Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [58]
The air was full of him: that’s how I think of Twain in San Francisco. He’d fled Washoe disgraced and fearing for his life. Now he was in a city of delights, part of a circle of young writers running over roof-tops, and betting shellfish dinners on bowling matches, and drinking until dawn. A city of steamed sea mussels and of oysters by the bushel, of whiskey and Chinatown, of gold prospectors and Emperor Norton, of champagne and gas lamps and fog. Yeah.
OYSTER LOAVES
Cut out a piece of the size of a quarter of a dollar from the top of half a dozen buns, scoop out most of the crumb, put a portion of the latter with a good bit of butter, and about two dozen fresh oysters into a frying pan and fry all together for five minutes, add a little cream or milk and seasoning. Then fill the loaves, allowing four oysters to each; replace the pieces of crust on the tops, butter the outsides, and place them for a short time in an oven to get crisp. Serve them hot or cold.
—JANE CUNNINGHAM CROLY, Jennie June’s American Cookery Book, 1870
There are few things as liable to start an argument about food as oysters. You can argue about species: the relative merits, for example, of New York’s eastern Crassostrea virginica and France’s flat Ostrea edulis (Frederick Marryat wrote a classic takedown of America’s eastern oysters, saying that “as the Americans assert that the English and French oysters taste of copper. . . . I presume they do; and that’s the reason why we do not like the American oysters, copper being better than no flavour at all”). Or you can argue about region; Thomas De Voe said that “the Northern oyster has a broad, thin, tough shell, with a pleasant smell, savoring of the odor of marine plants, while the Southern oyster has a thick, spongy, soft shell, and [is] of less flavor.” You can even debate marine microclimates—whether oysters from the north cove of a given bay have a brinier snap than those farther south (if there’s a river to the south, they probably do). If Twain’s near duel had been about oysters instead of flour, it might have seemed almost reasonable.
Opinions about oysters are passionate for a simple reason: oysters are rabid filter feeders. With each oyster filtering thirty gallons of water a day, the character of the surrounding water—temperature, clarity, mineral content, salinity—completely infuses the flesh. Whether you prefer your oysters coppery or briny, meaty or smoky, or with a note of cucumber or celery salt, the ones you love are best from a particular spot. The prizewinning Sweetwaters from Hog Island Oyster Company take their name from the stream that empties near the fattening beds, which, as one oyster aficionado put it, “balances the saltiness of the oyster liquor with a smoky sweetness.” The Armoricaines of Locmariaquer, which author Eleanor Clarke insisted had “no relation at all to the taste, if there is one, of the usual U.S. restaurant oyster,” made her feel that she was “eating the sea, . . . only the sensation of a gulp of sea water [had] been wafted out of it by some sorcery” (she thought of mermaids, and poems, and the smell of kelp during ebb tide). Oysters from Cape Breton grow slow and briny, those from off Louisiana rapidly and mild. And oysters change flavor fast, fast enough to qualify as truly seasonal; the Hog Island Sweetwaters, for example, are brinier during California’s dry summer months, when the fresh stream flowing to the fattening beds becomes a mere trickle.
Terroir is the French word for the way a flavor can contain and express the essence of a place. Oysters have terroir. Do you ever sit around thinking about the salinity and temperature and nutrients and currents and clarity of local waters? Probably not—but eat a dozen oysters with a group of informed oyster lovers and you probably will. Arguments about oysters are really arguments about place, about the merits of home, whether home is New York or South Carolina