Secret Ingredients (38 page)

“Oh, shut up. There is no goddam Santa Claus. Leave me alone.” Osinski then went to bed. Later that week, he clandestinely bought someone else’s oysters (a great lapse of conviction, as if, in his exhaustion, he’d lost his raison d’être and concluded that an oyster was an oyster was an oyster, after all). A chef phoned: “We don’t know what happened, but these oysters are not what we thought we were buying. We’re throwing them away.”

This time, Osinski eventually found a cage of the appropriate-sized shellfish and sorted through the purse’s take, filling up a sack for Le Bernardin, saving the larger ones for other restaurants, and putting the smaller ones back for next year—provided he could find them again. We’d been on the water five hours. The day had yielded 170 oysters. Osinski gets seventy cents an oyster. That’s $119.

Until recently, Osinski had been making much more money, hundreds of thousands a year (“I can’t tell you—my neighbors hate me as it is”), but hadn’t been doing what he wanted. His secret ambition had always been to be a writer—that, and to live by the sea. (His website includes poems about the Peconic, but nothing about the price of an oyster.) When he graduated from college (English literature at Florida State University), he got a job on a shrimping boat, seeming to realize one of his ambitions, but quit after the boat almost went under in a storm. Then he was hired as a reporter for a Florida newspaper called
Today,
near Cape Canaveral, but was, by his own self-denigrating account, too sloppy to be a journalist. In a story about a white sheriff, Osinski confused the name of a white community with the name of a black one. He was fired. He seemed always to be getting fired, owing to what I’m tempted to describe as his congenital messiness. In this respect, his disordered oyster boat was like his life. “I know, I know, soon you’ll find me with a Coke machine in the garage and my pickup sitting out on bricks and a yard full of children.” (In fact, the yard is full of the detritus of his new profession—cages and purses drying out in the sun—as well as a rusted red wagon, a broken broom, a basket of sweet potatoes, a stroller with a wheel missing, a giant plastic duck, a torn pink blanket, a traffic cone, a tricycle parked inside a shrub.) A career breakthrough came when, urgently needing money, he took a job as a computer programmer. He got fired from that one, too, but not before discovering that his affinity for numbers was protected by a computer’s ability to self-correct. When I first met Osinski, he and a partner were writing a program affectionately called “the money tree” (it enabled banks to trade mortgages quickly and with a calculated risk). He made a lot of money for a lot of people, until he realized he didn’t have to be in an office and got someone to buy the program. Then he was fired (“I don’t know why—most people just don’t like me”). He is now writing a novel of his new life—his life on the water.

My second trip to Greenport was the first day of winter. It was windy and cold—twenty-two degrees—but also bright and clear. This time, I had a horizon to look out onto—my mind, liberated by the sight, seemed to expand to the very edge—as well as a capacious pair of bib pants, also liberating. “It’s the winter solstice!” I cried out. This big sky, the salty air. “What an ecstatic way to start a season!”

For Osinski, it was just another day on the bay. Dates didn’t matter to him anymore, he said. “I don’t pay attention. I know tide tables. I live by the phases of the moon and by watching the sea.” I wasn’t sure I believed him, but I recognized the philosophical point. He killed the engine, and we pulled up a cage. Once again, there weren’t many oysters that were market size, although enough for an impromptu breakfast.

There was a shucking knife on a bench, like a butter knife with more edge. Osinski grabbed a towel to hold an oyster in place, so the liquid wouldn’t tip out—the “liquor” is regarded by many as the most important ingredient in the experience of a shellfish—and gently pressed the blade against the hinge. Nothing happened. He pressed again: nothing. Typically, what I’d have done at this point was increase the pressure; rebuffed, I’d respond by raising the level of attack, but the result was never pretty. For Osinski, the operation was a negotiation. The blade in position, he wiggled it up and down gently. He seemed not to be prizing open the shells but massaging the muscle that kept them closed. I thought, At any moment he’s going to sing some soothing thing to coax the little fellow out. Then the muscle simply relaxed, and the shells separated.

“You don’t chew, do you?” I asked. I was confirming what I knew to be the received practice. (“It’s all about the mouth feel,” Sandy Ingber had told me. “Slurp, never chew.” But he admitted that he took a discreet bite when testing a new product.)

