• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 642 0

. and one hundred native oysters. Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row) later estimated that it would take between sixteen hundred and two thousand shucked natives to make a single gallon. Small oysters are great—you make the mistake of bypassing them in favor of the big ones at Hog Island only once, and even the landlocked Buckeye Cookery says simply that “the small-shelled oysters have the finest flavor”—but this is pretty extreme. What’s more, both Edwords and Ricketts are probably talking about imported Olys, which were about 50 percent larger than those native to San Francisco Bay. Newcomers accustomed to the larger, lighter eastern oysters began looking elsewhere—even to the small oysters of Oregon and Washington—from very early on. The first shipment of some six hundred bushels of Shoalwater Olympias arrived from Washington in 1850. For the next twenty years, they were the majority of the oysters eaten in the city (and 90 percent of imports). In 1859 some thirty-five thousand thirty-two-pound baskets were imported—over 1.1 million pounds, if you include the shells. Most went into holding tanks close to the city, fenced off against foraging bat rays. Even the fact that Olys couldn’t spawn in the cool bay waters had its advantages, since they could be taken from the pens and served on the half shell all year long; San Francisco didn’t have a “no oysters in months without r’s” rule.

Olys were San Francisco’s major oyster even before 1861, when huge floods flushed the bay with fresh water and killed many of the local shellfish. Still, they probably tasted much like the oysters that had been eaten in the region for thousands of years. Like all Olympia oysters, Shoalwater Bay Olys absorbed minerals quickly, which gave the dark meat a distinctly coppery taste, unlike the brinier (and more widely known) easterns. As soon as they reached the city’s holding tanks, they promptly began their relentless, untiring filter feeding; they must have quickly taken on some of the qualities of the even darker local oysters. An oyster didn’t have to have been spawned in San Francisco to be a San Francisco oyster.

Twain was very much aware of where his oysters came from—and his partisanship shifted, at different times, between several sources. When one Mr. Scoofy brought in a shipment of oysters from his Mexican shellfish farm, Twain declared them fine, fat, and “far superior to the poor little insipid things we are accustomed to here.” Scoofy, he rejoiced, would “hereafter endeavor to keep this market supplied with his delicious marine fruit.” The Mexican market never came to much (a steamer took thirteen days from Mazatlán, while a sailboat could arrive from Washington in less than a week). But did Olympia oysters, whether true natives or Washington imports, really suffer as much by comparison as Twain claimed?

If he was talking about size . . . well, shucking a hundred Olys to make a single omelet would be a true labor of love. Still, many people loved Olympias; an 1877 Scribner’s article said that “in San Francisco you earn the confidence of the Californian by praising his little coppery oysters and saying that . . . after all the true taste of the ‘natives’ is only acquired where there is an excess of copper in suspension.” And Edwords obviously loved the labor-intensive oyster omelets, writing that “the slightly coppery taste of the California oysters gives a piquancy to the flavor of the omelet that can be obtained in no other way, and those who once ate of Arbogast’s California oyster omelet, invariably called for it again and again.” Recent European arrivals like Marryat, loving intense Belons, might have preferred Olympias to bluepoints.

Here’s the definition of a good day of research: house-made potato chips, beer, and an oyster happy hour. Berkeley’s Sea Salt restaurant serves, among its many oysters, Olympias from Taylor Shellfish’s Skookum Inlet farms, brought from Washington, just like Twain’s were (though his were from extensive wild beds). Before my dozen arrive on the table, I know to expect something