The Big Oyster

by Mark Kurlansky

  But for the non-French, there was a traditional New York appetizer, pickled oysters, but with a new French name, huîtres marinées, which he served to the officers of the Russian fleet in 1863:

  Blanch some large oysters, drain them after the first boil and keep the liquor; boil some vinegar with cloves, whole pepper, whole allspice, half an ounce of each for every quart of vinegar, and add a little mace; put two-thirds of the oyster liquor with one-third of the vinegar, and also the oysters into hermetically closed glass bottles, and keep them in a cool place. Serve on side dishes with sliced lemon and sprigs of parsley set around.

  He also offered Americans a long list of cooked oyster dishes including oysters with curry, oysters on skewers, fried oysters à la Horly, oysters fried with butter or lard. The other oyster dish served in 1863 at the ball for the Russian fleet was oysters à la poulette, which New Yorkers used to call oyster fricassee:

  Reduce some velouté sauce with oyster liquor, season with with salt, pepper, and nutmeg, and thicken with egg yolks diluted in a little cream, incorporate into it a piece of fresh butter, some strained lemon juice and chopped parsley.

  Ranhofer, the most influential New York chef of the second half of the nineteenth century, was a practitioner of French classical cuisine, the cooking of Europe’s top hotels at the time, the cuisine defined by Auguste Escoffier. Typical of this cuisine, Ranhofer’s recipes are almost always more complicated than they seem. Just to follow his directions for raw oysters on the half shell, the cook needs to know how to make pimentade sauce, and to make pimentade sauce, the recipe for sauce espagnol, the standard brown sauce made from thickening stock, must be known, and in turn the cook needs to know how to make a good stock. To make the fricassee, the cook must know how to make a velouté, and for this, too, a knowledge of the making of stocks is required. The cook also has to know the right temperature, low, to thicken with egg yolks, and how to finish a sauce with a piece of butter—also stirred at a low temperature. The above fricassee is also just a sauce to pour over poached oysters. Ranhofer’s instructions for poaching oysters:

  Set a saucepan on the hot fire, and place the oysters in it with their own liquor, being careful to stir them about at times to prevent them adhering to the bottom; when firm to the touch, drain them from their liquor.

  But occasionally he offered a simple dish such as his Philadelphia-style oysters, which of course, he and fashionable New Yorkers called huîtres à la Philadelphie:

  Put two ounces of butter into a pan, and let it cook until nut brown, then add to it twenty oysters well drained and wiped: fry them until they assume a light color on both sides, then pour in a quarter of a pint of oyster liquor, salt, and pepper. Serve at the same time thin slices of toasted bread, or else pour the oysters over slices of toast laid in a deep dish.

  This was one of Ranhofer’s secrets. New Yorkers knew they could go to Delmonico’s and get some basic New York dishes like the fried oysters served in the markets, even if it was ascribed to some distant place called Philadelphie. In 1893, Ranhofer published The Epicurean, his twelve-hundred-page, four-thousand recipe “Franco-American Culinary Encyclopedia,” which, though it made its way into few household kitchens, became a bible for American restaurants and hotels. Though it has thirty oyster recipes, its oyster section states that an oyster is “sexless,” which is incorrect, and that it cannot live out of water, which it can for a considerable number of weeks if kept cool, which is how fresh New York oysters were able to reach faraway places. Showing his French roots, Ranhofer ventured the opinion that cooked oysters, which composed the majority of his oyster recipes, were not as digestible as raw ones. The following is one of his more impressive recipes for a lightly cooked oyster appetizer that could be served instead of raw oysters on the half shell.

  Oysters Tartare ( huîtres tartare)

  Blanch some large oysters, drain them, well, and season with salt, pepper, fine herbs, shallots cut into very small dice, and blanched capers, minced pickled cucumbers and lobster coral chopped up very fine. Have some thin slices of bread cut oval shaped the size of an oyster, fry in butter, place one oyster on each and cover every one of these with the chopped garnishing, finish by covering all with a mayonnaise jelly.

