The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  A Five Points oyster cellar as depicted in George Foster’s

  NEW YORK BY GASLIGHT, 1850

  The women were “all of one kind,” but the oysters came in a variety of types. Bluepoints, Saddle Rocks, Prince’s Bays, City Islands, Spuyten Duyvels, Rockaways or Jamaica Bays, and Canarsees were considered some of the best. For the oyster aficionado there were smaller subdivisions. Just among Great South Bay oysters, any of which might be called Bluepoints, there were Fire Island Salts and Gardiner Salts, both of which were thick-shelled and salty tasting. New York merchants also bought various varieties from Cape Cod and the Chesapeake Bay.

  The city turned to Downing’s, the most celebrated oyster cellar, to cater Dickens’s introduction to twenty-five hundred of New York’s elite. Because of the author’s nickname, Boz, the event was popularly known as “the Boz Ball.” As a youth, Dickens had given one of his younger brothers the nickname Moses, and ridiculing the nasal way the child pronounced it, Dickens took to saying “Boses,” which led to his own nickname, Boz.

  Downing’s at the time was the caterer of official events. When a company opened, a ship was launched, a steam-powered vessel first crossed the Atlantic, the Erie Railroad was extended north of the city, a bank or insurance company elected its board members, Downing’s catered. When Philip Hone, the self-made man who had risen from poverty to be mayor, learned of his unprecedented catering bill of $2,200 for the event, he referred to Downing as “the great man of oysters.”

  The Boz Ball had thousands scrambling through what Hone called “Pickwickian” decorations to get to Downing’s oysters. The crowd, as Mrs. Trollope might have predicted, was consumed with what Hone termed “the unintellectual operation of eating and drinking” and the dance floor was so crowded that the dancing was described by one participant as “like dancing in a cane break.”

  Hone, a keynote speaker for the event, who later described Dickens as “a small, bright-eyed, intelligent looking young fellow,” wrote:

  The agony is over; the Boz Ball, the greatest affair of modern times, the tallest compliment ever paid to a little man, the fullest libation ever poured upon the altar of the muse, came off last evening in fine style.

  But not for Boz was the agony over. Four nights later was the banquet in his honor at the premier hotel, City Hotel, occupying an entire block of Broadway between Cedar and Thames, with food by Gardiner’s, reputedly the city’s most elegant caterer. The first three of the extensive five courses included oysters. The first course consisted of three soups, including oyster “potage,” and fish—trout, bass, and shad—all products of the Hudson River. The second course offered six different cold dishes, including oysters in aspic, as well as roasted sirloin, saddle of mutton, goose, veal, turkeys, and capons—note the plural—and a choice of five boiled meats, including boiled turkey with oyster sauce and stewed terrapin. At last the entrées arrived, which included a total of nineteen dishes including “Oyster Pies.” Next was the game course, all from New York’s woodlands: wild turkey, canvasback ducks, venison, and bear. This was followed by the fourth course, twelve desserts and six decorative pyramids. The last course was nuts and fruit. The soups came out at seven and the nuts at midnight and Dickens left a half hour later. Americans had again lived up to their reputation for eating fast and copiously.

  The menu listed the soups in French, the fish, the cold dishes, roasts, and boiled meats in English. The main courses were in French translated into curious English—a timballe became a tamball. The French was also curious and in spots misspelled. Seventy years later, Julian Street, a magazine writer, would comment, “Broadway eats French better than it speaks it.” Gardiner’s charged the City Hotel $2,500 for the dinner serving 237 people, slightly more than Downing’s had charged for oysters and hors d’oeuvres for 2,500 people at the Boz Ball.

  On February 4, 1842, ten days before the Boz Ball, when Boz was still in Boston, George Templeton Strong had written prophetically:

  The Bostonians are making horrid asses of themselves with Mr. Charles Dickens, poor man. He’ll have his revenge, though, when he gets home and takes up his pen again. How people will study his next productions to see if they can find any portraits! However, we shall be fully as bad, with our Boz Ball.

