Oyster

by Rebecca Stott

  Before the Norman Conquest in the eleventh century, the old Roman practice of transporting shellfish inland had been revived, and by the 1400s the oyster was a popular food for rich and poor alike, transported inland in barrels of sea water and usually cooked in its own juices with ale and pepper. An English recipe dated around 1390 suggests that oysters were also being cooked elaborately for the banquets of the rich, for it instructs cooks to ‘shell oysters and simmer them in wine and their own broth, strain the broth through a cloth, take blanched almonds, grind them and mix with the same broth and anoint with flour of rice and put the oysters therein, and cast in powder of ginger, sugar and mace’.2

  By the time that oysters reappeared in British accounts of banquets in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these feasts had acquired a distinctively English character, hearty and meaty, and accompanied by ale, quite unlike the dainty assemblies of morsels of raw seafood, snails and honeyed wine that characterized late Roman feasts. Henry Machin, for instance, ‘a citizen and Merchant Taylor of London’, describes a breakfast oyster feast he consumed in 1557:

  On the 30th July, 1557, himself, Master Dave Gyttons, Master Meynard, and Master Drapter, and Master Smyth, Master Caldwella and Master Asse and Gybes, and Master Fackington, and many more did ett alff a bushell of owsters in Anchur-lane, at Master Smyth and Gyttons’ seller, a-pone hoghedes, and candyl lyght, and onyons, and red alle, and claret alle, and muskadylle fre cope, at viii in the mornying.3

  Dirck Hals, A Party at Table, 1625, oil on wood.

  After oysters, muscatel, red ale and claret ale at eight o’clock in the morning it is difficult to imagine what work these merchants would have been able to undertake, but it seems that the consumption of oysters in a cellar by candlelight was an opportunity for lively conversation and perhaps some business. It was a men-only occasion and this is a common pattern of oyster feasts from as early as Roman times. Since Anchor Lane probably refers to Blue Anchor Lane (now Keeton’s Road) in Bermondsey, only a short distance from the docks at Wapping by the Thames, the oysters that Merchant Machin and his friends consumed are likely to have been only recently delivered to the fish markets along the river. These men were also eating oysters in the month of July, for the practice of avoiding eating oysters in the ‘r’-less summer months seems to have begun around this time for health reasons and because spawning oyster meat is poor. In 1599 Samuel Butler wrote in Dyet’s Dry Dinner: ‘it is unseasonable and unwholesome in all months that have not an R in their name to eat oysters’.

  Oyster-feasting in eighteenth-century France: Jean-François de Troy, Le Déjeuner d’huîtres, 1735, oil on canvas.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, oysters were often eaten informally in oyster taverns, or ordered from oyster stalls in small barrels, each holding four dozen oysters, to be eaten straight from the barrel. The diarist and writer Samuel Pepys mentions oysters 68 times in his diary – they are the most frequently mentioned seafood, often eaten for breakfast and accompanied by wine:

  [21 May 1660] So into my naked bed and slept till 9 o’clock, and then John Goods waked me, [by] and by the captain’s boy brought me four barrels of Mallows oysters . . .

  [6 November 1661] Going forth this morning I met Mr Davenport and a friend of his, . . . and I did give them in good wine, and anchovies, and pickled oysters, and took them to the Sun in Fish Street, there did give them a barrel of good ones, and a great deal of wine . . . [4 December 1665] So late by water home, taking a barrel of oysters with me, and at Greenwich went and sat with Madam Penington . . .

  Pepys’ descriptions give us a sense of oysters being both a delicacy and what we might call a ‘fast food’. Small oysters were cheap enough to buy by the barrel on the way home from visiting friends or the pub. They were not a mark of social status or of wealth but were food for friends and social gatherings, to be eaten in taverns, or in one’s own room, or in the street. They were the food of street life and the food of intimate conversation. Paintings of feasts in Holland in the seventeenth century show groups of men and women sitting around tables in richly furnished rooms eating oysters, paintings in which the atmosphere is convivial and relaxed, not elaborately formal. They eat oysters with their fingers and they are all rapt in conversation. When the oyster is shown in yet more intimate situations in these Dutch genre paintings, being passed to a (usually seated) woman by a (usually standing) man, the sense of overheard and impassioned conversation is strong.

