WHAT NOISE ANNOYS AN OYSTER MOST?

THE NOISE OF NO OYSTERS FOR NOEL, OF COURSE

Enjoying oysters at Huitres Regis, best place for oysters in Paris. (They supply the President.)

Something in the seasonality af seafood, its essentiality of freshness, demands our instant attention. The translucency of an oyster’s flesh, the gleam of a fish’s eye and the sheen of its skin are imperatives that transcend the banality of existence, imposing a duty of relish which we, as creatures of the sea ourselves, who still weep and sweat salt, ignore at our peril. “Sometimes I dream of the seafood of Marseilles,” says the Water Rat in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, “and wake up crying.”

My wife Marie Dominique inherited the home of her grandparents in Fouras, on the Atlantic coast. The town sits on a crooked spit of land jutting into the Atlantic. Erosion by the ocean on one side and the river Charente on the other has worn the promontory knife-blade-thin, and so much in apparent danger of separation from the mainland that it’s earned the title La Presqu’Ile; the Almost Island.

Its river side faces the watery front yard of the estuary, scattered with low-lying offshore islands - Ile d’Aix, Ile de Ré, Ile d’Oleron, Ile Madame. 18^th century stone forts armour the shores that face out to sea, an architecture reflected in the villas that line the coastlines. Retired navy men, unable to imagine a life that didn’t always turn its eyes ocean-wards, crowned them with as many rooftop lookouts and Widows Walks as the houses of Nantucket.

Ile de Re. Eyes turned ocean-wards.

And like New England, this is oyster country. They thrive in the cold tidal brine. Chicken wire sacks of young oysters fill the estuary (making them vulnerable, incidentally, to rustlers. When random patrols proved ineffective, one grower found the culprits by including some empty shells in his stock, with a note inside promising a free hundred to anyone who identified the sellers.)

At maturity, oysters are transferred to fresh water ponds where they lie for months, purging salt, and ingesting a local microbe that turns their flesh a faint translucent green – the signature of the Charentais claire.  

Traditionally, a French Christmas dinner begins with oysters – accompanied, however, by a small chipolata sausages. I always found this inexplicable, since the greasy, salty pork had nothing in common with shellfish.  With just as  little logic, many French restaurants serve oysters with a dish of red wine vinegar and chopped shallots, guaranteed to destroy the taste as surely as the horseradish-and-ketchup “cocktail sauce” of American seafood restaurants. The only greater sin, to purists, was the Australian custom of shucking oysters, washing out the natural juices, then returning them to their shells. There are probably worse offences – peeing in the font at Notre Dame comes to mind – but not many.

All this made even more painful the announcement, just before Christmas, that oysters from Arcachon, further south of Fouras, were infected by overflow from a sewage system. A pronounced dip in sales all over France proved a bonus to producers of foie gras, the next most popular Christmas entrée. (We enjoyed both: a few dozen claires from local ponds, and a memorable foie gras mi-cuit – slices of raw liver sautéed, with a Balsamic vinegar reduction.)

It will take more than the occasional scare to keep the French from their shellfish. So revered are oysters that, in the nineteen-fifties, one of France’s most prestigious cultural prizes was the Prix Claire Belon, which came with a basket of oysters chosen from the two major varieties – Atlantic rough shelled claires and the smooth-shelled English Channel belons. The prize ceased to be presented in the ‘sixties, although it has recently been revived by the Academie de Saint’onge, which recognises achievements by creators from Charente. And not before time. As the British writer Saki said, “You needn’t tell me that a man who doesn’t love oysters and asparagus and good wines has got a soul, or a stomach either. He’s simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.” 

Oyster ranching - claire ponds in Charente.