The Books: Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink; edited by David Remnick; ‘On the Bay’, by Bill Buford

pm20121021_books1

Next up on the essays shelf:

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick

Secret Ingredients is a collection of food writing from The New Yorker. I love these collections. So far, we have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories, The Fun of It, and The New Gilded Age. There are a couple more collections out there that I do not own, sports writing, humor writing, fiction.

I’m not a foodie, but I love this collection because 1. it gives snapshots of different eras, 2. the writing is great.

Bill Buford has written a ton of books, although I’ve only read Among the Thugs (thoughts here), and thought it was brilliant and disturbing. I read his short pieces when I see them in magazines. This piece, from 2006, is about fishing for oysters off of Greenport, Long Island. Buford had a neighbor in the city named Mike Osinski. Buford says he had no idea what Osinski did, but he assumed it was something corporate-ish, due to the fact that he was always in a suit. One day, Osinski disappeared. In a big apartment building, you don’t keep track of your neighbors, so Buford didn’t know where he went. Later on, Buford saw him again and he looked totally different, wearing big boots, and baggy jeans, and he had grown a beard. Osinski and Buford stopped to talk and Osinski ecstatically tells Buford that he “got out of the rat race”. He quit his job, moved out of the city out to Greenport, Long Island, bought a boat, and is now a “batman”, harvesting and selling oysters. Buford was fascinated. He asked Osinski if he could come out with him on his boat some time, and Osinski said sure.

The piece is about Osinski’s new lifestyle, his patient wife, his messy house. It’s about the history of seafood-hunter-gatherers off the coast of Long Island (which kind of reminds me of the mythical boatmen of Bayonne in Mark Helprin’s Winter’s Tale. It’s about oysters themselves: the history of humans eating them, the history of why they stopped, the fears of oysters (they can make you sick), and it’s also about how to eat oysters. Buford is obsessed on a couple of points, one being: Do you chew an oyster? He asks everyone he meets. He gets varying answers. There seems to be no right way to do it.

As I mentioned in this post (which is about digging for clams off of Long Island), this is my milieu. I grew up in Rhode Island, where fishermen are an everyday part of life. My brother-in-law comes from a big fishing family. He works for an outfit that sells oysters and mussels to high-end restaurants all over the country. He occasionally goes to big events all over the country where he shucks oysters. It’s a fascinating business, and it’s fun to read some of these essays in this food collection that have to do with seafood. How to catch fish, how to transport fish, how to cook fish. I come from The Ocean State. This is my landscape.

Here’s a small excerpt.

Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink, edited by David Remnick; ‘On the Bay’, by Bill Buford

I didn’t know what it meant to harvest an oyster. I had images, probably from books, of people standing in a skiff, raking the bottom and lifting dislodged shellfish with “tongs”, deftly maneuvered like giant chopsticks. My suspicion is that, in earlier times, everyone knew where and how they got their oysters, because in earlier times everyone seemed to eat them. The mystery of oysters today is why people stopped.

It happened fast. “For most of the twentieth century, most people in town were involved in shellfish,” the mayor of Greenport, Dave Kapell, told me when I called him looking for an explanation. “There were a dozen canneries, plus shuckers and washers and packers and a barrel-making factory for the daily shipments to Fulton Fish Market. Discarded shells were everywhere, some in piles forty feet high, and always the stench of oyster tissue decomposing.” According to Kapell, most of the waterfront was given over to shellfish. So was most of the water in front of the waterfront, a concept I didn’t understand until I was shown a map from the fifties, a familiar enough graphic – small lots, big lots, a network of right angles – but unusual in this respect: the property was at the bottom of the bay. It is likely that Greenport underwater was more valuable than the town on land.

Today, the town is framed by the remains of two giant canneries – Lester & Toner Company, near Osinski’s home, and the Long Island Oyster Company, on the other side of the bay, a gleaming white monster with what looked like Hellenic pillars. Both businesses went bankrupt in the sixties. Lester & Toner is now condominiums; the Hellenic pile is empty. What happened?

Overharvesting, according to Dave Relyea, an owner of Frank M. Flower & Sons, in Oyster Bay (started in 1887, “the last of the big boys”); people didn’t know how to replace what they were taking out. And then pestilence (Dermo and MSX, parasites that mysteriously appeared in the fifties – no one knows from where). And predators (starfish, mainly, which arrived in the thirties and then again in the sixties, devouring whole bays). But people, principally. And pollution and the pervasive unease raised by the prospect of eating diseased shellfish. Oysters eat by filtering nutrients through their gills – a single oyster cleans about two gallons of water an hour – but their health corresponds to that of the water passing through them. Good water: good oysters. Bad water: bad oysters. Bad oysters: bad tummy ache, unless your oysters are really bad, in which case you have a really bad tummy ache. In Louisiana, where the fecund Gulf and the warm Mississippi encourages all kinds of growth – including the unique Vibrio vulnificus, a cousin of cholera – someone dies from oysters every year.

There were other factors. Osinski blames the Catholic Church (“If only everyone still ate fish on Fridays, I’d be rich”), an unlikely explanation but not without merit: people stopped eating oysters because they stopped knowing them. My Louisiana grandfather, for instance, a boomingly affable man (who also believed that if you’re from the Gulf you eat the Gulf), had loved oysters – along with crawfish and shrimp, plus swamp items like catfish and possum – and devoured them with a voracious zeal, somehow finding something in the shellfish that confirmed his Southernness. My father, a more selective eater, didn’t confuse identity with diet, and thought oysters were repellent. It takes only one generation to turn against a thing, and the next generation (mine) has no idea what it’s missing. As a result, oysters today are mainly a nostalgia food, rarely eaten at home but served in restaurants by members of a staff we’d like to believe won’t poison us. They are the very people Osinski sells to. Which was why I was accompanying him into the freezing Peconic. Le Bernardin needed another two hundred.

This entry was posted in Books and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.