  However, when they were consumed as part of a more formal feast or banquet in the same period, cooked oysters seem to be the distinguishing line between the upper and lower tables, as the following record of an East India Company feast (20 January 1623) indicates. The upper table had ‘rost mutton with oysters’ in the first course, ‘boyled oysters’ in the second course, and then ‘oyster pie’ and ‘picked oysters’. Those sitting at the lower tables were served raw oysters or no oysters at all. Oysters raised their value if they were cooked elaborately, if they were shipped some distance or if they were prized flat oysters from a particular area such as Whitstable. They held an almost mythical status among the high society of seventeenth-century Europe. In 1671 the Prince of Condé’s steward fell on his sword after a basket of oysters arrived late for his master’s lunch with Louis XIV.

  In Exotic Brew: The Art of Living in the Age of the Enlightenment, the food historian Piero Camporesi plots the part that oysters played in the changing cuisine of the eighteenth century in Europe, particularly Britain and France. For Camporesi they are the emblematic food of the Enlightenment with their succulent, light, taut and white flesh, ‘an expression of the Lebensgefuhl of the fledgling century, its hunger for light, trim and nimble bodies (alert and agile, like the new ideas and spirit) in stark contrast to the previous century’s floating, blown-out masses of flesh’.4 Elsewhere, fashions became markedly leaner and lighter; men’s clothes and the outlines of furniture became drawn in and streamlined. ‘People were developing a new relationship with food. . . . Taste was transformed, excess and splendour were condemned as evidence of irrational dissoluteness’, and it was in this changing culture that oysters found new power and value on the table of the epicure as white delicate flesh: ‘Oysters and truffles seized power, forcing all the strong dishes typical of ancient aristocratic tables into exile.’5

  Selling oysters in London, 1804.

  A French oyster seller in 1774, pen and watercolour.

  This was, Camporesi claims, the end of the reign of the dark meats and the beginning of the ‘clattering forward march of raw oysters’ at the tables of the fashionable and wealthy:

  [game] had now entered a funereal twilight zone. Potent symbols of feudal conviviality and of barbaric aggression, these glorious black and bloody meats suffered the affront of having to bow to the soft, bloodless and gelatinous pulp-like flesh of oysters . . .6

  This was a new way of eating. The eighteenth-century aristocratic table was marked by ‘a subtle palette of tastes’. It was also marked by a demand for rare foods procured from the furthest reaches of the empire: birds’ nests from the Far East cooked in stock and served with butter, cheese and spice, thrushes claws toasted in the candle flame, bear-paws, heads of woodcocks split open and grilled, tea, coffee, ketchup, sorbets and glacé chocolates.

  There were still, of course, thousands of oysters sold on street corners in Paris and England during the eighteenth century as these illustrations of oyster sellers show, but they would have been selling much lower-quality oysters. All these sellers were also likely to have set up their stalls close to the sea and river ports and to the fish markets to which the oyster boats sailed. But by the 1840s all this was to change when the spread of the railways and new developments in oyster cultivation made it possible to transport large numbers of cheap and small oysters, called ‘scuttlemouths’, selling at two for a penny (the modern equivalent of about 12 pence each), straight into the inland industrial cities. Within a few decades, oysters, until only recently savoured as ra
re delicacies at the banquets of the rich and fashionable, had become a subsistence food for the urban poor. As early as 1836 Charles Dickens described raw oysters as the food of the poor in Chapter 22 of The Pickwick Papers:

  ‘It is a very remarkable circumstance, sir,’ said Sam, ‘that poverty and oysters always seems to go together.’ ‘I don’t understand you, Sam,’ said Mr Pickwick. ‘What I mean, sir,’ said Sam, ‘is, that the poorer a place is, the greater call there seems to be for oysters. Look here, sir; here’s an oyster stall to every half-dozen houses – the streets lined vith ‘em. Blessed if I don’t think that ven a man’s very poor, he rushes out of his lodgings, and eats oysters in reg’lar desperation’.

