Oyster Read online

  By the nineteenth century oysters had become ubiquitous in America too, and like England, the food of both rich and poor, formal food of the great banquet and informal food of the street. In 1842 Charles Dickens visited America for the first time and befriended the oyster-lover Cornelius Felton, Professor of Greek at Harvard. The two went ‘roistering and oystering in New York’, eating their oysters from stalls and talking to local oyster sellers. Later Dickens would correspond with Felton, writing letters that were full of oyster comedy, including this extract in which he pondered over what oyster openers did in New York in the summer months when oysters were out of season:

  Do they commit suicide in despair, or wrench open tight drawers and cupboards and hermetically sealed bottles – for practice? Perhaps they are dentists out of the oyster season. Who knows.14

  ‘Bernstein’s Fish Grotto’, a San Francisco oyster shop, was established in 1912.

  Felton accompanied Dickens to a huge reception that the people of New York had organized for Dickens’s visit, which was attended by 3,000 people and at which 50,000 oysters were served to both male and female guests. It seems that in America oyster eating had become democratized at such large public occasions far earlier than it would be in Britain. There is no evidence that the mayor of New York kept the best oysters for the most important guests, for he had ordered more than a dozen oysters per guest.

  In Britain, city oyster feasts remained exclusive events until the early twentieth century, and the guest lists from the early nineteenth century to the early twentieth mirror in interesting ways the gradual opening up of the franchise. As the status of citizens changed – and perhaps because votes were now to be won – so city oyster feasts would cater to much larger numbers of guests each year. In ‘Civic Ritual and the Colchester Oyster Feast’,15 the historian David Cannadine shows how the oyster festival held in Colchester was democratized gradually during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Between 1800 and 1870 the oyster feast took the form of a small private feast held by the wealthier Tory and Anglican members of the corporation. By 1880, when the more democratic city council established a grammar school and became increasingly central to the life of the city, it turned the oyster feast into a grand, public pageant open to all the men in the city (the franchise had been extended to include all men in 1867). A new town hall was built in 1897, in part to house the feast. It is striking how closely oyster feast enfranchisement mirrors political enfranchisement for women were allowed to attend the oyster feast only after 1914; the right to vote was granted to women only over the age of 30 in 1918 and to all women in 1928.

  Given Cannadine’s thesis about the Colchester oyster feast being a ritual around which civic responsibility and pride were modelled, a sonnet to the oyster written for the Diamond Jubilee Toast list in 1897 (when the feast was still a men-only affair) shows the oyster anthropomorphized as a model of civic virtues, the spirit of the feast itself – and quite definitely a masculinized set of values:

  To public men – and private men as well –

  The Moral of the Feast these verses tell.

  In spite of foes, which everywhere abound,

  The cool impassive Oyster keeps his ground:

  Tenacious, firm, in temper unexcelled,

  His mouth kept shut, unless he is compelled,

  And then imparting only what he should,

  Not for his own, but for the public good,

  All sweet, agreeable, in perfect taste,

  With nought superfluous to vex – or waste;

  Unselfishly relinquishing his ease,

  His only object seems to be to please.16

  This sonnet celebrating the oyster as a civically minded creature reverses the range of poetic anthropomorphisms the oyster has assumed over hundreds of years. It is much more usually associated with stupidity or silence or inertia and almost always with a kind of solipsistic individualism, as Eleanor Clark writes: ‘Though the oyster spawn and teem, it is always oyster – singular that is used in culture: silent as an oyster, alone as an oyster . . . ’17 Dickens, for instance, described Scrooge in A Christmas Carol as ‘secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster’. But for the civic feast for which this oyster poem was written, the poet enlisted the oyster in the rhetoric of town pride and civic responsibility. Oyster anthropomorphisms it seems, like the oyster itself, can turn every which way.

