THE ART OF THE OYSTER

An oyster is not a ham sandwich. This little hermit focuses just enough cosmic energy inside its cave to merit a moment of your attention. The following dos and don’ts are suggestions to help make the most of that moment. But this isn’t the Japanese tea ceremony, either—we’re talking happy hour here—so don’t get all orthodox about it. There’s an art to eating and appreciating an oyster, but—as with all the social arts—part of the art is in not drawing attention to the artistry. Get it right, don’t linger, move on.

DO UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU’RE EATING

An oyster is a filter feeder. All life long, it sits attached to a rock or a shell in some bay, pumping water across its gills, straining out the phytoplankton, and transforming this marine forage into protein. Oyster farms are the greenest protein producers on earth (no feed!). An oyster wants to grow up, grow strong, and reproduce as many times as possible before the Grim Reaper arrives, shucking scythe in hand. Anytime the water is warm enough for it to feed, it builds up its body and its shell. When the water gets really warm, usually in summer, it spawns, ejecting sperm or eggs into the water.

These form larval oysters, which swim around for two weeks looking for something hard (rock or shell) to attach to. As soon as they “set,” they are called “spat.” They never move again. Oyster hatcheries trick oysters into spawning by cranking up the water to summer temps. Then they trick the larvae into setting on tiny grains of sand instead of whole shells. Oyster farms buy this quinoa-sized “seed” and grow it in protected environments. Oysters are the animals that farm like plants.

DO KNOW YOUR TERMINOLOGY

“Spat,” “spawn,” “seed,” “set,” “flupsy”—lots of weird and colorful terms populate the oysterverse. I have used them sparingly, but sometimes there’s no way around it. You don’t need to know this terminology to enjoy an oyster, but it might make the experience a tad richer. Because all the terms are in the glossary, I don’t define them every time they appear in the text.

DO KNOW YOUR SPECIES

The flavor, texture, and vibe of the five species of oysters grown in America are as different from one another as is that of a cow, a pig, a sheep, a goat, and a bison. The Pacific (Crassostrea gigas) species is the workhorse of the oysterverse, responsible for at least three-quarters of the oysters produced worldwide. France, Ireland, England, Australia, New Zealand, and the West Coast of North America all depend on the Pacific oyster, as does its native Japan. It grows fast and hearty, tastes good (cucumber is the go-to descriptor), and isn’t picky about its waters. It can be really pretty (like that sexy little Naked Roy), with ruffled shells fanned in pastel, or strong and silent, its shell buffed gray-green by abrasion on the beach. The Kumamoto was an obscure and unheralded species from southern Japan before war and California brought it to fame (story here); now its conspicuously fruity essence makes it the most beloved oyster in America. The button-sized Olympia, which once enjoyed an empire from British Columbia to Southern California, is too small to be taken seriously except by those few of us who know it to be a brassy masterpiece (as is so evident here). Its hefty cousin, the European Flat, the native oyster of Europe, is more like a metal monster straight out of Marvel Comics: Iron Oyster. It’s a mouthful of crunch and iodine. Tough to farm, it’s quite rare these days, though it thrives in deep, wild basins from Maine to Scotland. Only those from Brittany’s Belon River can be called Belons. The Eastern oyster grows wild from New Brunswick to Texas and builds reefs so large people have camped on them. Today the wild ones are few and far between, but every farmed oyster on the Gulf and Atlantic Coasts is an Eastern, prized for its robust shell (like the Gulf Coast brute here) and its pure sea-salt savor. Honorable Mention: The New Zealand Flat oyster, cousin to the European Flat (can’t miss the family resemblance here), native to New Zealand and Chile, now jetting in to the West Coast to make the occasional summer appearance.

DON’T TAKE THE EASTERN OYSTER FOR GRANTED

If you grew up on the Gulf Coast or East Coast, the Eastern oyster is about as exotic as the seagull. It’s everywhere, stuffing turkeys, lining driveways, keeping the cocktail sauce honest. You’d be forgiven for thinking it’s common. But you’d be like kids in Alba who think the whole world shaves truffles over its spaghetti. Familiarity breeds complacency, but it’s time we woke up to the fact that we have one of the world’s greatest foods clinging to our eastern shores, and nowhere else. No oyster builds reefs like the Eastern; no oyster evokes the ocean with such hyper-realism. Eagle, shmeagle; nothing says “America” like Crassostrea virginica.