  That was exactly what happened with Dickens’s next two works, American Notes and the novel Martin Chuzzlewit, neither of which required careful study to find the attacks. He described oysters disappearing down “gaping gullets—a solemn and awful sight to see. Dyspeptic individuals bolted their food in wedges, spare men with lank rigid cheeks, unsatisfied from the destruction of heavy dishes, glared with watchful eyes upon the pastry. But there was one comfort. It was over soon.” As for Downing’s and Gardiner’s costly cuisine, the most celebrated food in New York, Dickens wrote that Americans ate “piles of indigestible matter.” And this was from a man whose wife—Hone described her as “a little fat English-looking woman”—had penned a cookbook under a pseudonym in which she offered such refutable delights of digestion as suet dumplings and batter pudding.

  As for the young, diminutive Boz himself, he made clear that he would rather be in the intimacy of an oyster cellar in Five Points.

  At other downward flights of steps, are other lamps, marking the whereabouts of oyster cellars—pleasant retreats, say I: not only by reason of their wonderful cookery of oysters, pretty nigh as large as cheese plates . . . but because of all kinds of eaters of fish, or flesh, or fowl, in these latitudes, the swallowers of oysters, alone or not gregarious, but subduing themselves, as it were, to the nature of what they work in, and copying the coyness of the thing they eat, do sit apart in curtained boxes, and consort by twos, not by two hundreds.

  Thomas Downing had been born to a free Virginia black family in 1791 and was to become one of the most respected black men in pre–Civil War New York, or as George Templeton Strong put it in 1854, a “venerable Ethiop.” His parents had been freed because a traveling preacher had convinced the leading landowner of their area, Captain John Downing, that no one could be a member in good standing of the Methodist Church and a slave owner at the same time.

  Thomas Downing

  PHOTOGRAPHS AND PRINTS DIVISION, SCHOMBERG CENTER FOR RESEARCH IN BLACK CULTURE, THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY, ASTOR, LENOX AND TILDEN FOUNDATIONS.

  Like some of the blacks who settled in Sandy Ground, Downing came from Chincoteague, Virginia, Chesapeake oyster country, and he was an experienced oysterman when he moved to New York City in 1819. Chincoteague is an island village on an Atlantic inlet just south of the Maryland state line. During his youth, Downing had worked the small plot of land his parents had bought, dug clams, and caught terrapin, and he raked oysters. He loved eating oysters. He probably went to New York to be in the thriving city oyster trade.

  But it was more than just his oyster background that drove him to the oyster-cellar business. In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was widely accepted in New York that oyster cellars, like dance halls and many taverns, were run by blacks. Cato’s Tavern, a popular drinking spot for leading politicians four miles north as travelers entered Manhattan, was also run by a black man. Working-class black New Yorkers often converted their rental apartments into oyster cellars and dance halls on the weekends. Another African American niche in New York was running summer outdoor cafés called pleasure gardens, specializing in tall, cool drinks and ice cream.

  Downing had followed returning troops to Philadelphia at the end of the War of 1812. There he met his wife. When he got to New York, he rented an apartment to live in at 33 Pell Street and bought a small skiff, which he rowed across the Hudson to the oyster beds in New Jersey, tonged for oysters, and then rowed back with a load to sell before dark. His son George described him as an unusually energetic man. His customers increased every year and he acquired a reputation for excellent “fat” oysters. In 1825, Downing opened his oyster cellar at 5 Broad Street.

  He had five children, all born in New York City and educated at the
African Free School, a school system established by abolitionists, with whom he was involved for decades.

  For businessmen who preferred discussing their affairs rather than having them, Downing’s was the favorite oyster cellar, conveniently located near the Customs House, the banks, the Merchants Exchange, and important stores. It stood on the same street where the first oyster cellar had opened in 1763, a street long associated with selling oysters.

  Between 1830 and 1860, Downing’s was a place where oysters were eaten and deals were made. The senior partner of a leading banking house described the New York merchant’s life:

  To rise early in the morning, to get breakfast, to go down to the counting house of the firm, to open and read letters—to go out and do some business, either at the Custom house, bank or elsewhere, until twelve, then to take lunch and a glass of wine at Delmonico’s; or a few raw oysters at Downing’s, to sign checks . . .