  But if the oyster at Colchester was civic food, marking respectability and responsibility, it was elsewhere the food of the street and of the outsider, the flâneur, the bohemian. In the second half of the nineteenth century the proliferating taverns and inns serving oysters were the haunt of artists and writers. As they had been for Samuel Pepys some 300 years earlier, eating oysters at midnight or first thing in the morning was an essential part of the pleasures of bohemian living, food eaten with other bon-viveurs amongst the urban poor, an underground pleasure taken on the edges of the day. The journalist George Augustus Sala, bohemian par excellence, documented the street life of London in Twice Round the Clock; or, the Hours of the Day and Night in London (1859) location by location. He casts himself as the flâneur, walking the streets of London for inspiration, the urban voyeur. The pleasures of the oyster are reserved for midnight:

  But we have come to the complexion of midnight and the hour must be described. It is fraught with meaning for London. You know that in poetical parlance midnight is the time when graveyards yawn . . . and graves give up their dead. And there be other grave-yards in London town – yards where no tombstones of brick-vaults are – that at midnight yawn and send forth ghosts to haunt the city. A new life begins for London at midnight. Strange shapes appear of men and women who have lain a-bed all the day and evening, or have remained torpid in holes and corners. They come out arrayed in strange and fantastic garments, and in glaringly gaslit rooms screech and gabble in wild revelry. The street corners are beset by night prowlers. Phantoms arrayed in satin and lace flit upon the sight. The devil puts a diamond ring upon his taloned finger, sticks a pin in his shirt; and takes his walks abroad . . .18

  At this point Sala takes a tour of the coffee houses, cafés, restaurants of Haymarket, but his imagined reader or companion refuses all these and demands that only oysters be the order of the night. Sala writes: ‘The London oyster-shop, and particularly the Haymarket one, stands, and is a thing apart, among the notabilia of the metropolis.’ He contrasts it to the French and American oyster bars. The French oyster bars he rejects for several reasons: they serve oysters with other foods, their oysters are too coppery, they don’t serve Cayenne pepper and because they don’t eat enough or vigorously enough they have ‘nimby-pimby ways’. New York oyster shops, however, are considerably better, he claims:

  During the gay night, brilliant lamps, sometimes covered in fantastic devices, invite you to enter underground temples of oyster-eating. These are called oyster-cellars. Some are low and disreputable enough, and not inpassible to imputations of gouging, bowie-knifing, and knuckle-dusting; but others are really magnificent suites of apartments, decorated with mirrors and chandeliers, and glowing with gilding, mahogany and crimson velvet; and here you may consume oysters as small as periwinkles or as large as cheese-plates, oysters of strange and wondrous flavours – oysters with bizarre and well-nigh unpronounceable names – oysters cooked in ways the most marvellous and multifarious: stewed, broiled, fried, scalloped, barbecued, toasted, grilled and made hot in silver chafing dishes . . .

  Yet for all the splendour and rarity of the cooking, and the variety of the oysters, I will abide by the Haymarket oyster-shop, rude, simple, primitive as it is, with its peaceful concourses of customers taking perpendicular refreshment at the counter . . . calling cheerfully for crusty bread and pats of butter; and tossing off foaming pints of brownest stout . . .19

  The decline in oyster production across Europe in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth changed patterns of oyster consumption once again. During the First World War the slaughter of mi
llions of the young men of Europe left oyster-beds abandoned around France and Britain. In the 1930s, however, oyster sellers still plied their wares at oyster stalls wheeled on the sands of Blackpool and other seaside towns, a vestige of old England. In Blackpool there were as many as fifteen or sixteen stalls on the beaches in season, many owned by Irishmen who came over for the summer season.

  Selling oysters to the troops during the First World War, a morale-boosting postcard sent to Britain from France.

  ‘Oyster Bill’ with his stall on Blackpool sands in the 1930s.

  One Blackpool resident commented to the oyster writer Robert Nield: ‘Isn’t it funny that people have been in all sorts of jobs, selling all sorts of things on stalls, they’ve done everything, but shellfish has lasted everyone out’.20 During the Second World War, food rationing and austerity changed attitudes to gourmet foods, but the return of those who had served in occupied France brought new food cultures into Britain. After the war, as ex-servicemen set out to make a living outside the cities and to revive the oyster-beds, oyster production began to pick up slowly again.

