A Cook's Tour_ In Search of the Perfect Meal - Anthony Bourdain [21]
They hauled wet bags on deck for about an hour, stacked them neatly, then showed us where the seedlings were raised nearby. This process had not changed at all. Oyster larvae, before their shells fully develop, are at their most vulnerable. Ages ago, fishermen found that the oyster larvae would cling comfortably to the curved surfaces of terra-cotta roof tiles (after a process of whitewashing and sanding them), adhering themselves to the insides. The tiles could be stacked and restacked easily, and then, at the appropriate time, scraped free.
Oysters, by the way, are bisexual in ways undreamed of by career-minded actors. They actually change sex from year to year. If you were to tell an oyster ‘Go fuck yourself,’ it would probably not be offended. The males of a particular year spew their reproductive juices into the water in a generalized, omnidirectional way – a ubiquitously impregnating cloud that fertilizes whatever’s female that year. Picture the swimming pool at Plato’s Retreat back in the 1970s. That fat guy at the other end of the pool with the gold chains and the back hair? He’s getting you pregnant. Or maybe it’s the Guccione look-alike by the diving board. No way of knowing.
Loaded up with about two thousand pounds of young oysters, we headed back to port, Dominique and Jérôme smoking roll-ups and still talking about food. Back at their shack, the two men demonstrated their oyster-scrubbing apparatus, which blasted off the outer silt and dirt, the automated sorting equipment – a multilayered array of large-gauge strainers that bounced back and forth over a conveyor belt, accompanied by unbelievable noise and vibration, as it shook the oysters through. There was a storage and cleaning pool, where the oysters were soaked in clean, strained bay water – nutrients still intact but dirt and silt strained away – useful for leeching out internal impurities. The day’s work done, we retired to their shack for a tasting of their wares, a few dozen fresh Arcachon oysters and a bottle of dry white Bordeaux. It was eight o’clock in the morning.
In a previous book, I have described my first oyster on Monsieur Saint-Jour’s pinasse as a seminal experience. I’ve never forgotten that moment: that big, scary, ugly shell in my neighbor’s knobby hand, the way he popped it open for me, still-dripping from the bay, the way its pale blue-gray flesh caught the light, pulsated, the mother-of-pearl-like interior of the shell like a jewel box – promising adventure, freedom, sex, as-yet-unencountered joys.
I’d hoped that all that would come rushing back when I slurped down one of Dominique and Jérôme’s finest. I knew I was trying too hard. I knew I was forcing things. It was as ludicrous as buying your girlfriend not only flowers, jewelry, perfume, and candy but also the bathing suit Ursula Andress wore in Dr. No, then plainly stating you expect the best sex of your life. Doubtful in the extreme that events will live up to your expectations. I don’t know whether I really expected to swoon, fall to the floor, start weeping with joy, or what. No, I do know. I expected the perfect damn meal. I’d thought for sure that this would be it. But did my first oyster fresh from the bassin in thirty-four years do it for me? Did it transport me immediately to some culinary version of Elysian Fields, as I’d hoped? Was it the perfect meal I’d so hoped to find?
Nope. Not really. It’s no reflection on the oysters, which tasted much as I remembered them, briny, not too cold (oysters should not, by the way – contrary to conventional wisdom in the States – be buried in ice for hours and served chilled to frigid temperatures; it may make opening them easier for the shucker, but it diminishes