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Books

History on the half-shell

By BILL DURYEA
Published March 12, 2006

THE BIG OYSTER:

History on the Half Shell

By Mark Kurlansky

Ballantine, $23.95, 320 pp

Reviewed by BILL DURYEA

At the Oyster Bar, located in the vaulted-ceiling depths of Grand Central Station, it is possible to select from a menu of 30 varieties of oyster: Yaquinas from Oregon and Golden Mantles from British Columbia, Barnstables from Cape Cod and Chincoteagues from Virginia.

The oyster that travels the least distance is the Bluepoint, which is brought from the south shore of Long Island. A dozen of them will cost you about $20 with tax, a price that signals as clearly as any other fact that New York is no longer the oyster capital of the world.

As recently as the late 19th century, the rivers and harbors around New York teemed with oysters. Biologists later calculated there were enough oysters to filter every ounce of New York Harbor water in a matter of days. So plentiful were they - and so large (there were reports of oysters nearly a foot long) - a basket of a couple hundred oysters could be had in 1860 for $1.50. Twelve million oysters a year were traded on the city's docks, bound for cities across the country and even Europe. Much of the local harvest was consumed by men rich and poor in the city's hundreds of oyster cellars, the simple taverns of which the Grand Central Oyster Bar is perhaps the last remaining descendant.

Today no one eats New York oysters. They don't exist. The last beds died off around the 1930s.

"The history of New York oysters," writes Mark Kurlansky in The Big Oyster, "is the history of New York itself - its wealth, its strength, its excitement, its greed, its thoughtlessness, its destructiveness, its blindness - and as any New Yorker will tell you - its filth. This is the history of the trashing of New York, the killing of the great estuary."

In truth, the vast oyster beds of New York began to die almost as soon as Europeans claimed ownership, Kurlansky writes. In a relatively short period of time, the Dutch and then the English began to foul their sweet-smelling eden. They dumped garbage over the wall (from which Wall Street took its name), and when the stench of filth in the streets became too great they built sewers, which simply channeled the waste directly into the pristine harbor waters.

Crassotrea virginica, the species that grows from Appalachicola to Nova Scotia, is hearty as bivalves go, but it doesn't do so well in polluted muck of the kind that began to overwhelm New York's rivers and harbor. Overly intense harvesting didn't help either. Wild beds began to disappear in the early 1800s, but cultivation techniques resurrected from Roman times (that was another oyster-loving culture) kept oystermen busy through the late 19th century.

Kurlansky, the author of two successful food histories, Cod and Salt, has done a fine job tracking the world's appetites for oysters and the growth of New York as an economic center. Oysters were so central to the growth that their lime-rich shells were ground to make mortar for brick buildings. The advent of canals and steamships meant New York oysters could be enjoyed fresh, not just pickled, by diners as far away as the Midwest.

And one of the most interesting themes is how oysters helped poor blacks emigrating from the South gain an economic foothold in the city. One of the most prosperous men in 19th century New York was Thomas Downing, the son of a free black family in Virginia. He opened an oyster cellar in 1825 that soon became as popular as Delmonico's with the city's politicians and business elite. Downing was so well off he was able to loan $10,000 to publisher James Gordon Bennett to keep the New York Herald from folding.

But there are limits to this food-history form that Kurlansky has made his signature dish. Too often in The Big Oyster Kurlansky veers off on some informational tangent that seems not at all relative to oysters.

Do we need to know about the Russians' expertise in removing the guard hairs from a beaver pelt? Does it matter to us that the first execution at the famous Tombs jail took place in 1839? Or that New York firemen were issued new leather helmets in 1740 that could be worn forward or backward? Probably not. And the many recipes that fill the pages seem like an unnecessary garnish.

Good oysters, no matter where they come from, don't need cocktail sauce or horseradish or lemon. The same is probably true of books of this scope. Better not to let the sauce mask the taste of the sea.

- Bill Duryea is national editor of the Times.

[Last modified March 11, 2006, 10:48:14]