DON’T FALL FOR CUTESY NAMES

I’m sitting at a bar with four French Hogs, two Sea Cows, a Fat Bastard, a Little Bitch, a Naked Cowboy, and a Lady Chatterley. It sounds like a joke waiting for a punch line, or a demented version of “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” but it’s also the state of oyster naming today. Oysters, like European wine, were once named for the places they came from. Apalachicola, Bluepoint, Wellfleet, Malpeque, Belon. But as wild oysters disappeared and aquaculture arose, you might have thirty different farms selling Wellfleets, each using different techniques, culling to different standards, and so on. The better growers naturally wanted to differentiate themselves, so they developed their own brands: the 13 Miles and Hog Islands of the world. It made sense, and honestly, most of the oysters I look for are branded names from a single farm. But, as happened with wine, growers and distributors soon discovered that a saucy name was a great way to grab customers’ attention, especially since information about the actual oysters was often hard to come by. Sometimes those oysters are good—French Hogs, Sea Cows, Fat Bastards, and Naked Cowboys are all great oysters—but a titillating name on an unfamiliar oyster should be a red flag. Real wine drinkers don’t buy Mommy’s Time Out.

DO TELL A WILD FROM A FARMED OYSTER

Wild oysters will be irregular in shape, owing to their irregular existences. They may be long and skinny or stumpy and gnarled. Their shells will almost always be scuffed, and will have a divot near the hinge where they were attached to a rock or shell. Farmed oysters will be perfect teardrops, paisleys, or cornucopias.

DON’T ASSUME THE WILD IS BETTER

This ain’t salmon. Oysters spend their entire lives attached to one spot. They free-range as often as broccoli. The farmed ones are usually better.

DO KNOW A TUMBLED OYSTER WHEN YOU SEE IT

And geek out for your tablemates. We are in the midst of a tumbling revolution in the oyster world. It started when Keith Reid, up in British Columbia, discovered that regular jostling would chip off the soft growing edge of his Pacific oysters—which by nature like to grow long and skinny—and force them to “cup up.” The result was the Kusshi, a bonsai masterpiece that is polished, round, and firm. Soon Chelsea Gem, Shigoku, Blue Pool, and the rest got in on the game, and now half the growers in North America seem to be tumbling their oysters to some extent. You can always tell a tumbled oyster by its smooth shell, stumpy stature, and deep cup.

DO IGNORE THE R RULE

The old r rule, which goes back centuries, states that you should eat oysters only during months that have an r in them, September through April. In other words, avoid oysters during the summer. This had something to do with safety (bacteria counts are highest in warm summer water, and higher still if oysters bake in the air like petri dishes for days before being consumed, which happened regularly in the old, pre-refrigeration days) and something to do with reproduction: Oysters spawn during the warm summer months. As they convert their energy reserves from glycogen to gamete, they can stop tasting sweet and start tasting like something that crawled out of a bait pile. The conventional wisdom was to steer clear in summer, let them reproduce, then resume in the fall. But today’s farmed oysters are spawned in hatcheries, are iced as soon as they leave the water, and they stay that way all the way to your plate. You can eat them year-round.

DON’T ENTIRELY IGNORE THE R RULE

On the other hand, I have yet to meet the oyster that wasn’t at its peak between November and January, so I reserve most of my serious shucking for fall and winter, when oysters are reliably mind-blowing. Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s were made for oysters. In that spirit:

DO THINK ABOUT SEASONALITY

Oysters vary in flavor throughout the year. Phytoplankton starts blooming in spring, when water temperatures and hours of photosynthesis rise, and that’s when most oysters really start to feed and grow. At this time of year, they can have a fresh, green flavor. Oysters like to spawn in summer, when temperatures peak. As they convert their energy stores to gamete they taste gamy and soft. After they spawn—which can involve ejecting as much as a third of their body weight—they tend to look shriveled and translucent, and they taste of little more than seawater. In the fall, they begin to bulk up again in preparation for the long winter dormancy. By early winter, they have stuffed themselves with glycogen and amino acids to prevent freezing and starvation, and they can be crazy sweet. They should look fat. Through the winter, they live off their reserves, and they can be very thin by the time that first spring algae bloom hits. This cycle is especially true for more northern, cold-water oysters, and less applicable to Gulf of Mexico oysters, which never stop feeding entirely and never have to plump up quite as much in the fall. But in general, if you’re disappointed by an oyster in spring or summer, try it again in late fall before you give up on it. It might be a different animal altogether.