“You tease it,” Osinski said, “you work it with your tongue. But you’d never sink your teeth into it. Goodness, no!” I watched. He slurped, swished, his cheek puffing out as the oyster, denuded of its shell only a few seconds before, was knocked around inside his mouth until it went down, and I found myself marveling at the speed with which a creature can be transported from ocean to stomach, dispatched from the dark and deep to—well, the dark and deep. Osinski emitted a sigh of pleasure. “I feel so elemental when I eat oysters. All primitive cultures ate them. The prehistory of man is in the shells they left behind.” He was alluding to what archeologists call middens, piles of shells, sometimes several acres across, believed to be thousands of years old, stacked up like dirty dishes (which in effect they were). They are described by Mark Kurlansky in his elegant history of New York,
The Big Oyster:
the inside of an oyster shell is white like ivory, and piles of them, gleaming in the sun, were visible from great distances. “When I eat an oyster,” Osinski declared, “I feel I’m connecting to something primordial.”

It was my turn. I slurped and, before swallowing, remembered the instruction to play with my oyster-creature, and was then struck by an unexpected affinity between where I found myself and what was in my mouth. It was the briny intensity of what had crossed my palate: the food equivalent of the salty air. Whatever I was doing (I couldn’t bring myself to call it eating) tasted absolutely of here—this spot on the Peconic.

Osinski opened more oysters. We ate them—or swallowed them, anyway—and sat studying the water and the million ways that a winter morning’s sun was reflected on it. (“When I’m out here, I actually get quite metaphysical.”) But I was left wondering: Is an oyster a primordial meal?

I asked Eric Ripert, the chef of Le Bernardin. I’d been intending to get in touch, ever since helping Osinski to eliminate three-and-a-half-inch shellfish in order to fill Le Bernardin’s uniformly dimensioned order. (“No, no, bigger is not correct,” Ripert told me. “It doesn’t work. To have a huge chunk of something so slimy in the mouth, this mass of meat—no, no, it’s disgusting.”) It turns out that Ripert had thought hard about oysters and valued their primordial qualities. For a start, he was an unapologetic head-tipping slurper and a connoisseur of the liquor (“I want to say it tastes of the sea transformed—can you say that in English? It is seawater but no longer seawater”), and an enthusiast of the Long Island crop. (“I come from France and did not expect to find edible oysters here. It was the water. I feared pollution. To my surprise, the water was wonderfully fresh, and the oysters have a briny quality I associate with Normandy.”) But when I asked Ripert if he chewed he surprised me.

He paused, deliberating. “Yes,” he said, finally.

“How many times?”

“Well…” He projected an imaginary bivalve into his mouth. “A couple of times. Actually, may I make a confession? I chew once. My parents taught me this. They told me, ‘Eric, you must always bite an oyster, firmly, once. Otherwise, it will be alive in your stomach.’”

I phoned Kim Tetrault, the marine biologist.

“You need to understand what happens when an oyster closes its shell,” he explained. “That liquor is not just seawater. It’s also part oyster. We call it extrapallial fluid. It’s like the blood that bathes an oyster’s tissues. When oysters close their shells, they are sealing themselves in their own environment—the world is their oyster—and they will survive as long as the extrapallial fluid doesn’t dehydrate.” The Romans used to ship their oysters from Britain, a journey that must have taken weeks. Tetrault confirmed that, under certain conditions, an oyster can live that long out of the water. He described his students dissecting shellfish. “If you’ve shucked an oyster carefully, you haven’t killed it. In my classes, we continue feeding it—the gills keep working—and its heart beats for another fifteen minutes.”

Maybe Osinski was right. Many foods are eaten raw. Many foods are swallowed whole. But how many raw foods are also still alive?

On my third trip to Greenport, our first cage yielded seven hundred oysters. Osinski was thrilled. “Whoopee! I knew I had some around here, I just knew it!” A second cage yielded almost as many, and by the time we pulled up a third Osinski had nearly two thousand oysters. “Oh, Daddy did well today.” He was giddy—downright hot-diggety-dog kick-ass happy—as though we’d just caught something wild and rare and managed to pull it in. But we hadn’t, had we? We’d merely relocated parcels that he had dropped in the water himself. (Most hunter-gatherers would call that cheating.) Of course Osinski would have no system for organizing. One of the benefits of being a messy person is that your life, in a condition of irretrievable disorder, is full of surprises.

Osinski was an underwater farmer. I’d been so caught up in his adventure—the open air, the water, the struggles to find three-inchers—that I hadn’t registered what I’d been seeing. Cages don’t occur in the wild. Today, you can eat a flavorless pink thing called “salmon,” which arrives at its mealy texture by a form of intensive farming that didn’t seem all that different from what I seemed to be witnessing here.