  Mayonnaise Sauce Jellied

  Use an ordinary Mayonnaise with oil, pouring into it slowly some cold liquid jelly. A jellied mayonnaise may also be prepared by whipping the jelly on ice and incorporating into it at the same time some oil and vinegar, exactly the same as for the egg mayonnaise.

  Ranhofer also invented baked Alaska to honor the U.S. purchase of that territory. There were several other Delmonico’s dishes that became American classics such as Delmonico potatoes and Delmonico steaks. People would bring ideas to the restaurant. In 1895, after Ranhofer retired, Richard Harding Davis, the journalist who did much to romanticize the image of foreign correspondents, fresh from Latin America, introduced Delmonico’s to the avocado. The fruit was one of Davis’s few verifiable facts from Latin America. Three years later he would popularize the Spanish-American War and by then Delmonico’s had popularized the avocado in New York.

  Ben Wenberg, a fruit merchant who traded in the Caribbean and a Delmonico’s regular, in 1876 showed Charles Delmonico a new lobster dish that he demonstrated in a chafing dish. Delmonico called it lobster à la Wenberg. But soon the two had an irreparable disagreement and Delmonico refused to use his name. In a fit of intentional dyslexsia, Delmonico inverted Wen-berg to New-berg. Ranhofer established the dish and it became known all over America as lobster Newberg.

  Lobster Newberg became an instant classic with many spin-offs, including the inevitable oyster Newberg, this one from the 1894 book Fifteen New Ways for Oysters by Sarah Tyson Rorer, a food writer and magazine editor who was one of the founders of the Ladies’ Home Journal. Notice the quantity of oysters:

  Drain fifty oysters; pour over them a pitcher of cold water. Have ready a granite pan, smoking hot; throw in the oysters; add two ounces of butter, a teaspoonful of pepper. Stir carefully with a wooden spoon until the oysters are smoking hot. Have ready the yolks of two eggs beaten with six tablespoons of cream; add quickly—do not boil; then add a tablespoonful of sherry and serve on nicely browned toast.

  The oyster craze had also taken London and Paris. Happily for the American oyster business, European beds were becoming exhausted. By the midnineteenth century, the increased popularity of oysters had led to the stripping of natural beds around the world that had until then been thought to be inexhaustible. In 1861, oyster merchants in the Zeeland region of the Netherlands had handled three million oysters, one million gathered by Zeelanders and the rest by Scots and Englishmen whose native beds had already become distressed. By 1864, the same dealers got only fifty thousand oysters to trade. The same decline was also occurring in France. It had also happened in New York, but by the second half of the century, New Yorkers had become skilled cultivators.

  Like New Yorkers, the late-nineteenth-century French were consuming oysters at a staggering rate, perhaps more staggering because they were almost all being eaten raw. It was said that oysters were served four times a day—breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper. But recipes for cooking oysters were long held to be a gastronomic atrocity in France, whereas in New York only one in three retail oysters was sold in the shell. Most of the others were stewed, stuffed, fried, roasted, put in soups or sauces, or in some way cooked.

  The French had long been oyster fanatics. Not only was there the legend of Napoléon’s prebattle oysters, but Diderot, Rousseau, and Voltaire are all believed to have eaten a few dozen oysters when in search of inspiration. And having won France’s greatest battles and launched its most original ideas, oysters, it is not surprising to learn, had also fueled its revolution. Danton and Robespierre found that whenever the revolutionary spirit began to wane, several dozen on the half shell would spur them on again. Some would say they ate too many oysters. It is not certain which, if any of these often-repeated legends are true, but
sometimes as much can be learned about a people from their myths as from the verifiable facts.

  In the seventeenth century, the French regulated the mussel industry but not oysters, believing in their unconquerable fertility. But unlike the British, by the early eighteenth century they could see their mistake and began regulating natural beds. In the nineteenth century, faced with disease, flukes of nature, bad luck, and overfishing, they realized regulations were not enough, and they began developing cultivation.

