I was flipping through some of my cookbooks after the recent "Joy of
Cooking" thread. One of my favorites is James Beard's "American
Cookery".

I don't have it in front of me for the exact quote, but I got a
chuckle from the section where he was talking about how he loved
oysters on the half shell. He said it was ok to serve them with a bit
of lemon and horse radish, but if you had to cover them with that red
cocktail sauce, what business did you have eating them, anyway...

...fred