OH! OYSTERS
8/28/2007 10:49:59 AM by Jen Karetnick
They’re aphroditic, they’re romantic — and above all else, they’re tasty. From the Kama Sutra of oysters to a restaurant that serves them up proper, we sink our teeth into the world’s most popular — and creative — bivalve. Warning: Reader discretion is advised.
Two credible oyster clichés we have all been conditioned to swallow: The oyster is an aphrodisiac, either because of the crustacean’s appearance (it resembles the female sexual organ), or because of its chemical makeup (lots of zinc, which in turn controls progesterone and increases libido). And you are only a true connoisseur if you enjoy them raw, pristinely posed on rock salt or a bed of ice, with a squirt of hot sauce or lemon.
After spending a week in Apalachicola, where 10 percent of the nationwide supply are harvested from wild reefs, I disagree. Not with the essence of either statement, but with their intent — that these mollusks are eaten for a purpose other than the culinary, and only within prescribed boundaries. To suck down a cleansed and shucked oyster is akin to fooling around under the covers: It might be standard for some and satisfying for others, but it’s allover boring for most.
Indeed, to the more experienced and less Machiavellian lover, it is not the what of the pearly bivalve but the how that makes it so irresistibly sexy, not to mention delicious. You can prepare and consume an oyster in as many ways as you can make love, and none is more right or wrong than the other. After all, while the visuals might be altered, the zinc content, as long as pollution isn’t interrupting the oysters’ eating patterns, doesn’t change. So the end result will be the same — you will be first stimulated, then satiated by an oyster (and, with any luck, by a fellow oyster lover) — but the path you choose to get there can and should be a different, nerve-tingling adventure every time.
You can test this theory for yourself by following the suggestions set out by the most infamous sexual manual of all time, the Kama Sutra. Just as it doesn’t let you down in areas of physical intimacy, the Kama Sutra doesn’t disappoint when applied to bivalvic gastronomy, either.
First, as the good book suggests, pay careful attention to planning. In short, you need to set the mood. You can accomplish this in one of two ways: Take yourself to a restaurant that serves them or journey to a place where oysters grow rampant, such as Florida’s Forgotten Coast. The latter is preferable because you can accomplish both at once, really: Where there are native Gulf oysters, there are various shacks and joints and dives — say, a charming, historic Apalachicola River shabeen such as Boss Oyster Restaurant — that dish them up in any of 17 ways. Starting, yes, with the most popular: bare and quivering to the touch, laid out for your inspection.
That’s not to say there’s no titillation involved, however. Foreplay fanatics can hire a guide who’s connected to the Apalachicola Bay oystermen. I did this by signing up for a “Foraging the Forgotten Coast” tour, led by chef Chris Hastings, who owns the Hot & Hot Fish Club in Birmingham, Alabama, and guides the four-day trip four times per year. This involved oystering behind-the-scenes at Buddy Ward’s 13 Mile Oyster Company, where the mollusks are scissored from the bottom the old-fashioned way: by a single (and single-minded) oysterman who works the water for eight hours a day on a reef-anchored, 20-foot boat.
The tongs — long-handled rakes that are heavy and awkward even without the oysters and debris in them that you drag up — get you warmed up pretty quickly.
Culling takes place right on the boat, with ones measuring less than three inches thrown back, and other choice specimens shucked on the spot. Depending on the tides and what they are straining through their gills at the moment, the oysters can be salty or sweet, mildly pungent or buttery.
Back on shore, the options are seemingly infinite, or at least exponential. Want to devour oysters in or out of the shell? By roasting, steaming, boiling, barbecuing or broiling? Within each category, subsets of ingredients (anything from onions to bacon) combine to make up innumerable recipes.
How many are concocted and consumed in the end depends on personal appetite and level of endurance. At Boss Oyster, mere admirers fall out after sampling the ultimate “sashimi” version with seaweed, wasabi and flying fish roe; addicts hang in all the way from the shuck-your-own (roasted) to the Greektown (baked with feta cheese, parsley and olives) to the po’ boy (battered and fried).
Boss Oyster adds recipes submitted by guests. If you lack such hospitable visitors or the requisite imagination, you can refer to the Kama Sutra of cookbooks: the recently released The Hog Island Oyster Lover’s Cookbook: A Guide to Choosing & Savoring Oysters, featuring 40 Recipes by Jairemarie Pomo. That’s a lot of temptation with which to test your culinary impulses.
In the end, though, it’s the third oyster cliché that stands: the afterglow. No doubt oyster enthusiasts everywhere, after a rousing bout with the bivalves, feel the need to indulge it. In the business of aphrodisia, this is called “taking a nap.” After all, even the Kama Sutra allows for a refractory period.