  It was unfortunate for the British that Jean Jacques Marie Cyprien Victor Coste, who probably in any case had too many names to be trusted by most Englishmen, had gotten into a heated and arcane dispute in 1838 with a leading English zoologist, Richard Owen, over the reproduction of kangaroos. As a result, Coste, the most important nineteenth-century scientist on the subject of oysters, was regarded with great distrust and dislike by the British scientific establishment. Coste died in 1873, but his work, along with a stroke of good fortune, did save French beds. In 1868, an entire cargo of Portuguese oysters, Crassostrea angulata, was dumped in a storm near the mouth of the Gironde. A cousin of the American oyster, they were more durable than the European oysters, and as those declined, the Portuguese took their place.

  According to Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, originally published in 1851, 500 million oysters were sold every year in London’s Billingsgate Market. If all 500 million had been consumed in London, that would have meant an average of 185 oysters a year eaten by each Londoner, including children. But of course some Londoners ate more than their 185 and some none at all, and a great many oysters from Billingsgate were shipped out of the city. Still, London was an oyster-eating town. They had a market similar to the New York oyster barges. Theirs floated up the Thames and tied up together at a London wharf known as “Oyster Street.” The first to go were the scuttlemouths, large heavy oysters with thick shells and surprisingly small meat. They came from the Sussex coast and were dredged from the Channel, where the French dredged them, too, and called them “horse hooves,” pieds-de-cheval. They sold fast because they were cheaper than the quality oysters from the Thames estuary, a short boat ride from the London market. In 1864, it was calculated by the Times of London that 700 million oysters were being consumed annually in London and that all totaled, the English ate 1.5 billion oysters a year.

  The two most famous English oysters, Whitstable and Colchester, the ones so often compared to New York oysters in colonial times, were both in decline. The Whitstable Oyster Company had grown from 36 oystermen in 1793 to 408 in 1866. The Colne oyster fishery in Colchester grew from 73 in 1807 to 400 in 1866, a number that did not include the many apprentices. In fact, by 1844 its five hundred vessels employed two thousand men. Soon there were more oystermen than beds in Essex and they began moving farther off in search of new oyster beds, which they also cleaned out. With increased pollution and excessive exploitation, the beds began to decline. Further destruction was caused by the arrival of two foreign pests, the oyster drill and Crepidula fornicata, which creates muddy conditions.

  In another oyster center, Falmouth, on the coast of Cornwall, seven hundred men worked three hundred boats in the extensive inlets of Falmouth Bay. It was a profitable oyster center regulated by “close times” when the beds would be replenished by moratoriums on shellfishing. In 1866, it was decided by regulators ingesting new science that oysters were so fecund that they would continue replenishing the beds and oystering could not possibly take enough to affect the total population. It was a popular theory in the age of Darwin, inexhaustible nature. In 1863, a Royal Commission on Sea Fisheries headed by England’s preeminent scientist, Thomas Huxley, was formed to investigate what appeared to be the disappearance of a number of varieties of commercial fish. After two years of investigation, the same commission that assured the public that it was scientifically impossible to overfish cod also assured them that a healthy oyster bed could not be cleaned out. It agreed that the “supply of oysters has greatly fallen off ” but explained:

  This decrease has not arisen from overfishing, nor from any causes over which man has direct control, but from the very general failure of the spat, or young of the oyster; which appears, during the year in question, to have been destroyed soon after it was produced. A similar failure of the spat has frequently happened before, and probably will often happen again.

  Nineteenth-century Darwinian naturalism often taught that the forces of nature are so great and intricate that man cannot possibly impact on the result. By 1876, only ten years after the regulations were dropped, the Falmouth oyster beds had only forty boats and forty working oystermen and still each boat could only find sixty to one hundred oysters in a day. Before 1866, an average daily take of a Falmouth boat was between ten thousand and twelve thousand oysters. Oystering in the Channel Islands went from four hundred vessels to a few part-time oystermen. By 1886, annual English oyster production was down to 40 million oysters, which at the time was about five weeks’ consumption in New York City.

