Why hello there, and welcome to Kitchen Catastrophe, where one seafood-shunning scrivener must now speak shellfish. I’m your Bartleby, Jon O’Guin. Today, we’re going to talk briefly about the history of oysters as a food source, some interesting details about their culinary use, and whatever else I can think of because my sleep schedule has been trash for the last week, and I’m getting loopy.

Oy, Stop Bothering Me

Oysters are rocks filled with snot that sometimes make shiny rocks, and idiots eat them. The end.

“G-g-g, G-g-g, G-g-get the fuck out”

I’m kidding, of course. While I am not a fan of seafood, oysters are actually on the upper end of things I like, because I can often just swallow them whole rather than having to chew them. In fact, I will regularly have one or two of the oysters we get at Finnriver, which are grilled with chipotle-butter.

So, how long have people been eating oysters? A long ass time. Like “evidence of man eating oysters predates evidence of man having clothing, or living in towns”. Which…honestly makes sense, if you think of something I JUST told you: Oysters can be cooked. That might sound dumb, but really think it through: You could cook an oyster by ACCIDENT, back in the day. You grab some rocks to put around a fire, and one of them pops open, and there’s meat inside! (or, more likely, you figure out that there are rock-goo creatures in the water, and figure out they open up when you put them near fire.)

So we’ve been eating oysters forever. The Greeks, in particular, LOVED oysters. They were, as far as we know, the first people to figure out how to farm them: you toss some pottery shards in the water you know oysters are, wait for them to make oyster babies on the pottery shards, and then you can MOVE THE SHARD wherever you want to grow more oysters! Boom. Funnily, this would later have political implications. According to some sources, the rite of ostracism (a kind of exile) among Greeks required that the votes be carved on an oyster shell, or ostrakon. Because, you know, you’re making them go somewhere else. It’d be like if angry wives had to give their husbands collars to inform them they were “in the doghouse”. Which I’m certain is a thing in some BDSM circles. Or maybe the opposite, I guess. It makes more sense to punish them by TAKING the collar…

Today on “things you didn’t expect to hear about in a food blog”.

Anywho, very popular to the Greeks, and then the Romans, and then like many things popular with the Romans, (and more specifically, things popular with the Romans that related to boning…) consumed almost to the point of extinction. Rome had a real “too much of a good thing” problem: if you don’t know, they ate so much of one plant, as far as we can tell, it’s just GONE now. Interestingly, that plant was silphilium, a cousin of the asasfoetida we talked about just over a month ago. It was used for flavor, perfume, an aphrodisiac, and a contraceptive! It was so important to the Romans, that it’s believed to be the reason we draw hearts the way we do: that’s what silphium seedpods looked like, so you’d get them, eat them, and get horny and bang without having kids! Romans also used bound together bundles of sticks, called fascis, as growing sites for oyster farms. They also used these bundles, wrapped around axes, as the symbols for lictors, a type of Magistrate. This is where the word fascist comes from! (Don’t worry, I’m not saying that Oysters started the Nazis: fascis literally just MEANS “bundle”. People just used it because it was the symbol of some important people a long ass time ago, and they figured the word sounded cool enough to ignore that they were calling themselves “bundlers”. It’s like the OPPOSITE of Nimrod! (If you didn’t know, Nimrod is a name that just shows up in the Bible to describe a dude who was “a mighty hunter before the Lord”. So for centuries, “nimrod” was a term for someone who was obsessed with, or very good at, hunting. Which was the joke when Bugs Bunny, in 1940, met Elmer Fudd, and said “Oh, poor little nimrod”: He was calling him a ‘great hunter’ sarcastically. And that usage (along with the word’s relative obscurity) is why we just use it to mean “an idiot” now. So I guess I’m saying Elmer Fudd is a Fascist?) 

We should have known, really. All the signs were there.

