More Shellfish Stories
An Oyster to Fight For
I've lived on the Pacific shore for more than a decade, yet I have never knowingly eaten an oyster. Then again, most British Columbians have never eaten an oyster that is actually native to this coast. That's right -- the famous Fanny Bay oyster and other familiar varieties from local fish shops and restaurants are introduced species. The exception is the Olympia oyster, Ostreola conchaphila, and I have five dozen of them heaped in front of me for shucking.
I'm really going to earn that first taste of oyster.
Until about 1913, any oyster I ate on the coast from at least northern B.C. to southern California would have been an Olympia -- making the "Oly" (as it's known to its fans) a potent symbol of our historical relationship to the sea. Today the Olympia oyster has largely vanished both from our shores and our collective memory. Read more...
The Taste of an Oyster
(This is an excerpt from Rowan Jacobsen’s A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Oyster Eating in North America, Bloomsbury USA (September 4, 2007). Copyright Rowan Jacobsen.
An amazing amount of ink has been spilled over the years in an effort to nail the taste of oysters. The essayist Michel de Montaigne compared them to violets. Eleanor Clark mentioned their “shock of freshness.” M. F. K. Fisher was one of many to point out that they are “more like the smell of rock pools at low tide than any other food in the world.” To the French poet Léon-Paul Fargue, eating one was “like kissing the sea on the lips.” For James Beard, they were simply “one of the supreme delights that nature has bestowed on man. ... Oysters lead to discussion, to contemplation, and to sensual delight. There is nothing quite like them.” Something about them excites the palate, and the mind, in a way that other shellfish don’t. You don’t see cookbooks devoted to scallops, and you’d never have found M. F. K. Fisher writing Consider the Clam. Read more...