  In London Labour and the London Poor (1851–62) the journalist and social investigator Henry Mayhew described how fish supplies were now brought to

  every poor man’s door, both in the thickly crowded streets where the poor reside – a family at least in a room – in the vicinity of Drury-Lane and of Whitechapel, in Westminster, Bethnal-green and St Giles’s, and through the long miles of the suburbs. For all low-priced fish the poor are the costermongers’ best customers, and a fish diet seems to be becoming almost as common among the ill-paid classes of London, as is a potato diet among the peasants of Ireland.7

  Mayhew estimates that nearly 500 million oysters and more than 1,000 million herrings passed through Billingsgate in a year, which he says are ‘based on facts . . . furnished me by the most eminent of Billingsgate salesmen’. If these statistics are accurate this would mean that the average consumption was around 185 oysters a year per man, woman and child, which seems implausibly high but which still gives us some idea of the increase in oyster consumption brought about by the dramatic fall in prices. Most were scuttlemouths, but some were of a higher quality selling at between 9 and 16 shillings a bushel (£29–£58 today);8 the expensive Milton oysters were not easily available from costermonger stalls.

  Mayhew also vividly describes the oyster boats selling oysters direct from their boats moored close together at Billingsgate:

  The costermongers have nicknamed the long row of oyster boats moored close alongside the wharf ‘Oyster-Street’. On looking down the line of tangled ropes and masts, it seems as though the little boats would sink with the crowds of men and women thronged together on their decks. It is as busy a scene as one can well behold. Each boat has its black sign-board and salesman in his white apron walking up and down ‘his shop’ . . . These holds are filled with oysters – a grey mass of shell and sand – on which is a bushel measure well piled up in the centre.9

  Although oysters were still generally avoided during the summer months, it remained customary to eat oysters in London on St James’s Day on 25 July. St James is the patron saint of Spain, and his sign is the scallop shell, carried by pilgrims making their way to his shrine in Santiago de Compostela. The illustration on page 68 from the London Illustrated News shows how by the nineteenth century many oysters, particularly on oyster day in London, would have been eaten on the street at the oyster stalls themselves. Towards the back of the picture you can see two small children directing the attention of passers-by to a pile of shells they have made up against a lamp-post. Street-children collected oyster-shells from taverns and fish-shops and made small shrines or grottos for St James as a way of begging for money.

  In the 1850s Mayhew interviewed an aging oyster seller about her customers. Her reply tells us a great deal about the range of people from different social groups who consumed oysters in the second half of the nineteenth century and show that social divisions were marked in some ways by etiquette about whether oysters could be eaten inside or outside. Clearly the ‘poor parsons down on their luck’ regarded buying oysters from a costermonger’s stall as something to hide, a sign of their poverty. But oysters themselves, eaten as the first course of a banquet or dinner party, would have been a sign of wealth; richer clients would send servants to the oyster stall to bring back oysters to be eaten in this way. So the genteel poor might have been remembering finer times in their illicit consumption of oysters at the oyster stalls. Interestingly, the oyster seller observed that the ‘vulgar poor’ were revolted by the idea of eating oysters. So an appreciation of oysters – at least for this oyster seller – remained a way of distinguishing between the genteel and the vulgar poor:

  Welsh oyster women from Llangwm in Pembrokeshire in the late 19th century. They were good business-women and known to be particularly hardy, walking some 30 miles to Carmarthen to sell their oysters once a week and walking home the next day with their profits.

  ‘The First Day of Oysters: A London Street Scene’ in the 1860s, from the London Illustrated News. Note the children at the back of the picture building an oyster ‘grotto’ or shrine to St James, for which they are collecting money.

  Oyster seller, engraving by an unnamed artist, 1830.

  As to my customers, sir, she said, why, indeed, they’re all sorts. It’s not a very few times that gentlemen (I call them so because they’re mostly so civil) will stop – just as it’s getting darkish, perhaps – and look about them, and then come to me and say very quick: ‘Two penn’orth for a whet’. Ah! Some of ‘em will look, may be, like poor parsons down upon their luck, and swallow their oysters as if they was taking poison in a hurry.

