The Big Oyster (9 page)

Oysters were sold from street carts and this was traditionally a black job. They were also sold by boats tied up in the canals the Dutch had built in lower Manhattan, but by the eighteenth century, the canals were gone and the oyster boats had moved to the end of Broad Street.

Along with oysters often went drinking. New York was the leading American city for oyster and alcohol consumption, as well as prostitution. Sarah Kemble Knight, who at age thirty-eight became the first woman to travel by herself from Boston to New York, noted in her diary that New Yorkers “are not strict in keeping the Sabbath as in Boston and other places I have been.” New York was known to be the port to land stolen goods and the place where pirates went to sell their spoils. Pirates would sell at low prices, which made their trade profitable for New York merchants who welcomed these grim, colorful characters and showed them around the streets of Manhattan. Captain William Kidd, one of the most famous of the seventeenth-century pirates, lived the life of a popular celebrity in New York. He married a wealthy New York widow and settled into what is now 119–21 Pearl Street—with the summer home that all well-off New Yorkers must have along the East River where Seventy-fourth Street is today. He was a respectable New Yorker with a pew at Trinity Church until one day he made the mistake of sailing into Boston. Promptly arrested, he was taken back to England and hanged. Boston was never New York.

New York became British very quickly, but it retained some Dutch ways. The Dutch contribution most often cited, and a great contribution to the American language it is, is the word
cookies
from the Dutch word
koeckjes.
If it hadn't been for the Dutch, Americans today would be calling them biscuits as the British still do. In fact, in colonial times New Yorkers were the only Americans to use the word
cookies.
The first recipe book to be published in the postrevolutionary United States has two recipes for cookies, in one place spelled “cookey.” The adoption of the New York word,
cookie,
may have been a conscious effort to use language differently from the British—the first American dictionary by Noah Webster intentionally created different spellings—or it may be that the author was a New Yorker. The book
American Cookery
was published in 1796 in both Hartford and Albany and there is much speculation on whether the author named Amelia Simmons was a New Yorker or New Englander. The use of
cookies
suggests she was a New Yorker, though it is forgotten that Hartford also had Dutch origins. In any event, they have been called cookies everywhere in the United States ever since Amelia Simmons published her book.

The oyster recipe she included also argues for her being a New Yorker. For it calls for an obscene quantity of oysters—and all just to cook a chicken.

   
To Smother a Fowl in Oysters

Gill the bird with dry oysters and sew up and boil in water just sufficient to cover the bird, salt and season to your taste—when done tender, put it into a deep dish and pour over it a pint of stewed oysters, well buttered and peppered, garnish a turkey with sprigs of parsley or leaves of celery: a fowl is best with a parsley sauce.

The question is What was the eighteenth-century New York concept of stewed oysters? The Albany families of van Cortlandt and van Rensselaer left numerous handwritten recipe books. All of these manuscripts offer oyster recipes, indicating that the tradition of shipping them up the Hudson outlasted the Dutch. There are recipes for oyster sauces, oyster “pye,” fried oysters, stewed oysters, oysters rolled in Indian cornmeal, pickled oysters, colloped oysters, and oyster soups. Maria Sanders van Rensselaer, who lived from 1740 to 1830 and was a resident of Cherry Hill, Albany, handwrote this family recipe:

   
To Stew Oysters

Take one pint of oysters, set them over the fire in their own liquor with a glass of wine, a lump of butter, some salt, pepper, and mace. Let them stew gently.

When the British
took over New Amsterdam, its hundreds of miles of natural oyster beds fell into the hands of another oyster-loving people. British oyster shells have been excavated from the ruins of ancient Rome. The Romans, who were themselves great oyster eaters, with a fondness for the largest ones they could find, appreciated the oysters of Essex and Kent. The Roman favorites were thought to be from Richborough, near Whitstable, which they labeled “Rutupians,” and from the river Colne at Colchester. Both have remained British favorites. In fact, in 50
B.C.
, the Roman historian and politician Sallust wrote, “Poor Britons—there is some good in them after all—they produce an oyster.” In Poole, Dorset, a large shell midden has been dated to Saxon times. Anglos, Danish, Saxons, Normans—all the ancient British cultures left behind evidence of oyster eating, though Celts seemed to prefer cockles and mussels.

This recipe from an anonymous fifteenth-century manuscript is written in Middle English:

   
Oystyrs in grave [gravy]

Shelle oystyrs into a pott and the sewe therwith. Put therto fayre watyr; perboyle hem. Take hem up; put hem yn fayre watyr. Peke him clene. Blaunch almondys; grynd hem, tempyr hem up with the same broth: draw up a good mylke. Do hitin a pott with onyons and hole spycez and a lytyll poudyr of sygure. Boyle hit togedyr, & doo the oystres therto, & serve hit forth. & caste theryn youre dragge of hole spicys abovyn, & blaunche poudyr.

In 1699, Billingsgate, an area where shellfish and fish merchants had long hawked their goods, officially became a seafood market, greatly increasing the availability of oysters and fish. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English were passionate about oysters, which were remarkably inexpensive. In 1701, two hundred oysters sold for a paltry four shillings. Prices must have remained low for English oysters for a long time—at least from Chaucer, whose “Monk's Tale” expresses insignificance as being “not worth an oyster,” to Dickens, whose
Pickwick Papers
equates poverty and oysters. According to the eighteenth-century author Tobias Smollett, freshness was not always the most prized aspect of these shellfish, and some oysters were deliberately kept in “slimepits” for several days covered with “vitriolic scum” until they acquired the desired greenish color.

Diarist Samuel Pepys often mentioned eating, giving, or receiving oysters for breakfasts, lunches, and dinners—in all he mentions oysters fifty times in his diaries. Dr. Johnson fed oysters to his cat, Hodge, buying them personally because he feared that if he sent servants, they would end up resenting the cat. Sir Robert Walpole, British prime minister in 1715, was noted for his program to reduce national debt, but he ran up an enormous personal bill for the barrels of oysters he had shipped to himself. Seventeenth-century English cookbooks invariably gave recipes for oysters, and not surprisingly these recipes later turned up in New York. This recipe, similar to one in the van Rensselaer manuscript in Albany, comes from
Elinor Fettiplace's Receipt Book,
an English book that was written in the first half of the seventeenth century.

   
To Stew Oysters

Take the water of the oisters, and one slice of an onyon, and boile the oisters in it, when they are boiled put in some butter and an oringes peel minced, & some lemon cut verie smale, and so serve it. You must put some whight wine in your stewinge.

A popular English dish of the seventeenth century that was to remain in fashion in New York into the twentieth century was the oyster pie. This recipe, from a 1694 English cookbook by Anne Blencowes, is typical of British cooking at the time, which was reluctant to cook anything without “a lump of butter,” a few anchovies, always preserved in salt, and some nutmeg or the casing, which is mace. This also became the American way of cooking. Nutmeg, which the British planted in their Caribbean islands, became a reliable trade commodity for the port of New York. Pies, as in the French word
pâté,
were a way of cooking in a sealed envelope. The crust was unimportant as food and was often discarded.

   
Oyster Pye