Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [66]
OYSTER SOUP
Wash and drain two quarts of oysters, put them on with three quarts of water, three onions chopped up, two or three slices of lean ham, pepper and salt; boil it till reduced one-half, strain it through a sieve, return the liquid into the pot, put in one quart of fresh oysters, boil it till they are sufficiently done, and thicken the soup with four spoonsful of flour, two gills of rich cream, and the yolks of six new laid eggs beaten well; boil it a few minutes after the thickening is put in. Take care that it does not curdle, and that the flour is not in lumps; serve it up with the last oysters that were put in. If the flavour of thyme be agreeable, you may put in a little, but take care that it does not boil in it long enough to discolour the soup.
OYSTER [ICE] CREAM
Make a rich soup, (see directions for oyster soup,) strain it from the oysters, and freeze it.
—MARY RANDOLPH, The Virginia Housewife, 1838
One of my mottos, seldom stated yet assiduously observed, is “I will not jump into a mudflat in winter.” Today I volunteered to do it.
I clamber down the rocks beneath the Marin Rod & Gun Club, which consists of a nondescript clubhouse and a pier near the northern end of the Richmond Bridge. We’re just across the peninsula from San Quentin Point, which commands a spectacular view of the city (and was once the site of some of the earliest oyster pens) but is now much to be avoided, there being a gigantic prison there and all. Marin Rod & Gun is a throwback, a place for older men to come and play checkers and have a drink or else head out on the pier to pull in a striper or bat ray. It owns twenty acres of waterfront property and forty more underwater (much to my surprise, most of the submerged bay, other than the shipping channels, is privately owned), and when I first arrived was catering to exactly three old guys playing cards.
Just north of the pier are three long, narrow grids of bamboo stakes: the site of what will become the biggest native oyster reef in modern San Francisco Bay.
My wet suit is meant for ocean diving, with a hood and two thick pieces that overlap all around my trunk, so I’m slow, clumsy, and increasingly sweaty even on such a cool and misty day. To keep me from bobbing around once I’m in deeper water, I’m wearing a twenty-pound weight belt, and it drives me better than knee-deep into the mud. Even with the bridge traffic roaring to the south, my steps are one of the loudest things out here—Slurp . . . pop! Slurp . . . pop! There are already a half dozen volunteers by the stakes, two more struggling out with me. More work from a dock on the other side of the main pier, handing sacks of shell into a pair of motorboats. There are eight pallets of sacks, each loaded chin-high—this could take a while.
The mud I’m in probably isn’t Gold Rush mud. That’s deeper, buried under a century of additional sediment. But whatever this is, it stinks, and is fine as dust; later I’ll try to rinse out my suit in a half dozen changes of water. In the end the silt will defeat me—the next time I dive, I imagine, I’ll look like a squid shooting ink.
Bud Abbott, a fisheries expert at the health and environmental consultancy Environ, played a big role in getting the work here started; he calls efforts like this one “the largest social movement in the world that no one saw coming.” There are, he’ll tell me later, literally thousands of nongovernmental organizations helping to defend local waterways. Friends of a creek, friends of a pond, friends of the bay. “Every mud hole has its friends now,” he says with a grin. “I mean, how in the world did we get a hundred volunteers?”
Rena Obernolte, Bud’s partner and project