Damien Pignolet

Oysters and watercress

Allow four freshly shucked oysters per person. Using some light brown milk bread, square section, make sandwiches consisting of three slices of bread buttered and filled with watercress leaves. Pack the sandwiches in greaseproof paper and weigh them down for one hour under refrigeration.

Trim to a square and cut in half. One sandwich is a portion together with several batons of lebanese cucumber and a little mound of mignonette pepper. The oysters should be kept upright on a little bed of flossy fine salt to retain the juices in the shells.

(Damien issued our kitchen with the most painstaking of work sheets. Every part of the process was outlined clearly and carefully. Aside from the things he brought with him from Sydney he decided to make the choice himself of one ingredient, the bread for the oysters. Somehow this became a major nightmare, the right loaf could not be obtained.)