The Big Oyster (30 page)

Theirs was a legend that fit the times—a tale of excess. It was the Gilded Age and there was a tendency to gild just about everything, including the proverbial lily. It was the age when it was no longer enough to serve a raw oyster in its shell. It became the fashion to commission ornate oyster plates, often hand-painted and custom-made, from leading china makers. Gilded porcelain would, of course, be better. Originally, oyster plates had one deep well, like a soup bowl, for a bed of ice on which to put the oysters. But soon they were made with a half-dozen wells, shaped like the interior of an oyster, in highly ornate patterns preferably with a maximum of gilding. The only problem with these plates was that they could not hold enough oysters to keep many diners happy and would require constant refilling. And it is true that oysters have the unusual quality of not filling or bloating, even when large quantities are consumed. One book,
The Oyster Epicure,
published in New York in 1883, quotes a man who has just dispatched ten dozen on the half shell, “Something must be wrong with me! I have eaten 120 oysters and upon my word of honor, I don't think I am quite as hungry as when I began.”

Tschirky, who admitted that he really couldn't cook, collected his recipes without acknowledgment from people who could, the leading chefs of New York, during his many years first at Delmonico's then as maître d' of the Waldorf-Astoria. The Waldorf-Astoria was known for its oysters, though it is only remembered today for a salad. Though most modern diners would choose dry white wine with oysters, Tschirky recommended the sweet, musty, complex, and costly wines of Sauternes, specifically an 1878 Château-Rieussec.

His oyster science, like that of many of the great chefs he stole from, was somewhat faulty. He identified all oysters as
Ostrea edulis,
the fading flat oyster of Europe. He considered Bluepoints to be the best oysters, though he didn't seem to realize that they, along with all the other East Coast oysters, were
Crassostrea.
This was his oyster-bisque recipe:

Place about thirty medium sized oysters in a saucepan together with their own juice, and poach them over a hot fire, after which drain them well. Then fry a shallot colorless in some butter together with an onion, sprinkle over them a little curry and add some oyster juice, seasoning with salt and red pepper; pound the oysters to a good firm paste, moisten them with a little of their juice, and strain them through a fine tammy-cloth; warm them over the fire, but do not let them boil; add a small quantity of thickening of potato flour mixed with a little water (about a tablespoon for each quart of the mixture), and when about to serve, incorporate some cream and fine butter, garnishing with some chopped oysters and mushrooms, mixed with bread crumbs and herbs; add a little seasoning of salt, pepper and nutmeg, some raw egg yolks and roll this mixture into ball-shaped pieces, place them on a well buttered baking sheet in a slack oven and poach them, then serve.

In his 1912 article on lobster palaces, Julian Street wrote, “Let us dry our tears, go to the Café de l'Opéra and listen to the
haute monde
of the Tenderloin eat soup.” The Tenderloin, where many of the lobster palaces were located, was between Forty-second and Twenty-fourth streets, between Fifth and Seventh avenues. Known for its corruption, it was sometimes called “Satan's Circus,” while the original name, tenderloin, came to mean a bribe paid to the police.

No one can say
exactly who ate the hundreds of millions of oysters that were sold in New York markets, but New Yorkers seemed to be able to consume as many oysters as were available. More came to the city every year. By 1872, New York City had cornered a third of the annual $25 million U.S. oyster trade. New York operators planted hundreds of thousands of bushels of seeds to keep up with the demand. On September 10, 1883,
The New York Times
reported:

One of the dealers was asked whether he did not think the oyster business was increasing in volume to such an extent as to imperil the future of the oysterbeds. He replied that there was, in his judgment, some fear that before many years, the demand, if it continued to increase as it had been doing in the past five years, would be greater than the supply. The oyster could not last forever any more than the lobster, and the latter were becoming scarcer every year.

CHAPTER TEN

Ostracized in the Golden Age

B
y 1880, New York was the undisputed capital of history's
greatest oyster boom in its golden age, which lasted until at least 1910. The oyster beds of the New York area were producing 700 million oysters a year. That is without including the oysters of New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, or eastern Long Island, all of which were sold in the New York City markets.