  Downing’s was also a popular spot for politicians. Like other oyster cellars, it was marked by a red balloon over dank sidewalk steps, but the interior of Downing’s eschewed the seedy, vulgar look of the oyster cellars farther uptown and was decorated with mirrored arcades, damask curtains, gilded carvings, sparkling chandeliers, and plush carpeting.

  Downing made oyster cellars respectable, at least his, which was a family restaurant where a man could bring his wife. Downing’s was the one oyster cellar that respectable women could go to, provided they were accompanied by their husbands. Prostitutes were the only unescorted women ever seen in restaurants, and only in restaurants that allowed prostitution. One oyster cellar came to terms with the alleged moral ambiguities of leaving women alone with oysters by founding a women-only oyster cellar, the Ladies Oyster Shop, a forerunner of the Ladies’ Fourteenth Street Oyster House in the 1880s, on 4 East Fourteenth Street just off Union Square. It reflected a growing movement. A Ladies’ Bowling Alley was also opened.

  In 1835, Downing expanded, renting the basements of the two neighboring buildings. Numbers 5 and 7 Broad Street held the basement restaurant and Number 3 became an oyster storage cellar with running salt water. Though he now raked in too much money to be raking oysters, Downing was known to prowl the harbor in the dark of night looking for the best deals on the best oysters. He would sometimes rent a skiff, row out in the harbor to intercept an incoming sloop or schooner, board her, and buy the best of the catch. Then he would row back to the market, which was an auction, and bid on the vessel’s remaining oysters, which he had no intention of buying. When the vessel reached market the price for his leftover catch would already be high. The oyster captains liked Downing, and when they came to his cellar he would make sure that they were treated as well as the leading politicians and businessmen.

  Downing’s offered a wide variety of oyster dishes, but the standbys were raw, fried, and stewed. His son George described steamed oysters at Downing’s:

  Ladies and gentlemen with towels in hand, and an English oyster knife made for the purpose, would open their own oysters, drop into the burning hot concaved shell a lump of sweet butter and other seasoning and partake of a treat. Yes, there was a taste imparted by the saline and lime substance in which the juice of the oyster reached boiling heat that made it a delicate morsel.

  Food writers always emphasized that smaller oysters could be used for stewing, fritters, or pies, but frying was to be done with large oysters. This is an excellent recipe for frying from the time of Downing’s that most health-conscious people today will miss out on.

  Fried Oysters

  Take large oysters from their own liquor into a thickly folded napkin to dry them off; then make a tablespoonful of lard or beef fat hot, in a thick bottomed frying pan, add to it a half salt-spoonful of salt; dip each oyster in wheat flour, or cracker rolled fine, until it will take up no more, then lay them in the pan, hold it over a gentle fire until one side is a delicate brown; turn the other by sliding a fork under it; five minutes will fry them after they are in the pan. Oysters may be fried in butter but it is not so good; lard and butter half and half is very nice for frying. Some persons like a very little of the oyster liquor poured in the pan after the oysters are done, let it boil up, then put it in the dish with the oysters; when wanted for breakfast this should be done.

  —MRS. T. J. CROWEN,

  The American System of Cookery, 1864

  Oyster stew is a very old concept that seems to have changed slightly with each generation. In the heyday of Downing’s, the second quarter of the nineteenth century, which many food historians consider to be the best age of American cuisine, Eliza Leslie, a Philadelphian, was recognized throughout the still-young country as the most reliable authority. She made a batter with eggs for frying oysters, which might be better than Mrs. Crowen’s later recipe, but Miss Leslie fried in butter, which Mrs. Crowen justly criticized. Butter cannot be heated to a high enough temperature for true frying. But then again, it always tastes good. This is Miss Leslie’s recipe for stewed oysters. Her admonishment against flour-thickening refers to a horrible practice of the early nineteenth century in many places, including New York.

