To Taste of the Sea
“Oysters are the usual opening to a winter breakfast. Indeed, they are almost indispensable.” Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière, (1758 – 1837) Terroir The French term terroir is often used throughout the wine world to describe elements such as the climate, geology, topography and management practices and their impact on a wine’s aroma and taste and overall phenotype. It forms the basis of the French wine appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) system and is the model for the geographical regulation of wine grape cultivation and winemaking around the world. The foundation premise being that the habitat the wine grapes are grown in imparts specific qualities and characters unique to its exclusive site, others go further and include the producers themselves, so that a combination of farm and family create something truly unique and inimitable in the bottle. Merroir Oysters are natural filter feeders; they feed by pumping water through their gills, trapping particles of food, nutrients, suspended sediments and contaminants. In doing so, oysters help keep the waters around them clean and clear for other aquatic life. But, if you are what you eat, then just as the soils and the diet available to grapevines impact on the ultimate, character, quality and flavour of what the grapes taste like, so too does the maritime environment, diet and management of an oyster play a very big part in both its physical make up and its ultimate taste. It should be of little surprise the oysters taste like where they come from and what they eat, this not only gives them observable quality it also gives them truly regional characteristics. In French, the word mer means sea, and so the term merroir has been adopted to describe a sense of maratime terroir for oysters. “As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.” Ernest Hemingway, ‘A Moveable Feast’ The Big Oyster Oysters have been eaten since antiquity, there are oyster middens in Australia dating back 10,000 years BC and there is evidence of oyster cultivation in Japan as far back as 2,000 years BC. During the time of the Ancient Greeks and the Roman Empire they were being over-harvested and seen as a delicacy, only available to the wealthier, privileged classes. Then, for over 100 years, beginning in the early 1800s all that changed, and Oysters experienced something of a golden age, thriving as a ubiquitous and inexpensive source of protein for all. It has been recorded that in during the 1800s New Yorkers consumed over one million oysters every week! During this period the population of New York City went from 60,000 in 1800 to 3.8 million people at the turn of the century, to just over 10 million people by 1930. There is evidence of large scale oyster consumption in the area dating back to 6950 B.C. and Oysters thrived for thousands of years in the brackish waters around New York Harbor. As filter feeders, they kept the estuary clean and fed the native inhabitants. In the early 1600s the New York metro area is said to have contained nearly half of the world’s entire oyster population. Immigrants soon turned this resource into a major industry, and to such an extent that oyster shells were used in road paving and ground up to be mixed in with construction cement. As well as being available in restaurants and specific ‘oyster cellars’ all over New York city, oysters were being shipped all over the country. New Yorkers ate them anytime and almost anywhere, including from carts on the street. They ate Blue Points, Saddle Rocks, Rockaways, Lynnhavens, Cape Cods, Buzzard Bays, Cotuits, Shrewsburys—raw on the half shell. They ate them as fried oysters, oyster pie, oyster patties, oyster box stew, Oysters Pompadour, Oysters Algonquin, oysters a la Netherland, a la Newberg, a la Poulette, oysters roasted on toast, broiled in shell, served with cocktail sauce, stewed in milk or cream, fried with bacon, escalloped, fricasseed, and pickled. At the height of their fame New York oysters were considered the finest in the world at a time when New York was the busiest port in the world. In a comprehensive history of the oyster in New York, ‘The Big Oyster’, author Mark Kurlansky wrote, “the history of the New York oyster is a history of New York itself—its wealth, its strength, its excitement, its greed, its thoughtfulness, its destructiveness, its blindness, and—as any New Yorker will tell you—its filth.” It was pollution and over-harvesting that killed the oyster industry in New York, a surprising feat considering that the lower Hudson estuary once had 350 square miles of oyster beds.” While visiting New York in the 1790s, the Frenchman Moreau de St. Mery commented, “Americans have a passion for oysters, which they eat at all hours, even in the streets.” Oysters were regular fare at cheap eateries, and it was claimed that the very poorest New Yorkers “had no other subsistence than oysters and bread.” Fortunately, oysters are nutritious—rich in protein, phosphorus, iodine, calcium, iron, and vitamins A, B, and C.” One early problem for the New York oyster industry was the use of child labor, children as young as four years old would work from 3am to 5pm shucking oysters, much of this was documented and reported by former schoolteacher Lewis Wickes Hine who gave up the classroom to document the plight of these poor children and he reported it to National Child Labor Committee, of which he had become their chief photographer. His photographs exist as confrontational evidence to this day, and his work changed the laws governing child labor in America forever. Carmen Nigro, Managing Research Librarian, Milstein Division of … Read more
