Oyster Read online

  Oyster

  Animal

  Series editor: Jonathan Burt

  Already published

  Crow

  Ant

  Boria Sax

  Charlotte Sleigh

  Tortoise

  Dog

  Peter Young

  Susan McHugh

  Cockroach

  Marion Copeland

  Some forthcoming titles

  Wolf

  Bear

  Garry Martin

  Robert E. Bieder

  Tiger

  Spider

  Susie Green

  Katja and Sergiusz Michalski

  Snake

  Parrot

  Drake Stutesman

  Paul Carter

  Bear

  Whale

  Robert E. Bieder

  Joseph Roman

  Falcon

  Rat

  Helen Macdonald

  Jonathan Burt

  Moose

  Hare

  Kevin Jackson

  Simon Carnell

  Fox

  Bee

  MartinWallen

  Claire Preston

  Oyster

  Rebecca Stott

  REAKTION BOOKS

  For JB

  Published by

  REAKTION BOOKS LTD

  33 Great Sutton Street

  London EC1V 0DX, UK

  www.reaktionbooks.co.uk

  First published 2004

  Copyright © Rebecca Stott 2004

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers.

  Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and

  Index match the printed edition of this book.

  Printed and bound in Hong Kong

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Stott, Rebecca

  Oyster. – (Animal)

  1. Oysters 2. Animals and civilization

  I. Title

  594.4

  eISBN 9781861894946

  Contents

  Prologue: On Oysters and Memory

  1 Oyster Biographies

  2 Oyster Culture

  3 The Rise and Fall of the Oyster

  4 Oysters and Gluttony

  5 Oyster Flesh: Desire and Abjection

  6 Oyster Philosophies

  7 Oyster Arts

  8 Oysters, Sex and Seduction

  9 Pearl

  Epilogue: Tonguing Oysters

  Timeline

  References

  Bibliography

  Recipes

  Restaurants

  Acknowledgements

  Photo Acknowledgements

  Index

  A five-year old shellfish-worker in Biloxi, Mississippi, in 1911.

  Prologue: On Oysters and Memory

  In 1929 journalist and food writer Hector Bolitho described his love affair with the oyster in a delightful book called The Glorious Oyster. In colonial New Zealand, where he grew up in the late nineteenth century, settlers imitating English ways of life ate roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, shortbread from Edinburgh, turkey and steamed pudding at Christmas. Food was heavy, overcooked and rarely discussed or contemplated, for, Bolitho explains, by the nineteenth century talking about food had become a taboo: ‘So the gourmet of Queen Victoria’s time became a sinner. He met his kind in secret . . . ’.1 All this was to change for Bolitho when, at the age of fifteen, he went to stay in a boarding house in a hotel on a ‘romantic’ island off the coast of New Zealand, a mile or so from a settlement where Maoris were reputed to have eaten oysters at their cannibal feasts. Here the boy met a mysterious English traveller at the dining table and the two discovered a mutual pleasure in talking about food – oysters in particular. Eager to please the young man, Bolitho promised to take him to a rocky shore where oysters grew in their thousands:

  We came upon a place where the oysters grew, packed together, as closely as grapes. My English companion put the basket on the ground. He was a smiling, good-looking fellow, with a shirt and collar cut so well that they filled me with envy. He opened the basket and took out two bottles, two glasses, two plates and two forks. I produced nothing but a chisel. I broke the oysters off, one by one, choosing the big ones of tidy shape. The outsides of their shells were still wet from the sea. We prised them open and placed them, eighteen upon each plate. My friend produced lemon and red pepper and I began to eat.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. He brought the two bottles from a place behind the rock, where they had been cooling in a pool. One was champagne, and the other was stout. And thus was I introduced to the pleasure of eating oysters with black velvet. The drink was two thirds of stout and one of champagne.