  Put the oysters into a sieve, and set it on a pan to drain the liquor from them. Then cut off the hard part, and put the oysters into a stew pan with some whole pepper, a few blades of mace and some grated nutmeg. Add a small piece of butter rolled in flour. Then pour over them about half the liquor, or a little more. Set the pan on hot coals, and simmer them gently about five minutes. Try one, and if it tastes raw cook them a little longer. Make some thin slices of toast, having cut off the crust. Butter the toast and lay it in the bottom of a deep dish. Put the oysters upon it with the liquor in which they were stewed.

  The liquor of oysters should never be thickened by stirring in flour. It spoils the taste, and gives them a sodden and disagreeable appearance, and is no longer practiced by good cooks. A little cream is a fine improvement to stewed oysters.

  —ELIZA LESLIE,

  Miss Leslie’s Directions for Cookery, 1851

  Twentieth-century New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, who interviewed many oystermen over stew, observed: “It isn’t easy to carry on a conversation while eating oyster stew,” which would have been useful advice for those who arranged amorous trysts in New York’s oyster cellars.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Making Your Own Bed

  I have never seen any city so admirably adapted for commerce.

  —CAPTAIN FREDERICK MARRYAT,

  A Diary in America, 1837

  By 1842, about $6 million worth of oysters were being sold every year to restaurants, fish stores, and street vendors in New York City. Most of these oysters entered the Manhattan market from barges tied up on either the Hudson or East River. These barges were wholesale houses, storage bins, and packinghouses. Typically an oyster barge was a two-story wooden vessel with a curved deck for drainage. On one end, oystermen would tie up their boots and unload, while on the other, pedestrians and wagons from the street would pull up to buy oysters.

  The oystermen could not afford to purchase waterfront property for an oyster market, but as early as 1805, oyster sloops started tying up at Coenties Slip, on the East River, just above Broad Street. These sloops served as oyster depots where the catch could be culled, sorted, packaged, and sold. Coenties Slip was a commercially choice spot, close to where the mouth of the East River met the harbor. As the port of New York grew, the oystermen were under considerable pressure to cede the spot to larger commercial interests. Finally, in 1845, the oyster boats moved to Catherine Slip, farther up the East River and close to the Catherine Market, or to Vie or Bear docks on the Hudson near the Washington Market. Because sloops did not have enough deck space for preparing oysters and lacked cabin space for conducting business, they were gradually replaced by canal barges.

  By midcentury, oyster dealers were having special barges built, sometimes called arks or scows. The first had small decks, only twelve feet by thirty feet. By the 1880s, at least thirty barges were tied up along the
Manhattan waterfront, and they had become two-story structures up to seventy-five feet long and twenty-four feet wide. They would be tied up together in a row, fixed to the waterfront by a gangplank the width of the barge, so that they looked like a row of two-story shopfronts except that they bobbed up and down in the current.

  This row constituted a floating wholesale oyster market, with shuckers and cullers and barrelers working on deck and deals being negotiated upstairs. They were often painted pink, though yellow and green were also common. They often had ornate overhanging roofs and balconies. Across the top, in embellished nineteenth-century lettering, would be painted the name of the company. J. & J. W. Ellsworth, Fraser, Houseman, Silesby, and Still were all leading New York oyster companies. The 1840s and fifties, when the oyster barge developed, coincided with the emergence of large oyster companies in New York. Each barge flew a large American flag over the sign. The merchants decorated their barges with bunting, pennants, and other ornaments for the opening of oyster season in September and sometimes for national holidays.

  A midnineteenth century wholesale ad showing oyster barges tied up in the East River.

  COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

  The upper-floor office was fairly elegant, with an ornate oak desk and leather chairs. Also on this floor was the storeroom where oysters were kept in cedar tubs and beside them oak bushel baskets and barrels. On the lower deck, seated in a row on three-legged stools, sat shuckers, usually tough, burly men. In front of them the deck was covered with oysters, with more lying in seawater in the hold below. The hold was deep, and so well designed that as long as the hatches were closed, the oysters would stay cool in summer and could not freeze in the coldest winter. An oyster barge was usually designed to hold about seven hundred bushels at a time. A bushel averaged about 250 or 300 oysters, but a basket held only 150 extras and could carry 15,000 seed oysters. At the peak of the oyster industry in the late nineteenth century, at any moment at least six million oysters were on barges tied up at the waterfront.