyster shut;
It shut and clung to so fast at ev’ry Stroke.16
Given the dual meaning, it is little wonder the figure of the ‘oyster-girl’, selling her wares on the street, became a figure associated with sex workers and general naughtiness. Throughout the eighteenth century, bawdy songs about oyster girls were common. M. Randall’s ‘The Eating of Oysters’ (1794), for example, begins like this:
As I was walking down a London Street,
a pretty little oyster girl, I chanced for to meet.
I lifted up her basket and boldly I did peek,
just to see if she’s got any oysters.
‘Oysters, Oysters, Oysters,’ said she.
‘These are the finest oysters that you will ever see.
I’ll sell them three-a-penny but I give ’em to you free.’17
The Irish folk heroine Molly Malone, who sells ‘cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh’, was immortalised in verse in 1876 and attributed to James Yorkston. The song tells of the beautiful Molly Malone who sells her wares throughout Dublin, and that ‘she died of a fever’.18 Since then, the song has become the unofficial anthem of Dublin, and a busty bronze statue of Molly was erected in the Georgian Quarter of the city in 1988. Dubliners affectionately call the statue ‘the tart with the cart’, and over the years repeated gropings have buffed her cleavage to a high shine.
A young girl is selling oysters to a customer in the street. Nineteenth-century coloured lithograph produced by J. Brydone & Sons.
In 2010, a text unknown to modern literary scholars, Apollo’s Medley (1790), was discovered and contains an earlier version of the Molly Malone song. Here, ‘Sweet Molly Malone’ is not quite the wholesome young woman depicted a century later. The narrator sings,
Och! I’ll roar and I’ll groan,
My sweet Molly Malone,
Till I’m bone of your bone,
And asleep in your bed…
Be poison, my drink,
If I sleep, snore, or wink,
Once forgetting to think,
Of your lying alone.19
In 1805, the song was republished and put to music by John Whitaker, who attests to its popularity and calls this bawdy version a ‘favourite song’.20 ‘The Widow Malone’, dating to the early nineteenth century, casts Molly as a very wealthy and very horny widow.
Of lovers she had full score, or more…
from the minister down To the clerk of the crown,
They were all courting the widow Malone.21
Although Sweet Molly Malone wasn’t given her wheelbarrow full of cockles and mussels until much later, it seems she has long had a reputation for promiscuity, and her casting as an oyster girl is very much a part of this.
Perhaps the most famous devotee of the oyster aphrodisiac was the legendary lover, Giacomo Casanova (1725–1789). It’s often reported that Casanova ate fifty raw oysters for breakfast each day, but this isn’t quite true – though he certainly ate a lot of them. On several occasions Casanova records sharing plates of fifty oysters with his guests, and there’s no doubt he believed in their stimulating effects. One of his favourite seduction techniques was teaching his lovers to eat oysters properly. ‘We sucked them in, one by one, after placing them on the other’s tongue. Voluptuous reader, try it, and tell me whether it is not the nectar of the gods!’22 He writes about the ‘oyster game’ he used to seduce two friends, Armelline and Emilie.
Molly Milton, the Pretty Oyster Woman, 1788. Molly flaunts her wares to a fashionable young man who ogles her with his hand in his pocket.
I placed the shell on the edge of her lips, and after a good deal of laughing she sucked in the oyster, which she held between her lips. I instantly recovered it by placing my lips on hers … [Armelline] was delighted with my delicacy in sucking away the oyster, scarcely touching her lips with mine. My agreeable surprise may be imagined when I heard her say that it was my turn to hold the oysters. It is needless to say that I acquitted myself of the duty with much delight.23
His diary records that they played this ‘game’ twice. The second time, Casanova ‘accidentally’ spills his oyster down Armelline’s cleavage and undresses her in order to retrieve it with his teeth. You may want to try this move the next time you successfully swipe right – if you fancy fishing lumps of dead molluscs out from between a lady’s tits, that is.
By the nineteenth century, the oyster industries were booming. Oysters were so plentiful they came to be dietary staples of poor and working-class neighbourhoods. In The Pickwick Papers (1837) Dickens noted that ‘poverty and oysters always seem to go together’.24 But just because they were widely consumed didn’t mean that oysters shook off their sexy image. It’s no coincidence that two of Victorian London’s most famous underground erotic magazines were titled The Pearl and The Oyster.