  When I rush back over the years of my life, that summer day stands out as vividly as any. The calm, warm sea, the log against which we leaned, the plate of succulent fat oysters on my knee, and the first glass of this magic drink, which made the oysters more wonderful than any I had eaten before. And then my friend talked about food, of avocado pears dressed with vinegar and oil he had eaten in Africa, of stuffed lobsters – I remember the pleasure with which he described the colour of the red shell against the blue plate, as he had eaten them in Paris. He talked, too, of Russian soups, and fish stuffed with mushrooms, and duck dressed with yellow tiger lilies, snails perfectly cooked, brought out of their houses with the aid of a slender two-pronged silver fork.

  ‘But the oyster is the loveliest of all food’ . . . he said . . . ‘Someday you must write in praise of the oyster.’

  Oyster desires.

  Bolitho describes a midsummer encounter on a shoreline which ends with a promise and then a parting, after which nothing will be the same again. This is an awakening – not only to taste but also to beauty and to language. The boy’s promise to turn oysters into words for the mysterious stranger will be an act of love and of dedication to beauty. Bolitho’s description of his first taste of oysters as a moment of transformation is often repeated, particularly by writers. Because the oyster inspires both revulsion and fascination, the action of putting a live oyster in the mouth is an act of courage, curiosity and trust for each new oyster eater – trust that others have been here before and not only lived but have acquired a taste for more. Not surprisingly, then, these memories of eating the first oyster are often remembered and recounted as rites of passage in which there is an initiator and an initiated. In eating the oyster the novice passes from one stage into another. The oyster often thus marks a passing and a moment of transition.

  Unlike the mammals in this series, the oyster does not map onto the human form: it has no recognizable head, legs, eyes, mouth, skin, hands or arms. As a sea creature, it is quintessentially alien to the human form and to human experience. Yet when humans have anthropomorphized the oyster, it has been to describe the imagined essential forlornness of the oyster’s condition: most often a combination of loneliness, mournfulness, melancholy, nostalgia and unrequited love. The oyster is usually described as closed to the world, sealed off, and thus to have suffered: as silent, solitary and secret as an oyster. And fascinatingly, though oysters, in common with other similar sea creatures, change their sex frequently, the anthropomorphized oyster is almost always male.

  The history of the oyster–human encounter is a history characterized by intimacy and distance. They have been beyond knowing, beyond language, but as food they are also naked, exposed, offered up to be consumed and swallowed in millions in Roman villas on ancient seashores, and, in more modern times, in restaurants and from oyster stalls. The oyster tastes of the exotic, the salty unknown darkness of the sea-bed, yet its fl
esh is also strangely familiar; its name used as the title of one of the most notorious Victorian pornographic magazines, The Oyster, paired with its sister journal, The Pearl. Oysters are both on the tongue and beyond the power of the tongue. They are not only slippery; they are evasive, almost beyond knowing.

  Like the other animals in this series, the oyster, through its relationship with humankind, has accumulated layers of meanings through time, not limitless, but particular. Oysters have been eaten by prehistoric humans and cultivated since the Romans in many ways and within infinitely varied contexts. More surprisingly, perhaps, they have been used to explore aspects of the human condition: greed, lust, flesh and pleasure in particular, but also, as one of the earliest life forms on the planet, they have been used to explore natural philosophical questions about ‘deep time’ and about the nature of life itself.

  This book explores the oyster as a material being, its life history, reproductive modes and evolutionary history, its long association with sex in the human mind, the set of relationships it has had with man as food source since prehistoric times and the development of oyster and pearl industries around the world, as well as the rich meanings the oyster has amassed through time and in different cultures. What is the oyster and what has it come to be and mean alongside and for man? These questions need to be answered within specific contexts and with a long historical view. To tell the story of man’s relationship with the oyster is to tell of railways, Dutch seventeenth-century still-life painters, oyster dredgers, oyster police and oyster thieves, gourmets and epicures, beachcombers, oyster acts and oyster bills, and to tell too of the philosophies, meditations, moral homilies and poetry the oyster has inspired since the beginning of human culture.