But an oyster is different. The commonplace (among tissue eaters) is that wild is better than farmed because a wild animal is more exercised, more oxygenated, more organically its natural self than anything grown in confinement. An oyster is not active in this wild way. Once oysters find a hard spot to settle on, they’re not going anywhere: they eat and exude (having, as Osinski believes, “no brain, just a stomach and an anus—therefore it’s okay to eat them while they’re alive”). According to William K. Brooks, whose 1891 masterpiece,
The Oyster,
is still regarded as one of the best accounts of the life of a bivalve, “the adult oyster makes no efforts to obtain its food, it has no way to escape from danger, and after its shell is entered it is perfectly helpless and at the mercy of the smallest enemy…. It is almost as inert and inanimate as a plant.” (Left alone, oysters live for fifteen years and grow very big; Tetrault has a shell that’s a foot long. I looked at it and thought, Ha! Imagine swallowing that one without chewing.)

Today, Brooks’s study is interesting for its doomsday predictions. Frightened by the terrible decline of the oysters in Chesapeake Bay, he urged his colleagues to raise shellfish in hatcheries and plant them—like so many acres of potatoes. The Romans knew how to do it; so did the French. Even Colonial Americans did transplanting: by 1775, the Wellfleet, from Cape Cod, was virtually extinct; what you eat today might actually be descended from Chesapeakes.

I saw an example of Brooks’s vision on a visit to Fishers Island, where Osinski buys the seed oysters that he plants in cages in his underwater plot. The Fishers Island Oyster Company is run by Steve Malinowski, an aqua-entrepreneur who has managed to raise five children while working on the water. Eight years ago, he began a nursery to ensure that he wouldn’t wake up and discover he had no oysters. Today, Malinowski produces so many seed oysters—about five million a year—that he sells some to other shellfish farmers. But there has been some tension. Two years ago, Manhattan’s top restaurants always offered at least one oyster from Long Island Sound: Fishers Islands, delivered by UPS the day after being harvested. Lately, you saw another: Widow’s Holes, delivered by Osinski on the day he’d pulled them out of the water. “It’s an interesting dilemma, to visit restaurants and find Mike Osinski’s oysters grown from our seeds,” Malinowski told me. “We want our buyers to succeed, but maybe not succeed too well.”

Malinowski runs the only hatchery on the island, having acquired Ocean Pond Oyster Company. Ocean Pond was started in 1962, after Carey Matthiessen and his brother, the writer Peter Matthiessen, discovered that a seldom visited local pond was full of shellfish. (They’d dragged up an abandoned boat, found it was covered with oysters, and concluded that oysters had been there since the 1938 hurricane blew open a passage to the sea, and the pond, previously freshwater, had become brackish.) Oysters grow well in brackish water because their natural predators can’t find them there. Brackish oysters don’t have much flavor—“They were big, but bland,” according to Carey Matthiessen—and, when mature, are moved to the sea to acquire that crisp salinity that gets the saliva going. But the pond was perfect for baby oysters—a low-salinity incubator.

I visited the hatchery: bubbling green vats of phytoplankton (a bivalve’s dinner) and gallons of seawater heated to the temperature of early summer—an oyster’s honeymoon suite. Oysters like warm water—they reproduce when it reaches seventy degrees, and at that time, according to Osinski, “they’re not to be eaten because they taste of gonads.” (Thus the caution against eating oysters during the “r”-less summer months—“Nobody likes shells full of sex.”) In normal conditions, a male spews billions of sperm in the proximity of a female, who then releases millions of eggs—most of which never meet in the topsy-turvy open sea. But in a temperature-controlled tank the process is more efficient, and you need only a few romantic “brood” oysters to produce a few million offspring.

Malinowski introduced me to six brooders. I couldn’t tell the boys from the girls, but with oysters it doesn’t always matter. Oysters are not just hermaphrodite, as some people believe. They’re protandrous: capable of alternating their sex. “You’ve got no idea what you’re going to get,” Matthiessen told me. “One year, an oyster produces eggs. The next year, it could be sperm.” Oysters hibernate when the temperature drops below forty degrees and seem to lose their gender. “If you pull one out and open it up, its genitals are completely flat—they’re not one thing or the other.” And then it’s anybody’s guess what happens when they wake up.