[Sca-cooks] Ersterz...

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Sat Feb 9 10:14:38 PST 2008


On Feb 9, 2008, at 12:11 AM, Christine Seelye-King wrote:

> Wow, I had the pleasure of some fresh oysters this past weekend (I  
> ended up
> opening way too many for other folks because I was the only one with  
> any
> skill at it- sigh) and they were so good - sweet and salty - oh, my
> goodness.
> Glad to have shared the pleasure with you, even if from long  
> distance :)
> Christianna

Yeah, it was loverly, and there's a lot more to it than just the  
lowering of bivalve contents into gut and saying yum (although, hey,  
I'm not complaining about that, mind you). There's also a hard-to- 
describe aspect of contributing to a vast, ancient marriage of  
humanity to environment that harms neither.

If you read Kurlansky's book on the role of the oyster in the founding  
and history of the city that would eventually become New York, it  
pretty much ends with an acknowledgement that all that is over, now,  
that the oyster is gone from our waters, that it _might_ be possible  
to get that particular machine going again, but that it is not only  
not guaranteed, but furthermore unlikely, that we ever will.

Now, I've seen things like shad returning to the Hudson River (this  
from remembering in my childhood when the Hudson could catch fire),  
and I'm eating oysters from the same body of water that surrounds much  
of my city, just from maybe fifty miles or so away. I'd like to think  
there's hope for more of that sort of thing, and when I see some sign  
for it, I'm overjoyed.

Adamantius



More information about the Sca-cooks mailing list