FAMOUS OYSTER EATERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 58, 9 March 1935, Page 10 (Supplement)

FAMOUS OYSTER EATERS.

32 DOZEN—AND THEN DINED !

There have been famous oyster eaters down the ages. Brilliant Savarin tells of a man he met at Versailles, one M. Laperte, who never could get enough oysters. One day Savarin invited him to dinner, and started with oysters as an appetiser. "I kept pace with him up to the third dozen," says the famous gourmet, "and then allowed him to go mi alone. He swallowed oysters steadily for more than an hour, and I had to stop him of tor the thirty-second dozen, just <is he remarked thXt he was beginning to enjoy himself. We then dined!"

In tho "fifties" of last century one Dando frequently figured in the London police courts. He was an oyster maniac. During the "R" period he would go from one oyster phop to another devouring the molluscs. When he could not pay for them he would plead poverty and play other tricks.

Then theie was the Trish oy<=tor fiend who died in 1839 after consuming for a wager 240 oysters in 19 minutes. They said of him'when they put him in his coffin: "One good shell deserves another."

On Christmas Eve a few yeare ago three Liverpool cotton brokers consumed between them :JB7 oyetere, and afterwards travelled by "the night express to London without paying for excels fare. The feat encouraged the proprietor of a Liverpool oyster saloon to burst into literature about (he oyster. He wrote a leaflet in which he ventured the advice: "If you cannot go to the seasido for a holiday, eat oysters." It is the iodine in them that does it, he allirmed, and he added: "Swallow an

oyster and get the sea breeze feeling. Science sanctions each slippery swallow. Napoleon fought his beet battles on a daily dozen."