How to Cook a Moose (30 page)

No one has written better about this magical, sensual creature than the great, late M. F. K. Fisher. Her fourth book,
Consider the Oyster
, is the definitive book about oysters. It's short enough to read in one sitting, and it demands, like a poem, to be reread immediately on finishing it. It's filled with recipes so direct and concrete you can taste them as you read, along with arresting images—a chilly, delicate gray body sliding down a red throat.

Fisher wrote
Consider the Oyster
in 1941, while her second husband, the love of her life, Dillwyn Parrish, was suffering from Buerger's disease, a rare autoimmune response to smoking; the phantom pain from
his amputated leg become so bad that he eventually shot himself. That she chose to write about the oyster—aphrodisiac, mysterious, a source of pleasure and strength—during the darkest time of her life suggests that the book was intended at least in part as a source of comfort. But not one word is self-pitying or elegiac; the tone is joyful, playful, and succinctly optimistic.

It opens with a witty overview of the “dreadful but exciting” life of an oyster, followed by mouthwatering descriptions and recipes for certain ways oysters can and should be eaten—either raw, in their shells, with various condiments and buttered brown bread, or cooked in buttery, milky stews and soups and all manner of other delicacies. Fisher is typically democratic and broad-minded but firmly opinionated at every turn; on the question of which alcohol goes best with oysters, she runs through the possibilities and concludes that just about anything will do.

The book ends with nostalgic memories, her own and others': her mother's schoolgirl treat of baked oyster loaf, a San Francisco bohemian's passion for the Hangtown Fry, the story of a virginal young man's wishful and fruitless overindulgence, and a fleeting, poetic trespass on a Chesapeake Bay oyster bed at dawn. This book packs a wallop in a small amount of space, satisfies without satiating, and goes down easily, pithy and nutritious and sweetly briny.

Oysters are perfect, eaten raw. But they're also good when they're cooked, and different: meatier, richer, plumper. Cooking them brings out their essential sweetness and briny purity, so they combine beautifully with starch and aromatics, herbs and fats, in a warm indulgence of pure pleasure. Here's a recipe I created for what's essentially an oyster casserole, inspired by others, including Fisher.

Classic New England Oyster Dressing or Stuffing

7 cups day-old cornbread, crumbled

1 lb. raw oysters (about 30)

8 oz. pancetta or thick-cut bacon, chopped

1 stick salted butter

1 cup minced celery

2 cups minced onions

1/3 cup minced parsley

1 T each minced sage and thyme

3/4 tsp each salt and black pepper

1/4 tsp nutmeg

1/2 tsp ground clove

1 cup oyster liquor or chicken stock

1/4 cup madeira or port

1 large beaten egg

Toast the cornbread crumbs on a cookie sheet in a 400-degree oven for 10 to 12 minutes. Put into a large bowl.

Melt butter till it foams in a large skillet, add pancetta or bacon, and cook till crisp. Add celery and onion and cook for 7 minutes, till they soften. Turn off the heat and stir in the herbs and spices. Add this mixture to the oysters and the cornbread crumbs. Toss and moisten with oyster liquor or stock, madeira or port, and egg.

You can fill the cavity of a turkey with this stuffing and bake it that way. But I prefer it on its own, as a dressing, baked separately in a buttered dish for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

One summer a few years ago, we stayed in Brittany for three days with friends of Brendan's family. Jean-Louis and his wife, Marie, and their son live in an old stone house in a small, insanely picturesque village called Saint-Briac-sur-Mer.

Jean-Louis is a real cook, whereas Marie, by her own admission, can't boil an egg. They're both French, but Marie is also Russian, which gives her personality a tragic depth. She has olive skin, wide blue eyes, and short, curly hair, and is a few years younger than I am. Jean-Louis is an energetic, handsome man twenty-five years older than she is, which beats Brendan's and my age difference by five years. As a foursome, we all seemed to be about the same age, which proves something, maybe.

Jean-Louis cooked up a storm for us, to put it mildly. On our first night in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, he made a
filet de bar
(broiled sea bass), with a fennel salad and chickpeas in olive oil. The next morning, before lunch, he sauntered out in his espadrilles to the village market, which camps outside their front door once a week (it's like a movie set, missing only an accordion player and Audrey Tautou), and bought a dozen oysters for everyone but Marie, an animal-lover and vegetarian who ate leftover chickpeas instead. He opened a bottle of cold Pouilly-Fuissé, and we tucked in.

The oysters were plump and robust and salty, even coppery, flinty-tasting, extremely intense. Their deep, shaggy shells were filled with brine and rested on a bed of fresh wet seaweed and had hats on, the flat tops of their shells, which contained nuggets of oyster meat we chewed off before emptying each shell down our gullets, brine and all. With these, we ate bread and butter, even gluten-intolerant me, because fuck it, that was the best lunch of my whole life.