  Artists dining on oysters at the London restaurant Wheeler’s in 1962. Timothy Behrens, Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews, photograph by John Deakin.

  In the late 1950s and ’60s as post-war austerity waned, interest in foreign food rose dramatically: men and women queued in supermarkets for Italian pastas and French wines and ate in Asian restaurants. Once again oysters became the food of the epicure, the bohemian and the artist. In the photo above Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and friends eat oysters and drink champagne at Wheeler’s in London in 1962. Michael Peppiatt, Bacon’s biographer, writes:

  Once he had done his morning’s work in the studio, Bacon would arrive around noon in Soho, have a few glasses of white wine, then move on for lunch . . . to Wheeler’s, his favourite fish restaurant, around the corner in Old Compton Street . . . His guests would often include other artists, writers and intellectuals – as well as some drunken bruisers or East End toughs. Wheeler’s became the ultimate club for Bacon, a place where he knew everyone, could sign for meals and cash a cheque.21

  If the oyster-shell has been used as a way of dating rock strata or early archaeological sites, oyster flesh can be used as a way of marking changing food cultures from the Romans to the present day. If Martial, the Roman poet, was outlawed from the oyster-eating tables of his wealthy patron, these twentieth-century painters were now at the centre of the bohemian oyster feast; they needed no patrons to provide their oysters.

  As food, then, oysters have been all things to all people, rising and falling in popularity as prices have been effected by conditions of farming and supply and transport systems. Wherever they are eaten, however, by Pepys at midnight on the street, or by the city banker discussing business over lunch in the early twenty-first century, or by the factory worker at an oyster stall on Blackpool beach, oysters are the food of the transient moment and of the epicure, rich and poor alike.

  4 Oysters and Gluttony

  Since the Romans the oyster has been associated with gluttony and acts of gluttonous bravado and used for moral homilies about the consequences of greed. In La Fontaine’s seventeenth-century fable ‘The Rat and the Oyster’, a rat ‘of weak mind and brain’ sets forth to travel the land. On the shoreline he finds an oyster-bed and, spotting an oyster with its shell open, reaches forward to consume the flesh, only to find itself caught in the oyster’s tightly closed shell. Fontaine offers several morals: that those who are ignorant of the world ‘judge every trivial object to be an astonishing revelation’ and that ‘the would-be trapper is often trapped’.1

  The animal oyster eater – whether fox, rat or mouse – in animal fables around the world is almost always portrayed as a warning against greed or stupidity. The animal driven by hunger is blinded to danger. He – and the animal oyster eater is almost always he – is impetuous and doesn’t stop to think. His body drives him, not his reason. The oyster, seemingly inert and passive, takes its revenge. Buried in such warnings about the dangers of reaching out for seemingly passive and inviting flesh, are surely warnings against sexual invitation and the dangers of following the promptings of the flesh rather than reason.

  In 1736 the poet Samuel Bowden was commissioned to write a poem about the skeleton of a mouse caught in an oyster-shell displayed in the local museum. He wrote a moral poem in the tradition of La Fontaine called ‘The Mouse and the Oyster: Occasioned by a Mouse Caught in an Oyster Shell’. An anthropomorphized epicurean – and once again male – mouse patrols ‘silent mansions’ at night in search of food.

  In some ill hour, he crept where Oyster lay.

  The Fish, commission’d from the watery throng,

  With tegument of scaly armour strong,

  Lay with expanded mouth – an horrid cell!

  What pen the dire catastrophe can tell?

  Stretch’t on the shore, thus ready for surprise,

  With jaws expanded, Nile’s dread monster lies.

  Th’ insatiable thief, now fond of some new dish,

  Explores the dark apartment of the fish,

  Conscious of bearded touch, the Oyster fell,

  And caught the head of caitiff in the shell.

  In vain the victim labours to get free.