  Anatomy of the oyster.

  1 Oyster Biographies

  Zoologically speaking, the oyster is a mollusc – an animal without a backbone but with an outer shell. It belongs to the same zoological phylum, Mollusca, as the mussel and snail and also the octopus and squid. It is also more precisely classified as a bivalve, which means that it has a shell in two parts or ‘valves’, held together by a hinge made of elastic ligament. But how has it come to be? How did the oyster ‘become’ an oyster? How long did it take for this curious anatomy – soft and complex, cupped in a hard shell lined with mother-of-pearl – to evolve?

  OYSTER EVOLUTIONS

  In The Meaning of Evolution, G. G. Simpson claims that ‘an oyster of 200,000,000 or more years in the past would look perfectly familiar if served in a restaurant today’.1 So we have to move even further back in time in order to trace its evolutionary beginnings. Zoologists speculating about the evolutionary origins of any creature begin by watching its embryological development, because the life cycle of an animal ‘recapitulates’ its evolutionary history like a kind of ancestral shadow. It is no coincidence that so many embryos of different creatures, including humans and oysters, look like sea creatures, for many of the first life forms on the planet were aquatic, emerging out of a primal sea. Unlike other increasingly amphibious land species that crawled their way lumberingly or slitheringly on to dry land, the oyster found an ideal way of reproducing and feeding on the seabed. Then, over millions of years of natural selection, it perfected that modus vivendi.

  Varieties of oyster.

  Oysters and other bivalve molluscs descended from a common ancestor, a ‘rather stocky’ marine animal like the modern snail. This creature had most of its movement muscles concentrated in a kind of foot set at the back and would have moved over the sea-bed with its tentacled head extended, sieving seawater for food through a gill cavity near its ‘foot’. Gradually – and we have to image time-lapse photography here stretching over thousands and millions of years of prehistory – it developed a sheet of tissue or a mantle, like the modern snail shell, to protect its soft flesh and – over more time – this developed into a dome-like shell. If alarmed it could retract both head and foot into this shell.

  Then over yet more unimaginable stretches of time, the snail-shell-like mantle closed in, bending along the mid-line down the centre of the back to form two shells. At this point in its evolution the ‘oyster’ (if we can call it that) could protrude its ‘foot’ by pumping blood into it, and protract its head like the snail or tortoise, but, as its two shells thickened over time, strengthening its defence mechanisms, the oyster’s head and foot became redundant and atrophied. The original gill cavity now came to extend all around the animal so that more and more water could be pulled through its body.2 Now if it were to be served on a plate in a restaurant it would be recognized as an oyster.

  Fossil remains confirm such speculations about the oyster’s origins. The very first animals on earth were microscopic single-celled aquatic animals – like bacteria – which emerged around 3,200 million years ago (in the Precambrian era) and crowded the seas. By around 540 million years ago (the very beginning of the Cambrian period, called the Palaeozoic era), their successors, who all still lived in the sea, had evolved hard outer skeletons that shielded the vulnerable parts of their bodies. This armoury enabled the various groups to multiply and develop very quickly. The most successful of these ‘armoured’ animals were the arthropods (segmented animals with an outer skeleton) known as the trilobites, which were diversifying into many different forms allowing them to flourish in different conditions all around the world.

  The illustration overleaf from Life Before Man (1972) shows some of the earliest forms of sea life: trilobites swim alongside echinoderms (spiny-skinned creatures – see the bulging bodies on a short stalk); the romantically named sea-lilies (far left) fan the water and brachiopods or ‘arm-footed’ creatures with two shells (bottom right) sift the water for plankton. Cephalopods (early relations of the cuttlefish) swim in tube-like shells, arms appearing to sprout from their heads. The animals that had survived to this point in prehistory had evolved defence mechanisms, armour and shells, and vulnerable tentacled flesh was now retractable.

