I had oysters for breakfast in honor of Ariel Barkhurst’s review of Sex, Death & Oysters in the San Antonio Express-News, which is headlined: “Writer Says Oysters Should Be Everyday Fare.” Here’s Ariel’s review:
Sex, Death and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour
By Robb Walsh
Counterpoint, $25
Robb Walsh, who has been nominated for four prestigious James Beard Awards for his writing about food and dining, says that his job is to understand culture through what we eat.
And in his new book “Sex, Death, and Oysters: A Half-Shell Lover’s World Tour,” he enlists the feared and revered little mollusk to do that.
“Oysters occupy an incredibly central place in our culture,” he said during a recent interview. “The best parallel I can think of is bread — bread is dull, but you’ve got the Catholic Mass, the Eucharist, all these associations. And oysters are very similar. They occupy this place — ‘the world is my oyster,’ the walrus and the carpenter, the idea of them as an aphrodisiac. An oyster is this quivering innocence wrapped in a shell, with the power in our hands as we hold it.”
“Sex, Death, and Oysters” is a quest to understand the oyster cultures of the world, and to taste every oyster-producing nation’s half-shelled treasures.
For the book, Walsh traveled from the Gulf Coast, where most of America’s oysters come from today, to the coast of Ireland, where Walsh drank Guinness and ate thoroughly decent oysters with “a bunch of crazy Irishmen.”
It is through his travels that he began to understand the place of oysters in Western history.
“Oysters were important in the Roman Empire, they’re in Shakespeare, there’s this symbolism in English literature of oysters as vulnerability,” Walsh said.
“They’re a part of Western civilization. We only stopped eating them in the Dark Ages, but then ate them again in the Renaissance. And then we had another dark age of oysters right after the Industrial Revolution because we polluted the water and poisoned them.”
In the past century or so, Walsh says, oysters have experienced their own renaissance. They may not be the bounteous and available food of the people that they were in Colonial times, but they have returned grandly to public consciousness.
And in America, they’ve returned to consciousness so much that we’ve already fished out the oyster beds of New England.
“There were these places in the old days that were famous for oysters,” Walsh said. “None of these places have any oysters anymore. They were fished out, and their day has come and gone. But there still are oysters in other places, like the Gulf Coast. And people gather up the oysters from the new places, drag them to the old places, and pass them off as oysters from those old places!”
Another primary message of the book, Walsh says, is that oysters are the lost food of the people. The reason Gulf oystermen feel compelled to pass off their oysters as New England fare may be that oysters have become something more precious than than the hearty fare they have been historically.
“We’ve lost something as a culture,” Walsh says. “Everybody used to have an oyster shucking night, and they’d eat oysters at home. Eat oysters at home, have an oyster party. They’re 20 cents a piece at the shore.”
If you love oysters, this is the book for you. And if you don’t, try a Gulf Coast oyster between November and March, when they’re sweetest, says Walsh, and then see how you feel.