It’s a measure of my laser-like focus on Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe that The Celestial Monochord has gone without any mention of oysters until this month. For you see, not only do I love raw oysters, I’ve also read two — count ’em, TWO — books about oysters since last spring.
The first was M. F. K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. Fisher seems to have been almost a food-focused Dorothy Parker or Edna St. Vincent Millay — you know, a brilliant writer, and an independent, bohemian, bisexual, martini-swilling raconteur. More or less.
Her Consider the Oyster is a beautifully-written, tiny little book — elegant and kind and wickedly funny, if sometimes a bit too silly. Open the book to any paragraph and you’ll see. Here she is early in the first chapter, discussing the early life of an oyster:
He is small, but he is free-swimming … and he swims thus freely for about two weeks, wherever the tides and his peculiar whims may lead him. He is called a spat.
It is to be hoped, sentimentally, at least, that the spat — our spat — enjoys himself. Those two weeks are his one taste of vagabondage, of devil-may-care free roaming. And even they are not quite free, for during all his youth he is busy growing a strong foot and a large supply of sticky cementlike stuff. If he thought, he might wonder why. [all original punctuation, etc.]
She gives many oyster recipes, and her ability to splice them seamlessly into a great story is dazzling. Writing before 1941 with an intimate eye for detail, her stories are vivid views of all sorts of gone worlds — fancy restaurants in France, roadside shacks in Maine, a girl’s school in Michigan, if I remember correctly. It’s only 76 pages long, and even I — slowest reader on Earth — finished it in a weekend. I’m even tempted to re-read it before the months without R’s begin.
By the way, Fisher says refrigeration had already rendered oysters safe to eat even in Oskaloosa, Iowa in any month of the year. Avoiding the R-less months might help the oyster farmer, since oysters lay their eggs during the warm months, but no season renders them dangerous to eat. Besides, some say summer oysters taste better.
I do recommend the other oyster book I read last year … it’s not Mark Kurlansky’s fault that a world-class stylist got to the subject first, and it’s even less his fault that I read Fisher’s book immediately before The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.
Kurlansky writes those pop history books where some very improbable thing changed the world forever — 1968, cod, salt. Stylistically, he’s as workmanlike and kitchen-sinky as you might expect. But his oyster book did transform my view of both New York and oysters, and made me enjoy the education.
The Big Oyster begins with Europeans sailing into New York Harbor for the first time, which allows Kurlansky to show how beautiful, bountiful and sweet-smelling its waters used to be — how much New York’s very existence was ABOUT those qualities. For me, it was an opportunity to finally wrap my mind around the confounding geography of New York City, and beginning with the estuary in its natural state turned out to be key.
But The Big Oyster has organizational issues, and can feel frustratingly directionless. I frequently thought of the fish in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life — the ones who complain there isn’t much in the movie about the meaning of life. Still, there are moments when your mind spins. Do you know why Manhattan city fathers laid out two hundred streets going from side to side (the short way) but only about twelve the long way (Bronx to Battery)? Because they thought the main flow of traffic would be between the two riverfronts. New York used to know where it was situated.
Kurlansky does leave us much more savvy about oysters than Fisher does. You can read Fisher closely without really realizing that all oysters you’re ever likely to eat have been seeded, grown, and harvested by farmers — and it’s been like this for at least 150 years. There hasn’t been a natural, unmolested oyster bed essentially anywhere for more than a century. If there were, you wouldn’t want to eat oysters from it. Natural oysters tend to get huge, and eating them is like “eating a baby.”
Editor’s Note: Well, here I am! The Celestial Monochord is trying to post an entry every day during the month of February. This here is installment 21 of 28. Whoo-hoo!
MFK Fisher’s book How to Cook a Wolf was on the shelf in the kitchen of my family friend, Nancy Scott (for a long time the lively arts editor for The Weekly People), who was also the person who gave me The Count of Monte Christo to read and assured me I would find people who knew what I was talking about some day. The wolf in the title of the book was the wolf at the door, and the book was a collection of essays about scraping by in hard times, while living an exciting bohemian life. She lived in the Bay Area at the end of her life, and occasionally an article by her or about her would appear in the Chronicle or other local publications.
But she’s wrong about months with an R in them or not. The reason shellfish are dangerous in the summer months is not that they go bad, but because of red tide organisms, which tend contaminate the near shore off and on through those months. The shellfish pick up the red tide organisms and the red tide toxin, and no amount of refrigeration can prevent it.
I love my oysters fried, but more often than not, restaurants fry the hell out of ’em until they are reduced to charcoaled bits of chewy tasteless crispy critters.
I have even tried my hand at shucking, but I am a lefty and had to use a righty oyster knife. It was not pretty.