  An artist’s impression of the ‘armoured’ life of the early seas. Oysters evolved from the brachiopods pictured on the sea-bed at bottom right.

  The fossil record shows that it was about 400 million years ago (the mid-Paleozoic era) that molluscs began to appear. Zoologists divide molluscs into three groups: gastropods (snails), bivalves (cockles, mussels and oysters – sea creatures with valves or shells, hinged together) and cephalopods (squid, octopus, cuttlefish and extinct groups such as ammonites and belemnites). Bivalves were particularly successful in ancient seas, gradually increasing in number throughout the Mesozoic era and Tertiary period (between 225 and 65 million years ago) and diversifying in shape, size, colour, reproductive modes and means of protection. Some lived in mud, others cemented themselves to hard surfaces, a few could even swim.

  A book illustration of a placodont, an early predator of the oyster.

  Species of early oysters made their appearance amongst these diversifying bivalves around 200 million years ago (the upper Triassic period) and multiplied enormously for the next 70 million years (through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods) so that by 135 million years ago they were one of the largest mollusc groups in the seas: an oyster empire.

  In its earliest days, then, the oyster shared the seas with cephalopods (related to the modern octopus and cuttlefish), ammonites (creatures like cuttlefish which lived inside a spiralled many-chambered shell), belemnites (which had two gills and a spear-shaped inner shell), early corals, ray-finned fishes, sharks, sea urchins, jellyfish and starfish. But who were their predators? Who ate oysters before human time? Placodonts, marine reptiles that looked like walrus–turtle hybrids with three eyes, lived mainly on molluscs and oysters and had evolved teeth for tearing off the shells from the sea-bed rocks and grinding them, and a snout for searching out molluscs in the mud, like a pig seeking truffles. One of the first oyster eaters was, then, as close to the walrus as any other modern animal. Later, of course, Lewis Carroll would make much of his walrus oyster eater in ‘The Walrus and the Carpe
nter’, but we may never know if he knew of the walrus’s placodont ancestor.

  Ostrea cucillina or the hooded oyster.

  Oysters flourished in the age of the amphibious lizard and the dinosaur. On land, at the same time, other primitive armoured amphibians foraged, fought and reproduced: early forms of newts and salamanders, turtles and tortoises, crocodiles, the brontosaurus, diplodocus and brachiosaurus and winged reptiles. All of these reptiles would become extinct during a catastrophic change of climate at the end of the Cretaceous period, around 65 million years ago. Dinosaurs, ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, belemnites, ammonites and many other groups of invertebrates and brachiopods died away. But the oyster was one of the survivors, outliving the catastrophe along with most other molluscs and crocodiles, tortoises, snakes, lizards, gastropods, octopi, cuttlefish and giant squid.3 The oyster had out-survived the dinosaur.

  When the Revd Williams mused in 1856 that the oyster ‘is to be traced to a period so remote as to eclipse the ancestry of Britain’s proudest peer’,4 his hyperbole fabulously understated the oyster’s story, for these shellfish filtered the seas millions of years before Homo sapiens appeared some modest 130,000 years ago. The oyster is nearly 200 million years older than man.

  Through that long history oysters continued to diversify, mutating into several different subgroups, adapting slowly and through natural selection to the conditions in which they lived. Those from colder regions evolved to fertilize within the oyster (these are called ‘larviporous’) and include the European oyster (Ostrea edulis), British Columbian (Ostrea lurida), Japanese (Ostrea gigas), South Australian and Tasmanian (Ostrea angasi), and New Zealand (Ostrea chilensis). Others adapting to warm and tropical seas evolved to spawn straight into the sea (they are called ‘oviporous’) and these include the US oyster (Crassostrea virginica), Japanese (Crassostrea gigas), Australian (Crassostrea commercialis), Portuguese (Crassostrea angulata) and Indian (Ostrea cucullata).