  In 1882, as the fall oyster season opened, the London Daily News reported:

  In the present dearth of oysters, turning what was once a season of joy, into one of regret, a pang of envy will seize the gormand who reads of the great oyster beds formed and in process of formation in that arm of the sea between Long Island and continental New York known as the Sound of the East River. Oyster farming in that favored region is carried out on a stupendous scale, which dwarfs the puny efforts of the Old World to insignificance. There are among the oyster-culturists of the Sound proprietors owning beds with an area of 4,000, 6,000, and 10,000 acres apiece and the bedding of the oyster is an operation on which considerable care, skill, time and labour are employed. The American oyster, which, when fresh torn from its natural bed, is a very different animal from the unhappy bivalves after an ocean voyage, lends itself very readily to cultivation and grows with extraordinary rapidity. In this country we are too apt to confound size with coarseness as the Zulus do fat with dignity, but the better advised Americans know by agreeable practice with Blue Points, Shrewsburys, Mobile Bays and other favorite oysters that the bigger they are the better they are and for every kind of roasting, broiling, steaming, and stewing immeasurably superior to any to be obtained in Europe. The East River farmers are gaining knowledge by experience, and have already discovered facts, which, if known, are practically ignored in Europe, to wit, that oysters thrive far better in deep than in shallow water, and prefer a bottom artificially made of oyster shells to any other. While they are eagerly laying down spat “full fathom five” beneath the surface, English and French oyster-growers appear to cling fondly to the shallow puddles in which oysters take an unconscionable time in growing to maturity.

  This ignores the fact that the American oyster is a completely different, faster-growing species than the European oyster. But what is significant is the extent to which the British were turning to American oysters. New York oyster producers had long been shipping to Europe. Before the Civil War, Colonel Harmon Thorne was known to give receptions in Paris featuring fried oysters from Downing’s. Downing’s was a New York trademark. This would be like a Paris reception today serving smoked fish from a famous New York deli. Downing also sent oysters to Queen Victoria, in appreciation for which the Queen sent him a gold chronometer watch.

  But in the second half of the nineteenth century, foreign markets, especially the English, were no longer an occasional outlet but an important part of the New York oyster trade. In 1883, a year after the London Daily News article appeared, The New York Times noted:

  The oyster men now do a heavy business in furnishing oysters for the European market. It has all grown up within the last five years. Five years ago I sent ten barrels to Liverpool as an experiment and had the greatest difficulty imaginable in disposing of them. There seemed to be a prejudice against things American and in order to sell them men had to be employed to peddle them around the streets in hand baskets. That was only five years
ago. The statistics show that during the year 1882, 5000 barrels a week were shipped to Europe and sold after they reached there. The English people have acquired a taste for American oysters and are obliged to admit their superiority over their natives.

  Oysters were being shipped from New York not only to Liverpool, Bristol, Cardiff, and Glasgow, but also to Le Havre, Bremen, and Hamburg. Bluepoints, not an obvious choice for shipping because of their thin shells, became a European favorite as they had long been in New York. Though not large by New York standards, they were known for their flavor, and their round thin shell that looked more like a European oyster than most New York varieties. Struggling to supply the demand for the brand name, producers in the 1870s attempted to pass off as Bluepoints Southern oysters that they tossed into the Great South Bay for a year. But the European market was demanding, and it rejected Bluepoints that were not truly native to the area.

  The leading merchants realized that such practices were damaging the reputation of their most valuable product. One of the leading New York City houses grew concerned that Chesapeake oysters were being sold to England as Bluepoints. An agent for the house intercepted a shipment of Bluepoints, opened the barrels as they were being loaded, and found that they were mostly “Virginias.” It was a new age of communications and the agent was able to telegraph Liverpool so that British authorities were waiting for the shipment when it landed. The oysters were confiscated, though it is not clear what happens to a healthy confiscated oyster. The American shipper was charged under British law with mislabeling, which carried considerable fines. The New Yorkers were not accustomed to such stringent consumer protection and the American agent argued that the oysters had spent a little time in the Great South Bay and they had thought that this was all that was required to label them Bluepoints. That the Americans don’t know any better is always an argument of some currency in England, and the charges were dropped.