On almost every block of Manhattan, oysters were for sale from streetside stands, belowground cellars, and aboveground palaces. In addition to all this, New Yorkers ate them at home. Lida A. Seely, in her 1902 book
Mrs. Seely's Cook Book: A Manual of French and American Cookery with Chapters on Domestic Servants, their Rights and Duties, and Many Other Details of Household Management,
offers this advice on giving dinner parties:

Early twentieth-century New York City oyster stand
MUSEUM OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK

As soon as a guest is seated, and has taken his napkin and bread from his plate, the butler puts down on it another on which are oysters, clams, or melon, according to the season, neatly arranged on a small doily. Oysters and clams should be served on plates of cracked ice, six or eight on each plate, with a quarter of a lemon in the centre. Although the former are said to be better if eaten from their deep shell, for formal dinners they look rather prettier on their flat upper one. The plates should be placed in the plates already in front of each guest, after the napkins have been lifted. As the butler puts down the oysters or clams, the footman should follow with a small silver tray on which are black cayenne, liquid red pepper, and grated horse-radish. Brown-bread sandwiches, cut very thin and spread with unsalted butter, are also handed with this course.

Seely was born in Canada in 1854 with the name Eliza Campbell. After marrying a man named Holly Seely, she moved to Manhattan and set up what was called an intelligence office on Twenty-second Street just off Fifth Avenue. An intelligence office, a growing business at the time, was an employment agency for butlers, maids, cooks, chauffeurs, valets, and other domestic servants. In 1900, about 1.8 million women, 90 percent of the female workforce in the United States, were domestics. It was, as it still is, one of the most sensitive and difficult employee–employer relationships, and Lida Seely earned a reputation for her skill, tact, and empathy.

The book urged employers to allow servants their privacy and never spy on them and entreated servants to overlook their employers' moments of ill temper. With its wealth of detail,
Mrs. Seely's Cookbook
is a social document of that Gilded Age before the Depression, an age that coincided with the last great era of New York oysters. In 1890, when the word
millionaire
still had meaning, there were only 4,074 of them in the entire United States, of which 1,103 lived in Manhattan. In the recipe section of her book, Mrs. Seely offers more than twenty oyster recipes. These recipes tended to call for copious amounts of bivalves. “Have at hand thirty-five oysters,” begins one recipe.

   
Stuffed Oysters

Have at hand twenty-eight large oysters and some chicken forcemeat prepared as follows: Scrape and pound the breast of an uncooked medium-sized fowl, then rub it through a purée sieve. Mix one-quarter of a cup of cream or milk with one-eighth of a cup of fine bread crumbs. Cook them slowly until they form a smooth paste. Then add the chicken, the white of one egg, one tablespoonful of butter, one half teaspoonful of salt, a bit of white pepper. Mix all together thoroughly and set away to cool. Dry the oysters thoroughly and season them with salt and pepper. Roll them in bread crumbs. Arrange the forcemeat in half as many pieces as you have oysters, cover with the remaining oysters. Press them together so they will stick. Take one whole egg and the yolk left from the forcemeat. Beat it well, season with a little salt. Dip each oyster in the egg, then roll them in bread crumbs. Fry in hot fat until a good color. Drain on brown paper and serve very hot with Madeira sauce in a separate dish.

“Pigs in Blankets” was a very popular turn-of-the-century dish.

Have at hand oysters, salt, pepper, sliced fat bacon. Clean and season some nice large oysters with salt and pepper. Wrap each oyster in a slice of thin bacon, pinning it with a toothpick. Cook them until the bacon is crisp.

Many of the waters
of the New York City area were still oyster producing. In 1883,
The New York Times
identified Bluepoint, today the closest New York City has to a local oyster, as the farthest oyster away, shipments reaching the city only once a week. The principal New York beds were Shrewsbury and Keyport, New Jersey; Prince's Bay, Staten Island; Jamaica Bay; the Great South Bay; City Island; Cow Bay; Hempstead Harbor; North Port; and Port Jefferson on the East River.

