The Big Oyster (15 page)

In 1834, the Delmonicos bought a 250-acre farm in Williamsburg, Long Island, which later became a section of Brooklyn. They did this not only because as successful New Yorkers they needed a country home, but because they wanted farmland to grow produce not available in the New York markets. Many of these items were French or Italian, but the Delmonicos were also innovative with native American products. At a time when tomatoes, known as love apples, were just becoming popular as an ornamental plant to brighten gardens, the Delmonicos introduced New Yorkers to cooking with them.

By the 1830s, a discriminating diner could survive in Manhattan. Several alternatives to Delmonico's opened, including the Astor House, a five-story hotel on Broadway between Vesey and Barclay streets. An 1837 Astor House menu listed many French dishes but also two lingering vestiges of English cooking: “boiled cod and oysters” and “oyster pie.”

At Delmonico's, the trendsetter, the emphasis was always on the French, who by the nineteenth century favored oysters raw on the half shell, served as an appetizer. It was not enough to have French dishes and French ingredients and, where possible, French chefs and French maître d's, but the service was also to be French. French words,
mots,
were to be dropped as often as possible. The service was to have a French style, and to a large degree, the menu was to be written in French. All this was not only the pride of many affluent New Yorkers, but it pleased a considerable New York population of Frenchmen. Louis-Napoléon, nephew of the emperor and future ruler of France, was a Delmonico's regular while in exile, dining with a handsome young actor named James Wallack, with whom he returned to France. The Prince de Joinville was another Delmonico regular in 1840 when his command, a frigate named
Belle Poule,
was in port.

Not everyone was pleased by this turn to that always slightly suspect affliction, Francophilia. Philip Hone, the self-made, outspoken ex-mayor wrote in his diary in 1838:

My wife, daughter Margaret, Jones and I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Olmstead. The dinner was quite
à la française.
The table, covered with confectionery and gew-gaws, looked like one of those shops down Broadway in the Christmas holidays, but not an eatable thing. The dishes were all handed round; in my opinion a most unsatisfactory mode of proceeding in relation to this important part of the business of a man's life. One does not know how to choose, because you are ignorant of what is coming next, or whether anything more is coming. Your conversation is interrupted every minute by greasy dishes thrust between your head and that of your next neighbor, and it is more expensive than the old mode of shewing a handsome dinner to your guests and leaving them free to choose. It will not do. This French influence must be resisted.

Both the steamboat
service to Albany and the Erie Canal were destined to be swiftly fleeting marvels, eclipsed by the next idea. Only seven years after the
Seneca Chief
brought whitefish to New York Harbor, the city's railroad age had begun. The New York and Harlem Railroad began service from Union Square to Twenty-third Street. But soon there were rail connections in and out of the city to Boston, across New York State to the Great Lakes, down to Washington, out to the growing West. As with the other innovations, not everyone was happy about this new idea, especially the city farmers. New York City milk producers were convinced that the Erie Railroad would be their ruin and warned New Yorkers that the city was going to be flooded with inferior milk. They were right about the quantity but not the quality. In 1842–43, the Erie Railroad brought three million quarts of milk into New York City. By the end of the decade, that amount had tripled.

1853 advertisement
COLLECTION OF THE NEW-YORK HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Midwest newspapers advertised the arrival of New York City oysters and their competitor, Chesapeake Bay oysters. Since oysters grow faster in warmer waters, the Chesapeake ones had the advantage, in an age when size mattered, of being much larger. But Northern oysters had a reputation of being more durable for travel. Oysters on ice followed the rail lines to Buffalo, then Cleveland, then Cincinnati. In 1852, the Michigan Southern Railroad brought the first East Coast train into Chicago. Soon it was on to St. Louis. And all these trains carried New York oysters. As a young politician in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln threw oyster parties at which hundreds of oysters were consumed.

Oysters were cheap. New York City oyster houses often offered the Canal Street Plan, which was “all you can eat,” raw on the half shell, for six cents. At the same time, fashionable restaurants were offering off-season strawberries from the Mediterranean for fifty cents a berry. For most nineteenth-century diners, “all you can eat” was a considerable quantity of oysters. Who would dream of stopping at a half dozen? A few dozen was a nice appetizer. Midnineteenth-century recipes called for enormous quantities of oysters and usually specified that they should be large ones. Eliza Leslie, a Philadelphian whose
Directions for Cookery
had sixty editions between 1837 and the posthumous 1870 edition, sometimes called for hundreds of oysters or several quarts shelled. Her recipe for pickled oysters begins, “Take a hundred and fifty fine large oysters . . . .”