DON’T SETTLE FOR SNOT-ON-SHELL

While it’s true that the art of oyster appreciating is at an all-time high in North America, it’s also true that as every dive bistro has been reborn as an oyster bar, there are more scrambled, shrunken, watery oysters being sold on the half shell than ever before. An oyster should be plump, opaque, and whole. Its meat should fill most of its shell, with just a little room for liquor (the watery juice inside the shell). It should not be translucent or gray. (A translucent oyster is basically a bag of seawater.) It should not be spawny, indicated by a creamy white belly, a mouth-coating texture, and spawning veins if you look closely enough (which you probably shouldn’t do). It should not be covered in shell fragments (though sometimes a fine dusting of plaster near the hinge is unavoidable; consider it your nightly Tums) and, equally important, it should not have a broken belly, the result of an inexperienced or hurried shucker. Think of it as a poached egg: The pleasure of bursting it open, of savoring the mix of sweet muscle and salty belly, is reserved for you.

DO CHEW

You need to mix that sweet muscle and salty belly. You need to taste the thing.

DO SAVOR THE LIQUOR—TO A POINT

For years, many of us have been advocating for more liquor appreciation. “It’s part of the gestalt,” we told everyone, and everyone listened. But the oysters we had in mind filled 90 percent of their shells, with just a thin envelope of liquor around them. Too often, I see a shrunken oyster floating in a tablespoon of seawater. Don’t feel compelled to swallow this broth. It’s going to overwhelm the oyster with saltiness, so pour some out. The bigger and plumper the body of an oyster, the more “stuff” it has to balance the salinity of seawater and the more liquor you’ll want.

DON’T MAKE STUPID APHRODISIAC JOKES

Mea culpa. This seemed kind of fun a dozen years ago, and we all ran with it. Now it feels stale.

DO TRY SHUCKING YOUR OWN

Think of the money saved! And the party adulation.

DO USE A GOOD KNIFE

The blade should be thin and strong, which means cheap knives won’t cut it. You need to be able to wriggle the blade between the shells, and you need to use some force to pry the oyster open.

DON’T DROWN THEM IN MIGNONETTE

So you’ve jettisoned cocktail sauce along with your Smash Mouth CDs and other signs of your ignorant youth, and now you think you’re Thomas Keller because you ladle vinegar over your oysters. Next time, bring an eyedropper with you. Three drops usually does the trick. Ditto for lemon: one wedge per dozen.

DO LOOSEN UP ABOUT DRINK PAIRINGS

Sure, sure, dry, crisp white wine with oysters. Dry, crisp beer. Both good. Now try martinis, margaritas, and manzanilla. Try flowery rosés. Try off-dry chenin blanc and sake. Vinho Verde on the rocks. Get a little louche with absinthe. Plant a Bloody Mary next to a plate of Olympias. Down sweet ice cider with salty Island Creeks. Guinness with Kelly Natives. Gin and tonics with anything. Maybe a Chupacabra’s Delight. And lest we forget: lemon water.

DO ADMIRE THE SHELLS

People never know what to do with the shell after eating an oyster. They look around for a discard bowl. But the artful solution is obvious: Return the shell right back to its spot on the bed of ice, facedown. Most of an oyster’s artistry lies in its bottom shell. That’s where you get the gorgeous purple and green fans of color, the rune-like patterns and architectural flourishes. And as you eat through your dozen and the shells accumulate, you get to appreciate the uniqueness of each. When you’re done, you’ve created a sort of clock of bones, a memento mori to mark this moment of your life. Then it gets whisked away.

Written by Rowan Jacobsen in "The Essential Oyster", Bloomsbury Publishing, USA/UK, 2016, excerpts chapter one. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.