Twain's Feast (18 page)

“My boy,” said Old Mr. Flood as he turned his attention from eggs to shellfish, “people who are unaccustomed to oysters sometimes behave real queer after putting away a few dozen.” He told of a group of Brooklyn boys, “weevily fellows, pale, stoop-shouldered, and clerky looking, three runts, no life in them at all,” who were given permission to eat all the oysters they could hold. Later that afternoon, said Flood, “those Brooklyn boys were laughing and shouting and wrestling and throwing each other’s hats in the water. They were flinging themselves head over heels. The air was full of Brooklyn boys.”

The air was full of him:
that’s how I think of Twain in San Francisco. He’d fled Washoe disgraced and fearing for his life. Now he was in a city of delights, part of a circle of young writers running over roof-tops, and betting shellfish dinners on bowling matches, and drinking until dawn. A city of steamed sea mussels and of oysters by the bushel, of whiskey and Chinatown, of gold prospectors and Emperor Norton, of champagne and gas lamps and fog. Yeah.

There are few things as liable to start an argument about food as oysters. You can argue about species: the relative merits, for example, of New York’s eastern
Crassostrea virginica
and France’s flat
Ostrea edulis
(Frederick Marryat wrote a classic takedown of America’s eastern oysters, saying that “as the Americans assert that the English and French oysters taste of copper. . . . I presume they do; and that’s the reason why we do not like the American oysters, copper being better than no flavour at all”). Or you can argue about region; Thomas De Voe said that “the Northern oyster has a broad, thin, tough shell, with a pleasant smell, savoring of the odor of marine plants, while the Southern oyster has a thick, spongy, soft shell, and [is] of less flavor.” You can even debate marine microclimates—whether oysters from the north cove of a given bay have a brinier snap than those farther south (if there’s a river to the south, they probably do). If Twain’s near duel had been about oysters instead of flour, it might have seemed almost reasonable.

Opinions about oysters are passionate for a simple reason: oysters are rabid filter feeders. With each oyster filtering thirty gallons of water a day, the character of the surrounding water—temperature, clarity, mineral content, salinity—completely infuses the flesh. Whether you prefer your oysters coppery or briny, meaty or smoky, or with a note of cucumber or celery salt, the ones you love are best from a particular spot. The prizewinning Sweetwaters from Hog Island Oyster Company take their name from the stream that empties near the fattening beds, which, as one oyster aficionado put it, “balances the saltiness of the oyster liquor with a smoky sweetness.” The Armoricaines of Locmariaquer, which author Eleanor Clarke insisted had “no relation at all to the taste, if there is one, of the usual U.S. restaurant oyster,” made her feel that she was “eating the sea, . . . only the sensation of a gulp of sea water [had] been wafted out of it by some sorcery” (she thought of mermaids, and poems, and the smell of kelp during ebb tide). Oysters from Cape Breton grow slow and briny, those from off Louisiana rapidly and mild. And oysters change flavor
fast,
fast enough to qualify as truly seasonal; the Hog Island Sweetwaters, for example, are brinier during California’s dry summer months, when the fresh stream flowing to the fattening beds becomes a mere trickle.

Terroir
is the French word for the way a flavor can contain and express the essence of a place. Oysters have
terroir.
Do you ever sit around thinking about the salinity and temperature and nutrients and currents and clarity of local waters? Probably not—but eat a dozen oysters with a group of informed oyster lovers and you probably will. Arguments about oysters are really arguments about place, about the merits of home, whether home is New York or South Carolina or San Francisco.

Now, San Francisco Bay isn’t actually a bay. It’s an estuary. And though this might seem semantic, it actually makes all the difference in the world. A bay simply holds water; an estuary mixes it. It’s the difference between a glass of neat gin and a dry martini—gin is well and good, but dry martinis are holy
,
and though bays are useful, estuaries are explosive creators of life. In an estuary, fresh and salt waters come together, mixing and churning, creating a state of change and utter confusion that is one of the most literally lively conditions on the planet.