Industrialization was encroaching on New York City beds. The natural beds around Hell Gate and in the Harlem River were abandoned in the 1870s because they were too close to industry. But oystermen were still working farther up the Harlem River and commuters on the Harlem and New Rochelle railroad passed in plain view of the Harlem River oyster rakers. Some Westchester and Bronx beds were still in use, notably East Chester Bay, the waters of City Island. There was also oystering along the Bronx coastline until 1889, when the dredging of the Harlem Ship Canal, allowing passage for larger ships, took away the wetlands, the shellfish beds, and the traditional look of that coast.

After the Civil War, Staten Island oyster prices went back down to their prewar level. The response was to produce more oysters. A handful of families had become wealthy on oysters—a kind of Staten Island oyster aristocracy who named streets after themselves and built grand mansions facing the Kill van Kull. The Virginia oysters of Prince's Bay, now some generations from Virginia, continued to be highly prized, as were the native Staten Island “Sounds,” which competed with Bluepoints and sometimes replaced them when the Long Islanders did not maintain their quality in the European market.

Staten Island oysters bound for Europe, with at times as much as a third of the catch for London alone, would be sent across the water to New Jersey packing plants in Keyport and Perth Amboy. Keyport also did a prosperous business supplying the beach resorts on the Jersey shore. In the late nineteenth century, oysters were the most popular snack on all the New York area beaches, including Coney Island and Rockaway. In 1867, a German immigrant named Charles Feltman had invented a cart for keeping sausages warm so they could be sold on the beach at Coney Island. The sausages grew in popularity after 1875 when he started selling them on a roll as they had done back in Nuremberg. By 1882, the eighty Frankfurt vendors on Coney Island beach and Feltman's 1,200-waiter restaurant were giving oysters some competition, but for the ten-cent price of a hotdog, the bather could get a whole plateful of oysters.

In the late nineteenth century, both the technology and the market existed to clean out New York oyster beds in a few energetic seasons. The economics were growing tougher because steam-powered dredges were greatly increasing the harvest. Each time a dredge was hauled across a bed, it hauled up seven to eight bushels of oysters. By 1880, the use of steam power was estimated to have increased the amount of oysters brought to market twelve times from the catch when oyster fleets had been purely sail-powered.

Laws were passed to moderate the natural industriousness of men who earned their living by harvesting huge quantities of a low-priced product. Steam power was now commonplace, but steam-powered dredging was banned in much of New York, and even in the case of dredging from a sail-powered sloop, the size of the dredge was restricted to a maximum of thirty pounds. Queens County barred all dredging except in Oyster Bay and Cow Bay.

So long as tonging rather than dredging was used, it seemed the beds could go on forever. A round of tonging stirred up the bed, exposed new surfaces, and promoted new attachments and a fresh crop. Some argued that dredging would do an even better job of this and that it was a mistake to ban the practice.

But it became clear that cultivation had its own kind of overfishing problem. Because of the Civil War, New Yorkers had abandoned their reliance on Southern seed oysters to plant their beds. Selling tiny seed oysters became a growing business, especially in the Great South Bay. Boats from as far away as Rhode Island and Massachusetts came to the Great South Bay to gather seed for their own beds. The bay was also a major source of seeds for Rockaway and Staten Island beds. In its cheapest form, seed was sold the way it was caught. The tiny oysters were clumped in with rocks, shells, and dead sea life. This sold for twenty-five cents a bushel in the 1880s. But often a skiff would hire boys to sit on deck as the oystermen were tonging and cull through the matter that came up with the oysters, spreading it out on the boards placed across the gunwales. The seed they culled sold for as much as sixty cents a bushel. But starting in the 1870s, seed became increasingly difficult to find in the Great South Bay. By the 1880s, with five hundred sailing vessels coming every year with a basket hoisted up the mast, young oystermen in the Great South Bay had no memory of the days when seed was easy to come by.