Oysters slowly became a symbol of status and wealth, because they spoil VERY easily, so you can’t transport them far from the sea…unless you have a LOT of money, and centuries of over-harvesting was slowly killing them off, making them more and more expensive…and then we figured out how to really farm them, and the bottom kind of dropped out of the market. Oysters became one of those weird double-foods, where they were sometimes eaten as fancy stuff, but mostly consumed by the poor and derided. Shakespeare talked shit about them in one of his works, and King James is supposedly the first guy to ever make the joke “It was a brave man who first tried an oyster”. American settlers in the 1600’s talk about how things got so bad they had to resort to eating Oysters from the beach.

And then they came back in vogue, as some advances in oyster farming in the mid 1800’s allowed production skyrocket (a new system of building sea-walls produced up to 2,000 oysters per square meter of wall .This combined with the fact that around the mid 1800’s, we started to make big leaps in refrigeration and ice making technology, allowing them to be more safely transported. For a while, there were oyster bars on every corner. New York City alone ate like, 6 million of them a year.

That’s what appears to be a 4-foot-high pile of shells, just tossed in the street outside the bar.

So from like, 1840 to 1950 was the “Golden Age of Oysters”. People invented new dishes with them, they figured out how to pickle them, they were hugely popular. This is why we had streetside oyster stalls for Lee Kum Shuang to be running and accidentally invent oyster sauce: it was an era of easy oysters. And then, in the mid 1950’s, the market completely collapsed. And this one we DO know the reason for: plague. Atlantic Oyster production was dependent on a fairly non-robust, functional monoculture of oysters, meaning that most of the oysters grown and harvested were all the same species. This made them very susceptible to disease, and two diseases, MSX and Dermo, SMASHED the farms and industries. We’re talking “95% crop loss, the market still hasn’t technically recovered” levels of destruction.

And that’s why people MY age associate oysters with high-falutin’ fancy parties: for the last 70 years, supply has been crippled, so prices went up. Supply and demand, baby. Maybe soon we’ll reach the heady days of “less than 1 dollar per oyster”, and we can embrace less high-falutin’ oyster dishes. Who knows? I’m not an oyster farmer.

I’m a LEAD FARMER, MOTHERFUCKER.

And while I had some vague ideas on how to maybe continue for a time, I must confess that, to quote Mad Sweeney, “The joy’s gone out of me now, like the pee from a small boy in a swimming pool on a hot day”: I woke to a debilitating migraine, and FIERCE technical difficulties. It took 7 minutes to convince my computer that the television it has used as a monitor without problems for 6 years HAS SPEAKERS, and 3 hours for my computer to do a driver update that should have taken 90 seconds. I know this, because eventually I had to hard reset the computer, and that’s how long it took. For a moment, I was afraid I wasn’t going to be able to show you the ONE important thing I really wanted to touch on:

It’s so big, it almost looks like a log.
A phrase I have never heard.

THAT is one of the interesting things about how we’ve changed oyster growing and harvesting. Because that 11 inch wide beast of a bivalve isn’t some mutant strain of oyster: that’s how big they get if you let them keep growing. That’s a 14 year-old oyster.  Like Trees, oysters add new rings of growth every year. The ones we eat tend to just be fairly young. They’ve got to be: you sure aren’t fitting 2,000 of THOSE suckers in a square meter.

I just can’t remember the thematic point I wanted to talk about, and I don’t have TIME to remember: I gotta run to the store this afternoon, and I am already struggling with this damn migraine, which, while the pain has been blunted by the aspirin I took, they don’t really help with the other effects. It has taken me 15 minutes to write THIS PARAGRAPH, because I keep needing to close my eyes, and loll my head to the side like a drunk suddenly passing out, as concessions to the oppressive lethargy and malaise it dropped on me.

I’m going to go lie down, and hope I feel better in time to finish this.  

MONDAY: PEAS AND GROUND BEEF HAD A FIGHT. PEAS KNOCKED GROUND BEEF OUTTA SIGHT.

THURSDAY: (MUFFLED SOBS FROM THE PILLOW) MAYBE I’LL REVIEW A SHOW ON A SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE NONE OF YOU HAVE! WOULDN’T THAT BE FUN?!