Afterwards, we staggered off for afternoon naps. I slept so deeply I had no idea where I was when I woke up. I think those oysters had a narcotic quality, like the poppies in
The Wizard of Oz
.

It turns out, amazingly, that these Belon oysters also live in Maine, where they're more accurately called the “European flat oyster,” since only true “Belons” come from the Belon River estuary. Call them what you will, Belons were transplanted to Maine decades ago.

The Browne Trading Company—a Portland seafood purveyor down on Commercial Street that sells top-quality seafood, wine, caviar, and cheese—also carries fresh, raw Belon oysters. On their website, they give the history of this rare creature in Maine: “While local legend has it that they came from Europe in the bilge of ships and took root here long before we were a country, in truth they were deliberate transplants by scientists to the Boothbay Region in the 1950s. Here they were able to adapt to survive in Maine's cold waters and were able to reproduce and establish various beds throughout the Maine coast.”

The French transplants went feral, and then oyster farmers began to cultivate them. Now they're established here, both wild and farmed; they flourish on “harder, rocky bottoms in rivers such as the Damariscotta where they are actually harvested by divers—who have limited access once the rivers and inlets freeze over. . . . With so few harvested a year (estimated at no more than 5,000), the Maine ‘Belon' is among the rarest oyster available anywhere.”

One night at a writer friend's cocktail party, I met a young oyster farmer named Abigail Carroll. She began cultivating oysters a few years ago in a nature conservancy in the Scarborough River around Nonesuch Point, just south of Portland. Her oyster farm, Nonesuch, is now among the most famous and successful in Maine; Scarborough River scores an A for cleanliness, and her oysters are described as “bright, fresh, salty-sweet, with delicate grassy undertones.”

I cornered her by the fireplace and got her to talk about oysters.

“I never meant to be an oyster farmer,” she told me. “I'm a native Mainer, but I wasn't going to live here. I was always going to travel
and live abroad. I studied languages at Barnard, French and Spanish, then got a master's in international affairs from Columbia. I lived in Paris for a decade, working in start-ups and writing and learning about food and wine.”

“And now you're a Maine oyster farmer,” I said.

“That was accidental! It's the result of a consulting project gone awry. Very awry. When I agreed to write a business plan for this guy, I declared, ‘But I'm not getting on the water!' Famous last words! I wound up owning the farm and being the farmer.”

“Do you raise Belon oysters?” I asked.

“Ah, the European Flats,” she said. “While they are considered a rare delicacy, and you get a premium for them, it's rare to find someone who actually likes them!” She laughed. “One oyster grower likened the taste of a Belon to licking an aluminum pail.”

“I love them,” I said. “But I can see that they'd be an acquired taste. They're very metallic and briny, it's true.”

She laughed again. “Here's a Belon story: I visited a French oyster grower, Anne Guelt, who laughed when I told her that we had to put rubber bands around our Belons to keep them closed. The adductor muscle on the Belon is quite loose, so for better storage, you need to actually fasten the shells closed. Anne said that was very old-fashioned, and in France, they actually ‘train' the oysters to stay closed. She says they take the oysters out of the water for an hour or so, then put them back in the water, then back on land for a longer period of time, and then back in the water. They do this ‘training' until the oyster can predictably stay closed when it's out of the water, and have a decent shelf life. She told me that she had trained one oyster so well that she left him out for twenty-three days in the living room before he let his adductor muscle go and opened up and died! I love the idea that Anne had a pet oyster.”

“A champion pet oyster,” I said, laughing.

“We had a funny experience with a Belon as well. We mistakenly harvested one when we were trying to harvest just regular
virginica
oysters. So we had to drive the Belon back out to the farm. It opened its shell, and as I reached out to touch it and close it shut, it snapped shut before I could reach it. This little game went on, with my team laughing hysterically, for the whole trip back to the farm.”

“How do they fare here, in these foreign waters?” I asked.

“Belons do really well in Maine. They're notoriously difficult to raise and susceptible to disease—French and temperamental!” We both laughed. “But they seem to do well here. I wish we could find a reliable source of Belon seed. They are a whole lot of fun! Wild Belons live in our estuary, but I'm a farmer, and I believe very much that we should reap what we sow and not steal the spoils that naturally exist in the water. As it is, we don't have enough oysters.”

This is true: Maine's oyster supply can't keep up with demand.

In a 2011
Press Herald
story by Ann S. Kim about Abigail Carroll's Nonesuch Oysters and another young oyster farmer named Nate Perry, Kim said, “The strength of Maine's brand is based not just on the state's reputation as a pristine area. There's a biological basis as well . . . Water temperatures in Maine are relatively cold, which means that oysters here generally do not spawn. When oysters direct their energies toward reproduction, their glycogen content falls, making them less sweet and plump. . . . Maine oyster farmers cannot grow enough to satisfy demand, and it's not uncommon for growers to have to ration the number they provide to each account.”

To which Abigail added, “There aren't enough Maine oysters for the world.”

I completely agree.