A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [20]
At 5:30 a.m., Chris and I set out on an oyster boat with Dominique and Jerome, two local pêcheur des huîtres. Their vessel was not the quaint pinasse of my childhood. Those days, Dominique explained, were long gone. What pinasses remained were used principally as pleasure boats, or to ferry tourists around on day trips and picnics. This craft was a long, flat beast without gunwales – more suitable for loading sacks of oysters – a winch, and an aft wheelhouse.
It was pitch-black on the bay when we set out, Chris and I clinging to the edges of the wheelhouse, Dominique piloting, Jérôme navigating. We putt-putted cautiously out to the middle of the bay, the sun slowly beginning to announce itself, the sky turning purple and black, shot through with hues of gold.
Things had changed on the bay since we’d last floated out with our neighbor Monsieur Saint-Jour to visit his tiny oyster park in 1966. Back then, we’d waited until the tide ran out and the boat came to rest on the bay floor, surrounded by a crude hand-constructed stockade that delineated his property. Oysters then were strewn directly on the bottom, raked, picked over, and sorted on site.
A few years ago, said Dominique, the oysters died – all of them. The bay was reseeded with ‘Japanese’ seedlings, which took to the water well. This was not the first time this had happened. Originally, oysters had naturally occurred on the region’s beds. When they’d gone, ‘Portuguese’ oysters spilled during a wreck had been encouraged, successfully, to proliferate. In 1970, those had mysteriously died off. Things were better now. In fact, young oysters from here were now exported to Brittany and elsewhere, as conditions were particularly favorable for them here. The number of independent oyster fishermen like my old neighbor had shrunk considerably, though, with only a few larger outfits working in much more spread-out areas. The dreaded European Union regulations – which have been wiping out artisans and independents across the Continent – make it much more difficult for small one- or two-boat partnerships to survive.
The oyster parks looked different, too. It is no longer necessary to allow the tide to completely recede. Oysters are kept sorted by size and age in mesh sacks of varying gauge, on raised platforms, just beneath the water’s surface. The sacks allow water and nutrients to flow through the oysters, while keeping most predators out. Raised from the seabed and restrained in bags, the oysters are less likely to experience breakage or damage, though an astonishing 25 to 30 per cent will be eventually discarded as unsuitable.
Dominique pulled the boat alongside a few hundred feet of racks, and immediately the two men suited up in hip waders and dropped into the frigid water. They worked in shirtsleeves and rubber gloves (which filled with water right away), seemingly impervious to the cold. While they loaded heavy, dripping sacks of jagged shellfish onto the deck, they smoked and chatted casually, in no apparent hurry to finish their work and leave the water. The oysters they were loading were still young. They’d be taken back to their shack on shore, sorted again, rebagged, and returned to the water the next day.
Chris and I huddled under thick waterproofs, two layers of sweaters, scarves, and long underwear while the two fishermen prattled on happily about food: lamprey bordelaise