All About Oysters
Rumored to be an aphrodisiac, oysters vary like fine wines.
October 9, 2007
By Martha Thomas
Photography by Bryan Burris
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An “aha” moment for Rowan Jacobsen came while he was sitting on a dock in Damariscotta, Maine. Oysters were being unloaded from a boat and shucked on the spot. “It was all there: the ice-cold water with a harbor seal popping up its head every so often,” says Jacobsen, who was in Maine to research a book on oysters. His epiphany was that those oysters tasted of that scene: the spruce trees and granite rocks, the seaweed and that barnacle-covered dock. As the cool, wet flesh of the oyster slid down his throat, he was tasting the coast of Maine with its crisp air and salty personality.
Jacobsen’s book, A Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur’s Guide to Oyster Eating in America, is scheduled for release this fall. His premise: “Oysters taste like the place they come from.”
A Moonstone from Rhode Island is briny, almost flinty, according to Jacobsen, while a bivalve from the fresh-water Rappahannock River in Virginia has only a hint of salt and is instead sweet and buttery. Oyster shells from Colville Bay on Canada’s Prince Edward Island take on the green hue of phytoplankton and the flesh within tastes lemony.
Oysters, it seems, have the nuances of fine wines.
When Europeans first sailed into the Chesapeake Bay they encountered the crassostrea virginica — the Eastern, or American,oyster — which grew everywhere, forming 20-foot-high reefs that created navigational hazards. The billions of living oysters filtered the bay every few days. By the 19th century, the reefs had disappeared, but the real crash came in the 1960s, as soaring demand for the delicacy simply outstripped the supply.
Tom O’Connell, assistant director of the Fisheries Service for Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources, says Maryland’s annual oyster harvest is about 150,000 bushels, compared to 2 million bushels in the middle of the last century. (Oyster restoration projects and the introduction of non-native species are under way.) The irony is that if oysters taste like their environment, you might not want to taste Chesapeake oysters nowadays: There aren’t enough left in the bay to keep the water clean.
For now, at least, Chesapeake oysters rarely make it onto tables at restaurants like the Oceanaire Seafood Room. The Oceanaire goes through about 3,000 oysters a week, with 10 to 12 varieties listed on the menu, which changes daily. Under the watchful eye of Ben Erjavec, the Oceanaire’s executive chef, my beau and I were presented with 22 oysters, two of each variety available that day. The shells were arranged in a ring on a tray filled with crushed ice and decorated with lemon wedges and dipping sauces. At first we tried to be strategic, jumping from East Coast to West, Maritimes to Massachusetts, to see if, indeed, the oysters tasted like their origins.
We were beginning oyster-philes, so expecting us to taste hints of melon, cucumber, lemon, butter and vinegar would be the equivalent of asking a novice oenophile to tell a Shiraz from a Syrah. But we discovered, in our unschooled throats, a basic vocabulary — fishy, salty, fresh, briny, cold — that did seem linked to geography. The oysters from Prince Edward’s Island were my favorite: fresh, cool and filled with possibility. The Martha’s Vineyard selections were salty and overbearing, while the smaller West Coast oysters tasted most like the sea, fishy and redolent.
We sipped sparkling wine from Spain and French Muscadet with our oysters, but we refrained from upstaging the flavors by dipping the shellfish in the mignonette (a traditional wine- and vinegar-based sauce) or the cocktail sauce. We experimented with utensils: First we used forks and fingers, but we eventually found that loosening the oyster flesh from the shell with a flick of the tongue worked best. (Then you suck the whole thing down in one motion.)
Erjavec took it all in, his smile every so often bordering on a smirk. “For most people,” he said, “the biggest problem eating oysters is getting over the texture.”
Now it’s time to get to the big myth about oysters: that they are an aphrodisiac. In fact, the creatures are full of zinc, which contributes to male potency, and the wet, salty, fishy, fleshy qualities are, ahem, evocative. Author Jacobsen says he found oyster lovers to be overwhelmingly male. On the other hand, he adds, “there’s nothing sexier than a woman eating an oyster.”
I beg to differ. A drop of salty liquor dribbled down my chin with every slurp, and I found myself picking stray bits of shell from my tongue — but perhaps that’s not unlike Lauren Bacall removing a flake of tobacco after that first sexy drag?
Oysters are synonymous with indulgence and impulsiveness, at home in a world of champagne and fine motorcars. My beau and I nestled side by side on a luxurious leather banquette in a restaurant that could have come from the Jazz Age, sipping wine and enjoying the ambient laughter of others enjoying themselves just as much as we were. We tasted the outdoors, a crisp breeze and a spray of salt, the chuckle of a seagull as the tide turned and the sun slowly set.
