![]() ![]() had made a great fire, and had been newly a resting Oysters.” They ate some and sportingly pronounced them “very large and delicate in taste.” On a voyage of exploration, he and his companions once came upon a place where “the Savages. Captain John Smith seems to shudder when he described their plight, but on the other hand, Smith could relish oysters too, when he was sufficiently hungry. In the winter of 1609, the “Starving Times,” Jamestown survived only because sixty or eighty of the First Families of Virginia dragged themselves downriver where they subsisted on little but Crassostrea virginica, the native American oyster. It appears from the earliest descriptions of these navigational hazards that only desperation could drive men to eat the creatures. Seamen reported in amazement finding oyster-shell shoals large enough to capsize a boat. Boats that hauled oysters were thought fit in the off season for nothing but the hauling of wood or manure.Įven though oysters were cheap and plentiful in Europe, the abundance of the Chesapeake beds astonished the early Colonists. Their king, James I, is the earliest candidate for the authorship of the jaundiced assessment that “he was a valiant man who first adventured on eating of oysters.” A medical writer of the period formalized the inhibition against eating oysters in months without an “r” in their names. Their great poet, Shakespeare, described oysters as “foul” and linked them with the poorhouse. ![]() The generation that founded Jamestown, for example, regarded oysters as rather poor fare. The abundance of oysters is older than their glorification. But in gaslit America, high society’s every fine meal began with the same oysters that could be had on the street for pocket change by the rudest workingman. The privileged few usually define their delicacies in terms of how rare and, therefore, how expensive they are. From time to time since the Romans, enlightened individuals have recognized extraordinary qualities in the family Ostreidae, and about the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans joined in what amounted to a mass democratic cult, virtually worshiping the creature. And despite the saying that it was a bold man who first ate one, the oyster has been consumed by humans since before the oldest certifiable man-made artifact.īut the oyster is no ordinary food. It flourishes best in the bays and estuaries where salt- and fresh water mix and people build resorts. It is found in the tidal waters of every continent but Antarctica, on the shores of every sea but the Caspian. The oyster is an ancient species, and one that has evolved little over millions of years. ![]()
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