  I many a time think that two penn’orth [54 pence in today’s terms] is a poor man’s dinner. It’s the same often – but only half as often, or not half – with a poor lady, with a veil that once was black, over a bonnet to match, and shivering through her shawl. She’ll have the same. About two penn’orth. My son says, it’s because that’s the price of a glass of gin, and some persons buy oysters instead – but that’s only his joke, sir. It’s not the vulgar poor that’s our chief customers. There’s many of them won’t touch oysters, and I’ve heard some of them say: ‘The sight of ‘em makes me sick; it’s like eating snails.’ The poor girls that walk the streets often buy; some are brazen and vulgar, and often the finest dressed are the vulgarest . . . One of them always says she must keep at least a penny for gin after her oysters.

  My heartiest customers, that I serve with the most pleasure, are working people, on a Saturday night. One couple – I think the wife always goes to meet her husband on a Saturday night – has two, or three, or four penn’orth, as happens, and it’s pleasant to hear them say, ‘Won’t you have another John?’ or, ‘Do have one or two more, Mary Anne.’ I’ve served them that way two or three years.

  I send out a good many oysters, opened for people’s suppers, and sometimes for supper parties – at least, I suppose, for there’s five or six dozen often ordered. The maid-servants come for them then, and I give them two or three for themselves.10

  Richard Caton Woodville, Politics in an Oyster House, 1848, oil on canvas.

  When oysters were cooked in the nineteenth century they were often combined with other exotic foods, marking new French influences in food prevailing since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. For instance, The Oyster: Where, How, and When to Find, Breed, Cook and Eat It, published anonymously in 1861, lists recipes for Fried Oyster, Oyster Soup, Cabbage with Oysters and Fried Larks and Fried Hind Legs of Frogs with Oysters. In the second edition, published in 1863, the author lists places to buy and eat oysters in London and these include Rule’s oyster shop in Maiden Lane, Scott’s in Coventry Street, Wilton’s in Great Ryder Street, and Sweeting’s beyond St Paul’s. Wilton’s, founded in 1742, catered for the aristocracy and royalty and supplied Whitstable oysters to the court from the time of George III to George VI (reigned 1936–52). Clearly this anonymous writer’s oyster directions were for those with money to spend.

  In America oysters had been harvested and eaten by Native Americans who lived along the coasts and, when dried or smoked, used to trade with inland tribes. When the early colonists came to America they often described with admiration the abundant oyster-beds along the east coast as part of their rhetoric of describing the new world as the land of riches: the land
of milk, honey and . . . oysters. In 1607, for instance, a group of settlers landed at Cape Henry, which was later to become part of the State of Virginia. One of the settlers, George Percy, described coming upon a tribe of Native Americans: ‘they had made a great fire, and had been newly roasting oysters. When they perceived our coming they fled away to the mountains and left many of the oysters in the fire. We ate some of the oysters, which were very large and delicate in taste’.11 But in 1680 settlers in Maryland complained to British authorities that their provisions were in such short supply that ‘it was necessary for them, in order to keep from starvation, to eat the oysters taken from along their shores’.12 From such accounts it seems that by this latter point of settlement, oysters were seen as a subsistence food associated with the eating customs of the natives, not a delicacy for ‘civilized’ settlers.

  In the eighteenth century Captain Cook marvelled at the size and abundance of oysters he found along the coasts of Australia and New Zealand and sent his men to stock up the boat each time they landed on an oyster-rich shore or creek. He watched the natives collecting oysters in Botany Bay in May 1770 from his boat:

  On the sand and Mud banks are Oysters, Muscles, Cockles, etc., which I believe are the Chief support of the inhabitants, who go into Shoald Water with their little Canoes and peck them out of the sand and Mud with their hands, and sometimes roast and Eat them in the Canoe, having often a fire for that purpose, as I suppose, for I know no other it can be for.13

  But if oysters were a subsistence food, gathered and dried by Cook’s men and, on some parts of the journey, perhaps the only food they lived on, they were nonetheless still regarded as a delicacy provided abundantly by these paradisiacal shores.