THE SHUCKING TRUTH
Kim Knight on the secret life of oysters
Certain death tastes amazing. The quick of iodine, a flash of metal. The shock and awe of salt then sweet. The oyster is the only thing we eat alive. “The time has come,” the Walrus said, “To speak of many things ... ” Of a small, three-chambered heart that pumps colourless blood to the body. Of shucking and that thing that rhymes with shucking. Of this one-time food of the poor that is now the domain of the rich. Of this aphrodisiacal lunch of lovers and lovers of lunch.
“Consider the oyster,” instructed American food writing doyenne M.F.K. Fisher. And so, on the eve of Bluff oyster season, I do.
Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin was a 19th century French gastronome. The most famous thing he ever said was, “Tell me what you eat and I shall tell you what you are.” Other profundities include “a dinner which ends without cheese is like a beautiful woman with only one eye” and this:
“Those who have been too long at their labour, who have drunk too long at the cup of voluptuousness, who feel they have become temporarily inhumane, who are tormented by their families, who find life sad and love ephemeral ... they should all eat chocolate and they will be comforted.”
I digress. In 1825, Brillat-Savarin reported that all the best dinners, and also breakfasts, started with oysters.
“And there were always a good many guests who did not stop before they had swallowed a gross.”
A gross is 12 dozen. A gross is 144 oysters. A gross is worth, approximately, more than a flight for two to Sydney. This is nothing. First-century AD Roman emperor Aulus Vitellius Germanicus Augustus was said to have consumed up to 1000 oysters in a single sitting. There’s a bust of him on Wikipedia. He’s a little jowly.
It’s likely we’ve been eating oysters since the Stone Age. Academics speculate nomadic neolithics loved them because they could be ingested raw and on the way to work. (Attention: Auckland Transport.) Excavations of Maori midden have revealed tio shells. In 1769, Captain Cook and crew parked in the Coromandel and loaded their longboat to the gunwale with, reportedly, “as good as oysters as ever came from Colchester”.
Last week, they were selling Coromandel oysters at Auckland’s Viaduct. Saint Alice had 40 dozen from Te Kouma Bay ready to shuck from their raw bar. At the Fish Market, tourists stopped at Billypot and ordered 10. Then another 10. Then another 10. The sun shone and at dock level the superyacht masts were taller than the Sky Tower. We are oceangoers, island-dwellers and — especially at this time of year — oyster lovers.
They used to be common. Literally and literature-ally. “Poverty and oysters always seem to go together,” said Sam Weller, in The Pickwick Papers. “The poorer the place is, the greater the call there seems to be for oysters ... blessed if I don’t think that a man’s werry poor, he rushes out of his lodgings and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation.”
New Zealanders were either werry poor or werry desperate or perhaps both. Food historian David Galletly once read 380 cookbooks printed here between 1887 and 1950 and determined that the single most common seafood ingredient mentioned was the oyster.
In Auckland, the Bluff oyster is glamour and opulence. In Southland, the oyster is sex and disease.
He reports (in an essay in Helen Leach’s From Kai to Kiwi Kitchen) that between 1888-90, more than 1.25 million dozen oysters were exported from this country.
In the 1950s, my granddad worked at Cuddon Engineering in Blenheim. On Friday nights, he’d buy a hessian sack of Bluff oysters and they’d be demolished with beers. If you wanted them cooked, you whacked a greased plate on the blacksmith’s forge. My dad remembers Bluff oysters in the 1980s, bought from a mate at a $105 a coal sack. He can’t recall how many dozen they got — at least 20, maybe 40. Last week, I went down to the Viaduct and bought six freshly shucked Pacific oysters on a bed of ice on a plastic tray with a plastic fork. It cost me $30. In 2005, American and Italian researchers reported what Cosmopolitan magazine had been telling us for decades. Oysters make you amorous. Or, more technically, oysters definitely contain amino acids capable of triggering increased sex hormones in humans. They are also high in zinc, which helps in the production of testosterone (so do pumpkin seeds and lentils, in case you were vegetarian and/or earning less than $1m annually and wondering).
In the aquaculture world, says Bluff Oyster Management Company operations manager Graeme Wright, “oysters are dollars and mussels are cents”. And the wild ones from Foveaux Strait? Well, they’ve always been priceless.
“He was a bold man that first eat an oyster,” said Irish writer Jonathan Swift. But it is, perhaps, a bolder human who bets their house on catching the things.
Up until the mid-1990s, the Bluff oyster fishery supported up to 23 boats. Now just 11 hold commercial quota. They were scheduled to head out at midnight last night. This year’s season opening was tricky timing for Auckland appetites — Wright had his doubts any would make the 3.30pm courier north. Plus: “The Southlanders monster me on the first couple of days. We had someone in the shop wearing a GoPro camera last year. You can see in the footage, it’s just like bees into a honeypot. We had about 70 people lined up about an hour before the boat was even at the wharf.”
In Auckland, the Bluff oyster is glamour and opulence; life lived at a premium. The rich are not squeamish — while the oyster is in that shell, it’s still alive. Is it still alive when we chomp and swallow a few seconds later? The jury is out, but there are no empty seats at the city’s $175 all-you-can-eat fresh shucked (plus a champagne flute) long lunches.
“Those guys make a bloody sight more out of it than the oyster quota-holder does I can tell you,” says Wright. “It terrifies me how much an oyster goes for in some of those places. But then, I wouldn’t want to be renting a building in downtown Auckland, either.”
In Southland, the oyster is sex and disease; the twin preoccupations of the quota-holders who know how risky this business is.
In the summer of 2001-2002, an estimated 1.5 billion oysters were lost when the parasite Bonamia exitiosa wiped out 92 per cent of the Bluff fishery. In 2014, another attack killed 30 per cent of wild stock. Harvests fluctuate accordingly — as low as 7.5 million oysters some years, around 10 million last year.
Disease has been present since at least the 1960s (a different strain of bonamia resulted in the devastating shutdown of oyster farms in 2015, but has so far not been reported in the wild Foveaux Strait population). And that population? Researchers are still trying to figure out exactly what triggers a breeding “pulse” — last experienced in 2007-2008.
Wright says most oysters are “broadcast” spawners, meaning eggs and sperm mix in the ocean. The Bluff oyster female (who doesn’t actually become a female until she is at least 3 years old) keeps her eggs close, inhaling sperm from the water to fertilise her eggs internally. The oysters that will be shucked at Auckland restaurants next week, will have taken between six to nine years to get to eating size.
Compounding all of this, says Wright, is the fact that oysters like to grow on other oysters and when that happens, the bigger one can’t be collected.
“Their main settlement is on the back of other oysters,” says Wright. “It’s like The Partridge Family. Little babies all over the place. From a fisheries perspective, it’s then illegal to take the bigger one. It’s a good problem to have but from a commercial harvest, it’s quite difficult.”
And all of this, before you factor in Foveaux Strait. It’s rough out there. Wright reckons an average tide will carry you at four knots an hour, before you even switch on the engine. He recalls a few years back, one Auckland chef made the trip south to bring back the first day’s harvest. He went out on the boat at midnight. There were plans to have a feed onboard.
“He came back about 11 and I’ve never seen a bloke look so green in all my life ... I don’t think he got out of his bunk.”
Wright cannot explain the allure of the oyster. “I don’t think as an industry we’ve done anything clever from a marketing perspective. But people will walk over hot bricks to get the jolly things. You either love ’em or hate ’em.”