Empty beds

IN “The Big Oyster,” Mark Kurlansky uses a formula that has worked for him twice already in “Salt” and “Cod.” The formula is this: Isolate a substance, begin with its origins, describe its past and present, insinuate then periodically invoke the notion that the world as we know it might not exist but for the contribution of the substance or creature, and include photographs, drawings and recipes. In “Cod” and “The Big Oyster,” the arc of the narratives is cautionary -- valuable creatures, once bountiful, now are imperiled.

“Cod” is more of a cameo. “The Big Oyster” is a biography. The difference has to do, perhaps, with there being more material available about oysters and New York than about cod, and with Kurlansky’s employing a system with which he was already familiar and comfortable. Kurlansky also lives in New York, and the book seems suffused with his pleasure in exploring the city across ground that hasn’t already been covered with other writers’ footprints. People have used the material here before -- it’s New York City after all, and this is a work of research, not reporting -- but not as a means for enlivening the past through the lenses of indulgence, prosperity, marine bounty and night life.

Oysters, Kurlansky writes, were popular with the people living in the area of New York before the Europeans arrived. These people were called the Lenape. They left mounds of shells all over Manhattan. A writer in the 19th century said they looked like piles of snow. The largest shells were at the bottom, suggesting that before the Europeans got there, the Lenape were already taking more oysters than was sensible.

In the 17th century, lobsters in New York Harbor were sometimes 6 feet long. Oysters were a foot long. Kurlansky quotes a Dutchman of the period who wrote, “There are some persons who imagine the animals of the country will be destroyed in time, but this is an unnecessary anxiety.”

The Hudson River estuary had 350 square miles of oyster beds. They extended upriver about 30 miles, they bordered Brooklyn and Queens, and they surrounded Manhattan, Staten Island, Ellis Island, Liberty Island and City Island. “According to the estimates of some biologists, New York harbor contained fully half of the world’s oysters,” Kurlansky writes. Oysters were often sent as gifts to people living upriver. Among the letters left by a Dutchwoman of the 17th century “are numerous thank-you notes for oysters.”

All oysters in America are of the same species, Kurlansky says. They look different from each other and taste different according to where they were grown. In 1970, my father retired and moved to Wellfleet, Mass., and began tending an oyster bed. So I can say with some authority that oysters grown in more southerly waters such as off Delaware, Georgia and Florida typically are large, flaccid, watery and bland, and that those grown in cold water, such as off New York and New England, are small, firm and briny. When eaten they evoke poetic and passionate feelings. I don’t know why, it just seems to be true.

American oysters produce brown pearls. (The creature that makes white pearls is called a pearl oyster, but it belongs to a different genus and is more like a mussel than an oyster.) The oyster’s main predator is the starfish, which eats away at the shell until it gets to the meat. During the 17th and 18th centuries, New York oystermen would collect starfish in “small packets, slice the packets in two and throw the dead starfish back into the sea, where, they later came to understand, the two parts would each grow back their missing limbs.... “

By the mid-1820s, New York oysters were over-harvested, partly because New Yorkers were gluttonous oyster eaters, but also because the oysters were sold abroad. Kurlansky says they began to be cultivated (as opposed to being simply collected) at City Island from seed brought into the harbor in the 1830s, a practice that started after people noticed that anything spending a few days in the harbor in the summer had baby oysters attached to it.

New York had a style of restaurant called a cellar that occupied a room in a basement. By the 19th century, nearly all of these were oyster cellars. “A balloon made of bright red muslin stretched over wire or rattan and lit by a candle was always hung over the steps leading down to the cellar,” Kurlansky writes. In some of them, a person could eat all the oysters he wanted for 6 cents -- this was called the Canal Street plan. If a customer was eating too many, a proprietor might slip him an oyster whose shell had opened on its own, meaning that it had died and was no longer safe to eat.

Diamond Jim Brady was the city’s most famous oyster eater. He began each meal, according to Kurlansky, by drinking a gallon of orange juice -- he never touched wine or spirits. A restaurant owner described Brady and his girlfriend as his 25 best customers. To lose weight, Brady ordered 12 bicycles plated with gold and with diamonds on the handlebars. He rode them with friends in Central Park.

The oyster’s decline in the harbor seems to have reached an irreversible point in the 1860s when the eating of oysters was blamed for an outbreak of cholera, a result of sewage. By 1890, the beds were depleted and ruined by pollution. Kurlansky describes a 1993 study of toxins in the harbor. Oysters were planted in the Gowanus Canal, a body of water so filthy that only germs could live in it. The people conducting the study wanted to see if the oysters would spawn even so. Instead, they died within two weeks and their shells were partially eaten away by chemicals in the water.

My favorite sentence in the book begins: “In its natural life the wild oyster is barely more active than a plant....” It is cousin to Kurlansky’s observation elsewhere that salt is the only rock we eat.