Geography of Oysters: The Connoisseur's Guide to Oyster Eating in America
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Passionate and playful, this is the first comprehensive guide to identifying, serving, and savoring one of America's original and most delicious foods. Considered one of the great sensual foods since the time of ancient Rome, eaten in the United States since its earliest human habitation, oysters are now seeing an American renaissance. Like wine and cheese, they owe much of their flavor to terroir, or the specific environment in which they grow—indeed, oysters are the food that tastes most like the sea. Today, there are at least two hundred unique oyster "appellations" in North America, each producing oysters with a distinct and consistent flavor—some merely passable, others dazzling. Beautifully written and illustrated, A Geography of Oysters is an indispensable guide to the oysters of America, describing each oyster's appearance, flavor, origin, and availability. Readers will learn how to shuck, how to pair wines and oysters, and how to navigate a raw bar with skill and panache. The book includes recipes, maps, black-and-white photos, and a color guide, as well as lists of top oyster restaurants, producers, and festivals. Painting a picture of the quirky characters who farm oysters and the gorgeous stretches of coast where these delicacies are found, A Geography of Oysters is both terrific reading and the guide that foodies of all types have been waiting for. The Barnes & Noble Review Rowan Jacobsen begins his guide to the peculiarly adult pleasure in eating briny, live sea creatures by pointing out the obvious: "Oysters taste like the sea." This, he writes, gives each delicious mollusk a "somewhereness" -- or, if you prefer to borrow a fancy French vintner's term for describing how climate and geography influence flavor, "terroir" (given that oysters' "terra isn't very firma," he points out, the nonexistent word meroir might be more correct in describing the oyster's ocean home but would get you laughed out of any restaurant). He lays out the basic flavors that one can expect from each region (cucumber, citrus, melon, copper, smoke), runs through the most obvious complaints made by the uninitiated, and provides a history of the good old, bad old days, from Native Americans who harvested wild oysters to the early '80s, when restaurateurs, coddled by years of reliance on the shucked meat market, were stunned to discover that oysters could be served in their own shells. An appendix provides lists of oyster festivals, restaurants, and growers who will ship overnight to anywhere in the world. Though most of those who pick up this book will likely be previous converts, Jacobsen, a staff writer for the The Art of Eating, the food magazine with a deservedly cultish following, provides lively, lucid prose that should suck in even the most squeamish eaters.--Amy Benfer
How to Use This Book ixIntroduction 1Mastering Oysters 9A Dozen Oysters You Should Know 11The Five Species 15How to Grow an Oyster 27The Taste of an Oyster: A Primer 45Sustainability and the Environment: The Case for Oyster Aquaculture 55What Kind of Oyster Eater Are You? 65The Aphrodisiac Angle 70The Oyster Appellations of North America 73Navigating the World of Oyster Names 75Maritime Provinces 79Maine 95Massachusetts and Rhode Island 105New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut 119Chesapeake 136Gulf Coast 150California and Oregon 157Washington State 165British Columbia and Alaska 198International Waters 207Everything You Wanted to Know About Oysters But Were Afraid to Ask 211Shipping, Selecting, Storing, Shucking, Serving, and Savoring Your Oysters 213Oyster Wines and Other Libations 228Recipes 235Safety 255Nutrition 261The Best Oyster Bars and Oyster Festivals 265Growers Who Ship Direct 278Acknowledgments 283Oyster Index 285Recipe Index 287