It’s a situation as rare as it is precious, at least on the scale of the San Francisco estuary. Think, for a moment, of a hopeful ’49er taking a ship around Cape Horn (maybe he was worried enough about malaria to avoid the land crossing at Panama). He’d sail north past Chile, and Peru, and Ecuador, and Colombia, and past the Darien gap and along the sweeping curve of Mexico and then the whole lower California coast, and after all that time and distance his first encounter with a major estuary would be when he sailed through the nearly invisible narrow mouth of the Golden Gate and into the tidal maze beyond.

You tell the story of an estuary through water flow—where it comes from, how long it stays, what it carries, where it goes. In the San Francisco Bay, the story was complex and ever-changing. Every day the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers carried some 24 billion gallons of fresh water to meet the more than 200 billion gallons of cold, salty, ocean water sluicing in and out the Golden Gate. More streams, creeks, and winter rivulets ran through three hundred square miles of brackish bay wetlands, as well as the Sacramento Delta’s five hundred square miles of “reeds and rivers.” Leaves, reeds, and dead wetland plants drifted downstream, rotting into rich nutrients; plankton fed on them, bloomed, and in turn died and sank to the bottom of the bay. There, in the mud, the filter feeders waited, oysters and mussels and clams ready for the slow, steady rain of nutrients.

Call it a bay or an estuary, it suffused San Francisco. Sand dunes loomed above the “old-fashioned” frame houses; below them piers probed the bright water like fingers. People bathed in the bay, at least until (or so Twain claimed) the owner of a new North Beach bathing house fed pork to a shark, cut it open on the dock, and exclaimed in horror that the fiendish beast had eaten human flesh.
⁹
Twain could walk to the docks, passing Abe Warner’s Cobweb Palace with its mounds of scrimshaw and New England-style clam and crab dishes; there he could watch fishermen sail in with salmon and flatfish, and eggers unload baskets of murre eggs from the shark-haunted Farallons. Afterward he sometimes boarded a touring sailboat for a cruise to Oakland, or San Leandro, or Alameda. Along the way he doubtless saw wide beds of eelgrass hissing under the incoming tide, and flanking reefs of native oysters. There’d have been trawlers, feluccas with brightly colored square sails, even Chinese junks heading for the shrimping beds. Flights of pelicans tracing long lines in the water with their wing tips. Sea otters. Maybe a whale.

And he’d have seen, along with native oyster reefs, the sticks and stakes of submerged oyster holding pens. It’s hugely surprising how few of the oysters eaten in San Francisco in Twain’s day were true bay natives; hundreds of shell mounds flank the bay, after all. Oysters have fed people here for centuries. Still, within a few years into the Gold Rush, the great majority of oysters eaten in San Francisco came from somewhere else. Specifically, they came from Shoalwater Bay, Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula—came in such quantities that San Franciscans soon called all native western oysters “Olys” (they’re still called Olympias—the scientific name is
Ostrea conchaphila
).

The main complaint about native San Francisco oysters was their size. Clarence Edwords’s 1914 restaurant guide and cookbook
Bohemian San Francisco
has a recipe for oyster omelets, calling for six eggs . . . and
one hundred
native oysters. Ed Ricketts (the model for Doc in Steinbeck’s
Cannery Row
) later estimated that it would take between sixteen hundred and two thousand shucked natives to make a single gallon. Small oysters are great—you make the mistake of bypassing them in favor of the big ones at Hog Island only once, and even the landlocked
Buckeye Cookery
says simply that “the small-shelled oysters have the finest flavor”—but this is pretty extreme. What’s more, both Edwords and Ricketts are probably talking about imported Olys, which were about 50 percent larger than those native to San Francisco Bay. Newcomers accustomed to the larger, lighter eastern oysters began looking elsewhere—even to the small oysters of Oregon and Washington—from very early on. The first shipment of some six hundred bushels of Shoalwater Olympias arrived from Washington in 1850. For the next twenty years, they were the majority of the oysters eaten in the city (and 90 percent of imports). In 1859 some thirty-five thousand thirty-two-pound baskets were imported—over 1.1 million pounds, if you include the shells. Most went into holding tanks close to the city, fenced off against foraging bat rays. Even the fact that Olys couldn’t spawn in the cool bay waters had its advantages, since they could be taken from the pens and served on the half shell all year long; San Francisco didn’t have a “no oysters in months without
r
’s” rule.

