Food & drink takeaways - 5 August
A curated taster menu of every day's food & drink associations
Celebration days
The food calendar is packed with celebration days that lack genuine origins.
At first glance, 5 August produces another one.
Many online food reference and on-this-day sites proclaim it Oyster Day but none come up with any reason for it being so.
Except they’re missing some pearls of wisdom. There could well be a good reason and there are two sources to suggest it goes back as far as 19th century London.
Food historian Janet Clarkson explains in her amazing compendium Food History Almanac: Over 1,300 Years of World Culinary History, Culture and Social Influence (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers) that, according to the old Julian calendar, 5 August was St James's Day – the day that oysters could be legally sold in London until the end of April.
And Londoners believed if you ate oysters on this day, you would not want for money all year round.
The Cookbook of Unknown Ladies blog – highlighting ‘curious recipes and hidden histories’ from the Westminster City Archives – adds that oyster festivals occurred across the UK through late July and August and the old-style St James’s Day on 5 August was popularly considered ‘Oyster Day’.
“‘Oyster Day’ was an important occasion for Georgian and Victorian Londoners as costermongers picked up their wares from Billingsgate and customers from all walks of life enjoyed the first oysters of the harvest”
So while the food celebration sites contrive to push the frivolous and promotional, don’t be fooled that the virtual world is their oyster. . .
Cocktail of the day
The Difford's Guide cocktail of the day is Oyster Bay – whisky, dry Vermouth, orange Curacąo, lemon juice and orange bitters – to celebrate, yes, you've guessed it, Oyster Day
Food in art
We don't know if oysters were on the menu of The Parisian Cafe – a painting by renowned Ukrainian-born Russian Realist Ilya Repin, born on this day in 1844 – but they certainly would not have looked out of place.