   
Oyster Soup

Season two quarts of oysters with a little cayenne. Then take them out of the liquor. Grate and roll fine a dozen crackers. Put them into the liquor with a large lump of fresh butter. When the grated biscuit has quite dissolved, add a quart of milk with a grated nutmeg, and a dozen blades of mace; and, if in season, a head of celery split fine and cut into small pieces. Season it to your taste with pepper.

Mix the whole together, and set it in a closely covered vessel over a slow fire. When it comes to a boil, put in the oysters; and when it comes to a boil again, they will be sufficiently done.

Before you send it to the table put into the tureen some toasted bread cut into small squares, omitting the crust.

—ELIZA LESLIE,
Miss Leslie's Directions for Cookery, 1851 edition

The combination of having reputably the best oysters in the world in what had become unarguably the greatest port in the world made New York City for an entire century the world's oyster capital. The only question now, and only a few had the insight and bluntness to raise it, was whether there were enough oysters in New York Harbor to feed the world.

CHAPTER SIX

Eggocentric New Yorkers

A
curiosity in the development of marine biology is that
little is learned about a species until it is faced with extinction. As early as 1810, the oyster beds of Staten Island, where oystering was a leading economic activity, were showing signs of exhaustion. By the 1820s, most New York beds had been overharvested and could no longer keep up with the growing demand for New York oysters. Some were nearly barren, with only the occasional oyster on a stripped ocean floor.

It was at that eleventh hour that scientists stepped in.

Most of the oyster families, genera, and species had not even been identified at the time. Fortunately, the European
Ostrea
had troubles of its own, which in turn led a scientist to some ideas about what to do about it.

Cultivating oysters was an ancient European concept. Although none of the commercial producers bothered with it very much until North American and European beds started to show signs of permanent exhaustion in the nineteenth century, the idea had been under contemplation for a very long time. Long before anything was understood about the reproductive process of oysters, the possibility of seeding artificial beds was discussed. Aristotle noted that fishermen had taken natural oysters and moved them to a more favorable spot in a current where they “fattened greatly” but did not reproduce. An artificial bed had been created, but to maintain it, the bed would have to be replanted regularly with more oysters.

The seafloors of the ancient Aegean and Mediterranean were littered with both whole and broken pottery from shipments of wine and olive oil lost in storms. So much pottery was lost at sea that in some spots divers today still regularly run across both whole and broken pieces. By chance it was discovered that oysters seemed to like to attach themselves to this material. Would not scattering broken pottery over a suitable area create an ideal artificial oyster bed? Oysters from somewhere else could be deposited there.

The Romans were interested in such questions because they associated oysters with wealth and even created a coin in their currency, the
denarius,
which was supposed to be worth the value of one oyster. They also developed a love of gluttony. According to Edward Gibbon, the great eighteenth-century chronicler of the fall of the Roman Empire, a calamity not entirely disassociated from this turn toward gluttony, Vitellius, a first-century
A.D.
Roman emperor, ate as many as one thousand oysters at a sitting. The Romans ate oysters both raw and cooked. Apicius, who lived in the time of Vitellius, recommended them raw with sauces such as this mayonnaise:

For oysters: pepper, lovage, egg yolk, vinegar, garum [a sauce of salted fermented fish], oil, and wine. If you wish, add honey.

But he also offered this cooked “Baian stew” recipe:

Into a pot put small oysters, mussels, jellyfish, chopped roasted pine nuts, rue, celery, pepper, coriander, cumin, passum [raisin wine], garum, date, and oil.

Sergius Orata, a son of first-century
B.C.
Rome and its epicurean excesses, cultivated the European flat oyster,
Ostrea edulis,
in brackish lakes near Naples. These lakes have the kind of soft, black, muddy bottoms in which oysters sink and suffocate. But he placed at regular distances piles of rocks. He planted oysters from Brindisi on these rock piles and left them permanently to spawn at will. He surrounded each pile with a circle of stakes connected by rope above the water and then hung twigs from the ropes. When the breeding oysters discharged their fertilized eggs, the eggs were immediately attracted to the twigs as a place to attach themselves. The cultivator could regularly lift the twigs out of the water, pulling off the oysters of desirable size and lowering the twigs back with the smaller ones still attached to continue growing.

Orata made a fortune selling these oysters, or so said Pliny, but he also used them to feed the sea bream he was attempting to farm for commercial use. “Oyster-fed sea bream” was a great marketing concept in a Rome that loved wastefully exotic gourmetism, which is why the fish, in Italian, was named after him,
orata.
He cultivated more and more oysters in these lakes that were supposed to provide luxury bathing for the rich, until finally he was sued by bathers reluctant to share space with bivalves. The complainant quipped that even if Orata was stopped from growing his oysters in the lake, he would grow them on “the tiles,” which some have translated as roofs and others the tiles of his shower baths. Orata would grow oysters anywhere he could. But while it was true that growing oysters was one of his preoccupations, baths were another. Orata had considerably improved the facilities by inventing the pipe-heated floor and the shower, from the marketing of which he was said to have earned yet another fortune.