A woman, with light shining on her face from a lamp, standing in front of a barrel of oysters, opening one with a knife, 1855. The caption reads ‘The 4th of August. An oyster-woman of the last century. (From a painting by H. Morland).’
Jonathan Swift once wrote ‘he was a bold man that first ate an oyster’, but I suspect the ritual around eating an oyster is another significant factor in its long association with sex.25 As Casanova observed, there is something undeniably sensual about freeing the plump oyster from his shell, and tipping the liquored, salty flesh into your mouth to be tongued and swallowed whole. Combine this with the fact that the oyster looks like a vulva (yonic) and has strong associations with Aphrodite/Venus, and it’s little wonder that this humble mollusc garnered a reputation as a decadent aphrodisiac. As Trebor Healey once wrote, ‘The world is your oyster, they say, so fill it with pearls of semen’.26
* * *
1 ‘Science Proves Oysters and Mussels are the Food of Love’, The Scotsman, 2018
2 Antimo D’Aniello and others, ‘Occurrence and Neuroendocrine Role of d-Aspartic Acid And n-Methyl-D-Aspartic Acid Inciona Intestinalis’, FEBS Letters, 552.2–3 (2003), 193–8
3 Raul A. Mirza and others, ‘Do Marine Mollusks Possess Aphrodisiacal Properties?’, paper presented at the Chemical Society National Conference in San Diego, March 13–17, 2005.
4 Adam Lusher, ‘Raw Oysters Really Are Aphrodisiacs Say Scientists (And Now Is the Time to Eat Them)’, Daily Telegraph, 2018
5 C. D. Hunt and others, ‘Effects of Dietary Zinc Depletion on Seminal Volume and Zinc Loss, Serum Testosterone Concentrations, and Sperm Morphology in Young Men’, The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 56.1 (1992), 148–57 https://doi.org/10.1093/ajcn/56.1.148; Radhika Purushottam Kothari, ‘Zinc Levels in Seminal Fluid in Infertile Males and Its Relation with Serum Free Testosterone’, Journal of Clinical and Diagnostic Research, 10 (2016), CC05-8 https://doi.org/10.7860/jcdr/2016/14393.7723.
6 Robert C. Walter and others, ‘Early Human Occupation of the Red Sea Coast of Eritrea During the Last Interglacial’, Nature, 405.6782 (2000), 65–9
7 Hesiod, Theogony, ed. by M. L. West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 9.
8 Vātsyāyana, Kamasutra, ed. and trans. by Wendy Doniger and Sudhir Kakar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 165.
9 Nicolas Culpeper, The Complete Herbal (London: CreateSpace, 2018), p. 324.
10 Historia Augusta (Boston: Loeb Classical Library, 1921), p. 483.
11 Pliny the Elder, ‘Pliny the Elder, N
atural History | Loeb Classical Library’, Loeb Classical Library, 2018
12 Alain Chartier, Delectable Demaundes, and Pleasaunt Questions, with their Seuerall Aunswers, in Matters of Loue, Naturall Causes, with Morall and Politique Deuises. Newely Translated out of Frenche into Englishe, this Present Yere of our Lorde God. 1566 (London: John Cawood, 1566), p. 4.
13 Felix Platter, Platerus Golden Practice of Physick (London: Peter Cole, 1664), p. 170; Humphrey Mill, A Night’s Search, Discovering the Nature and Condition of Nightwalkers and their Associates (London, 1646), p. 113.
14 John Marston, The Scourge of Villanie, Vol. 2 (London, 1598), p. 107.
15 Thomas Killigrew, The Parson’s Wedding (London: Henry Herringman, 1641), p. 78.
16 John Wilmot Rochester, ’A Dream’, in the Poetical Works of the Earls of Rochester, Roscomon and Dorset; The Dukes of Devonshire, Buckinghamshire, &C. with Memoirs of their Lives in Two Volumes. Adorn’d with a New Set of Cuts (London: Goodourl, 1735), p. 71.
17 Printed in Drew Smith, Oyster: A Gastronomic History (with Recipes) (New York: Abrams, 2015), Kindle edition, location 866.
18 Henry Randall Waite, Carmina Collegensia: a Complete Collection of the Songs of the American Colleges, with Selections from the Student Songs of the English and German Universities (Boston: Ditson, 1876), p. 73.
19 Apollo’s Medley (Doncaster, 1790), p. 78.