  From durance hard, and dread captivity:

  Lock’t in the close embrace – dire fate! He lies

  In pillory safe – pants, struggles, squeaks and dies.

  Instructed thus – let Epicures beware,

  Warn’d of their fate – not seek luxurious fare.2

  In the nineteenth century Dando, a notorious London oyster thief, was the subject of many cartoons, ballads, and a play written in 1838. He was reputed to have been brought before the magistrates several times a month for having refused to settle his bill after overeating in an oyster shop. But although the Dando stories may carry vestiges of a moral, Dando is primarily represented as a kind of folk hero, transgressing the law to follow his own singular passions. A kind of oyster-eating pirate living outside the law. Charles Dickens described him in a letter:

  The comic actor Stubby Kaye, a star of the Broadway musical L’il Abner, eating oysters in New York in the 1960s.

  He used to go into oyster shops, without a farthing of money, and stand at the counter eating Natives, until the man who opened them grew pale, cast down his knife, staggered backward, struck his white forehead with his open hand, and cried ‘you are Dando!!!’. He has been known to eat twenty dozen at one sitting; and would have eaten forty, if the truth had not flashed upon the shop keeper . . . For these offences he was constantly committed to the House of Correction . . . They buried him in the Prison Yard, and paved his Grave with oyster shells.3

  One dozen oysters may be a reasonable number to consume in one sitting, but twenty dozen – that’s 240 oysters – is heroic. After Dando’s death, Punch published a delightful poem supposedly written by Dando’s spirit from beyond the grave:

  A message from the Spirit-sphere,

  List ye, who linger behind:

  I found not any oysters here,

  Which did at first disturb my mind.4

  In almost all these stories of excessive human consumption of oysters the subjects – like Dando – are men, and there is a note of admiration in the way their stories are told. They have a lust for life, and show no restraint in the pleasures of the flesh. These are the Casanovas of oyster flesh. There is, however, one hazy story of a woman oyster eater told in several of the histories of oysters but in different ways. Some say she was a Spanish oyster seller who frequented the bars of Madrid; others that she was Parisian. The details of her identity are vague but the event is the same in all versions: she made a bet with a group of men that she could consume a dozen oysters on each stroke of midnight, interspersed with glasses of champagne. That’s 144 oysters and 12 glasses of champagne. She won her bet and passed into history as an oyster-eating heroine of bohemian midnight.


  OYSTER WARS, LAWS AND LEGISLATION

  To protect oyster supplies from human over-consumption of the Dando kind, governments around the world have had to write oyster laws and oyster acts for three main reasons: to legislate about when oysters can be harvested to prevent over-farming; to prevent disputes breaking out between oyster dredgers from different countries, states or villages about oyster-bed boundaries; and to create legislation to prevent outbreaks of food poisoning. To enforce these laws, oyster superintendents or inspectors of health, or oyster ‘police’ have been appointed since the early eighteenth century. However, the details of these laws reveal that a good deal more has been at stake than public health and oyster conservation.

  In 1715, for instance, the first oyster law was passed in New York, ostensibly to protect the supply of oysters. Its stipulations, however, reveal a great deal about race and the oyster industry in eighteenth-century New York, then a small settlement (covering the area that runs from Wall Street south to the tip of Manhattan) ruled from London as part of British America:

  From and under the publication of this act, it shall not be lawful for any person or persons whatever, native free Indians only excepted, from and after the first day of May until the first day of September, annually to gather, rake, take up or bring to the market any oysters whatever, under the penalty of twenty shillings for every offence, to be recovered before any of his Majesty’s Justices of the Peace, who are hereby authorised and required to hear, and finally determine the same, one-half thereof to turn to him or them that shall bring the same to effect, and the other half to the poor of the place where the offence shall have been committed. And it shall not be lawful for any negro, Indian, or mulatto slave to sell any oyster in the city of New York, at any time whatsoever, under the penalty of twenty shillings for every offence, to be paid by the master or mistress of such slave or slaves, to be recovered and applied as aforesaid.5