Beard of the Week LVIII: The Big Oyster
This week's beard belongs to Mark Kurlansky, celebrated author of Salt and a number of other books. In fact, one of those other books is my subject at hand or, perhaps, at chin. (Photograph by Sylvia Plachy, which I took from this citation for the 2007 Dayton Literary Peace Prize in Nonfiction given to Kurlansky.)
I recently read his book The Big Oyster : History on the Half Shell (New York : Ballantine Books, 2006. xx + 307 pages). I found it very appealing–engaging and informative. It is a book about oysters, and New York City since, as he wrote (p. xvi), "The history of New York oysters is a history of New York itself." Incredibly, it's a topic that was worthy of 300 pages. My book note is here. Now, as often happens with interesting books, some leftover excerpts.
Here in two paragraphs, a thumbnail history of how the Dutch lost New York City to the British and the origin of the name "Wall Street", so much in the news lately.
In 1653, the Dutch West India Company ordered the construction of an enormous wall to protect New Amsterdam. Most of the physical labor was done by African slaves owned by the company. The forty-three wealthiest citizens loaned the financing at 10 percent interest, creating both the first Wall Street financial transaction and the first city debt. The wall was made out of fifteen-foot wooden planks and followed present-day Wall Street from the Hudson to the East River with two gates, one at the present-day intersection of Wall and Pearl Streets and the other where Broadway now crosses Wall Street. The settlers of New Amsterdam no longer had open access to the rest of Manhattan.
Today the popularly held belief is that the wall had been built to defend the settlement from Indian attacks. Given the way Indian-settler relations were going, this is not an illogical assumption. But in fact the wall was conceived at the outbreak of the Anglo-Dutch War to defend against a possible British attack from New England. Why would a maritime people expect another maritime people to attack their seaport from the land side? When the British attack finally came, not surprisingly for the world's leading naval power, it was by sea and the wall was a useless defense. [p. 44]
And here, a quick excursion into how alive is an oyster on the half shell. (Warning: those who like eating oysters that way but are of a queasy persuasion might want to skip this excerpt.)
The muscle that an oyster uses to squeeze its shell closed has extraordinary strength relative to its small size. Oyster shuckers sometimes refer to it as "the heart." They think of it as a vital organ, because once it is cut the oyster easily opens and so is presumed dead — stabbed in the heart. Oyster shuckers may not want consumers to know the truth. All they have done is destroy the oyster's ability to squeeze the ligament. William K. Brooks, the nineteenth-century Maryland pioneer in the study of oysters, said, "A fresh oyster on the half-shell is no more dead than an ox that has been hamstrung." If the oyster is opened carefully, the diner is eating an animal with a working brain, a stomach, intestines, liver and a still-beating heart. As for the "liquor," that water essence of oyster flavor that all good food writers caution to save, it is mostly oyster blood.
Finally, another etymological moment (not that the book is nothing but, just that I like these little stories about how we come to use certain words to mean certain things, especially when it elucidates a bit of history in an interesting way). In this case, the topic is the beginning of oyster cultivation in the NY Harbor, and why those baby oysters are called "spats".
But for oyster cultivation to have the kind of large-scale efficiency that was required for the hungry nineteenth-century market, the oysters would need to be collected and moved at a far earlier stage, when they were tiny swimming creatures. Coste understood that by providing favorable and plentiful attachment material, an oyster farmer could considerably improve on nature's survival rate and raise large quantities of oysters.
Others had quietly taken an early lead. The Japanese and even some in the Naples area had managed to collect seed oysters, as had the Chinese, with woven bamboo. Meso-Americans in coastal Mexico had solved the entire problem years, possibly centuries, earlier using tree branches to collect the tiny swimming young oysters. New York oystermen called these minuscule swimmers spats because they referred to spawning as spitting and they had been spat. [p. 119]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Books, Food Stuff