Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [63]
TO STEW OYSTERS OR MUSCLES
Plump them in their own liquor; then, having drained off the liquor, wash them clean in fair water. Set the liquor drained from the oysters, or as much as necessary (with the addition of an equal quantity of water or white wine, a little whole pepper, and a blade of mace,) over the fire, and boil it well. Then put in the oysters, and let them just boil up, and thicken with a piece of butter and flour: some will add the yolk of an egg. Serve them up with sippets and the liquor, and garnish the dish with grated bread or sliced lemon.
—SUSANNAH CARTER, The Frugal Housewife, 1803
The parking lot marking the old Berkeley shoreline belongs to Spenger’s, a venerable, much beloved, extremely crappy fish restaurant (the onion rings used to be good; other than that, drink or go home). Beneath the parking lot lie remnants of a monumental mound of millions of oyster and mussel and abalone shells left by generations of Ohlone Native Americans. Four hundred such shell mounds once circled the bay, some of them forty feet tall and the size of a football field at the base; the Ohlone valued the sites for spiritual as well as physical sustenance, with one site including five hundred nearby burials. Shellfish gave the Ohlone stability in a world of change, allowing them to stay as a community year round, rather than dispersing into the hills when the fresh waters of winter dwindled and died.
But then, and for centuries after, oysters and mussels were only one part of the bay’s grand treasury of fish. A day’s haul at Fisherman’s Wharf could include “fine, fat” crabs, sand dabs “but an hour or two from the water,” smelt, herring, flounder, sole, shrimp sold “alive and active,” crayfish, clams, squid, and more. Fishermen cooked breakfasts of fish and coffee on charcoal braziers set out on the decks while passersby bought fish straight from the boats. Into at least the 1870s, the catch sold so quickly that fishermen never used ice; the Vesuvius Italian restaurant was just one that would send a cook’s helper to the Clay Street Market for a “still flapping” fish as soon as it was ordered. Sometimes the abundance bordered on parody: once, when a fishing boat was hauled into dry dock, some fifty large anchovies were found dangling underneath. The fish had gone pecking for algae among the mussels that encrusted the hull and been trapped when the shells snapped down tight (this sounds like an exaggeration, but mussels have been known to take off the toes of passing clapper rails). The bay was chock-full of life, everything eating everything else.
For many decades San Francisco was not only a city by the bay, it was a city of the bay and of the ocean beyond. The abundance that Twain knew, much of which lasted until midway into the twentieth century, was a pulsing expression of the water that gave the city its name (originally called Yerba Buena, the city was renamed after the San Francisco Bay, not the other way around). There may have been no better place in America to experience the blend of wild and domestic foods that distinguished his menu; a lavish testimonial dinner in the city might include venison, bear, and five varieties of duck, alongside veal tartare, calves’ head, ice cream, nuts, raisins, and cake—things from both the vast nearby wetlands and quickly expanding tilled fields.
But even in Twain’s day, the filling of the bay had already