Olys were San Francisco’s major oyster even before 1861, when huge floods flushed the bay with fresh water and killed many of the local shellfish. Still, they probably tasted much like the oysters that had been eaten in the region for thousands of years. Like all Olympia oysters, Shoalwater Bay Olys absorbed minerals quickly, which gave the dark meat a distinctly coppery taste, unlike the brinier (and more widely known) easterns. As soon as they reached the city’s holding tanks, they promptly began their relentless, untiring filter feeding; they must have quickly taken on some of the qualities of the even darker local oysters. An oyster didn’t have to have been spawned in San Francisco to be a San Francisco oyster.

Twain was very much aware of where his oysters came from—and his partisanship shifted, at different times, between several sources. When one Mr. Scoofy brought in a shipment of oysters from his Mexican shellfish farm, Twain declared them fine, fat, and “far superior to the poor little insipid things we are accustomed to here.” Scoofy, he rejoiced, would “hereafter endeavor to keep this market supplied with his delicious marine fruit.” The Mexican market never came to much (a steamer took thirteen days from Mazatlán, while a sailboat could arrive from Washington in less than a week). But did Olympia oysters, whether true natives or Washington imports, really suffer as much by comparison as Twain claimed?

If he was talking about size . . . well, shucking a hundred Olys to make a single omelet would be a true labor of love. Still, many people loved Olympias; an 1877
Scribner’s
article said that “in San Francisco you earn the confidence of the Californian by praising his little coppery oysters and saying that . . . after all the true taste of the ‘natives’ is only acquired where there is an excess of copper in suspension.” And Edwords obviously loved the labor-intensive oyster omelets, writing that “the slightly coppery taste of the California oysters gives a piquancy to the flavor of the omelet that can be obtained in no other way, and those who once ate of Arbogast’s California oyster omelet, invariably called for it again and again.” Recent European arrivals like Marryat, loving intense Belons, might have preferred Olympias to bluepoints.

Here’s the definition of a good day of research: house-made potato chips, beer, and an oyster happy hour. Berkeley’s Sea Salt restaurant serves, among its many oysters, Olympias from Taylor Shellfish’s Skookum Inlet farms, brought from Washington, just like Twain’s were (though his were from extensive wild beds). Before my dozen arrive on the table, I know to expect something small and coppery-tasting, and that’s exactly what I get—the shells are as small as a doll’s dishes. And coppery? They’re coppery like a pulped penny is coppery. Yet I don’t mean to make them sound bad. In fact, they’re terrific with an IPA, the beer cleansing the nearly bloody taste and leaving only a memory of a full and unforgettable flavor. Olys are oysters to lean into; I’m just glad, considering their size, that someone else did the shucking.

Maybe it’s appropriate that Twain, a man who lived in and identified with so many American places, never took a firm and final position on which sort, or which preparation, was best. Beyond his praise for the half shells of San Francisco, his menu included fried oysters, stewed oysters, bluepoints on the half shell, oyster soup, and oysters roasted in the shell “Northern style.” He ate them in all their varieties and in all styles; given how ebullient he was when praising fresh fruit, and his savagery in blasting tired meat, I’m guessing he enjoyed talking about oysters as much as eating them.

As to the pressing question of whether he thought that Olys were poor and insipid, I have to think that he was sucking up to Scoofy. There were, it seems to me, few men that Twain would have wanted to know more than the owner of literal shiploads of oysters; publicly praising Scoofy’s “delicious marine fruit” would have been one way to get in good. In this case, however, the young writer’s calculations backfired badly. After a night of debauchery by Twain, his friend Amigo reported in
Gold Hill News
that Twain “had abused the Scoofy oysters served in McDonald’s Saloon,” claiming hellish vomiting and diarrhea. Amigo declared the oysters wholesome, pointing out (reasonably enough) that “where there is a barrel of whiskey and only a half bushel of oysters, it is hardly fair to assume that the poison is
all
in the said oysters.” He added that “the next time Mark gets poisoned, the police propose to have him ripped open and analyzed at once by a practical chemist.”