In the nineteenth century, French naturalists such as Jean Jacques Marie Cyprien Victor Coste, professor of embryology, took up the subject of oyster culture not because oysters were running out in Staten Island and the East River, but because the beds of France from Normandy to the Arcachon near Bordeaux were looking bare. In France, the oyster tradition is no doubt as old as in Britain, with both tracing back to at least Roman times. The earliest-known French recipe collections include oysters, and though by the time of Coste the French had come to disdain oysters eaten any way but raw, these early French oyster dishes were generally cooked. This one, from
Le Mesnagier de Paris,
a guide to household management written by a fourteenth-century Frenchman to his child bride, is similar to English oyster soup recipes of the same period, and would probably be appalling to later Frenchmen:

Oysters are first washed in warm water, then boiled until their flavor is left in the broth, it must not froth up. Take them out and, if you wish, fry them and add a few of them to the soup bowls and serve the rest on a platter.

When Coste began, at the request of the French government, to contemplate the French oyster problem, he first looked at the work of Orata in Naples, work that was still well known in Europe. Without learning anything more about the animal, medieval Europeans had imitated Orata's practices, so that by the nineteenth century, replanting oysters was commonplace. Usually this was done because the ideal environment for reproduction and the ideal environment for growth were not the same.

New Yorkers understood this. In the early eighteenth century, when townships started laying exclusive claim to their own parts of Long Island's Great South Bay, it became clear that not all of the bay was equal. Young oysters prospered in the east bay while in the west bay they were decimated by oyster drills. But those that survived the west-bay oyster drills would grow far plumper at a much faster rate than the east-bay oysters. The east bay, completely cut off from the ocean by Fire Island and fed by numerous rivers, had a low salinity. The west bay, exposed to the open Atlantic, was far saltier. The east bay did not have enough salt for the oyster drill. But it also didn't have enough salinity for optimum oyster growth. The solution was to raise the oysters in the east bay until big and tough enough to survive and then replant them for growth in the west. Such operations had been carried out all over the world for centuries. Orata had found that oysters developed very well in Brindisi up to a point, but when transferred to his lakes would grow much faster.

Oyster growers had learned some things. They had learned that an oyster is fairly discriminating about what it will attach to. Pottery works well, oyster shells work better. Clean surfaces are preferable. Silt is death. The French had for centuries been raising oysters in
claires,
artificial ponds constructed above sea level so that the seawater would only flow in at high tides.

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.

But no one in Paris or New York had noticed what Meso-Americans did with spats and it would take centuries for the French, completely independently, to settle on the same technique. Throughout the nineteenth century, as knowledge of the oyster grew, the ability to raise them artificially became increasingly sophisticated. In 1853, M. de Bon, the French-government marine commissioner, was ordered to restock some of the depleted beds and by chance discovered that oysters could also reproduce in places where none had been before. This led to experiments trying to capture the young free-swimming oysters, the spats, and plant them. De Bon devised a system of planks on the ocean floor covered with twigs. It was a variation on Orata's method eighteen hundred years earlier. De Bon never actually collected spats this way, but Victor Coste did. Coste received a government commission to attempt spat collecting on a large scale. Three million oysters were delivered to him by a fleet of small steam-powered vessels. He prepared a bed, spreading the seafloor with oyster shells. After the oysters were planted, bundles of sticks were anchored to the floor on a rope floating a foot above. At the end of one season, they hauled up the twigs and they were covered with small oysters. One bundle had twenty thousand oysters attached to it. In 1863, he obtained 16 million oysters of marketable size from half of a single one-thousand-acre bed. The government began granting seabed land to oystermen. Lots of 492 acres within a few years were yielding oyster harvests valued at $8 million.

Illustrations from William K. Brooks's 1891 book shows the technique to farm seed oysters.

With typically French administration, the government regulated the fishery by dividing the entire coastline into five arrondissements, thirteen sous-arrondissements, and sixty quartiers. A two-tier system was established. Where there were natural beds, they were dredged. The beds were maintained by cleaning them out and putting down tile or other cultch for larvae to adhere to. In this way a breeding stock was maintained. Some of the larvae would be placed in artificial beds, shallow-water locations, where tiles, sticks, string, or other objects were placed to catch them. When they grew into spats, the centimeter-long flakes were kept in mesh cages until they developed thick hard shells and then they were planted in the beds to grow and fatten.