Considering the oyster
On freshness, pearls and shucking your own.
Nau mai, haere mai. Welcome to The Boil Up, The Spinoff’s weekly food newsletter presented in partnership with Farro. I hope you’re hungry!
In Carmen Maria Machado’s short story 'Eight Bites', a woman begins her last supper before bariatric surgery with “a cavalcade of oysters.” When her sister – already made svelte – asks if they are good, she replies: “They are.”
“Tell me about them.”
"They are the sum of all healthy things: seawater and muscle and bone, I said. Mindless protein. They feel no pain, have no verifiable thoughts. Very few calories. An indulgence without being an indulgence. Do you want one?"
She does not, but I do. I always want an oyster. Any time they are on offer, I will order them, sometimes a half dozen served in a silver bowl filled with ice, but more often just one each for me and my dining companion, perhaps with a puddle of mignonette or a pale spoonful of champagne granita melting into brine. I love the ritual of an oyster, using a tiny implement to sever the fleshy hinge, prising the soft body from its sheath before clinking shells and tipping them down our throats, sweet salty buttery decadent slugs.
There are 28 oyster recipes indexed in M.F.K. Fisher’s Consider the Oyster. Oyster soups, stews, bisques and gumbo, instructions for making fried, grilled and roasted oysters as well as two recipes for something called pain d’huîtres or oyster loaf, a delicacy she remembers her mother describing as part of the sumptuous spreads at illicit boarding school midnight feasts – maybe there were cigarettes, and pickles, and bonbons. But it is the oyster loaf that I remember. There is even a recipe for how to make a pearl, although it will take at least 7 years and require such ingredients as an “unnameable wound-astringent provided by the Japanese government” and “1 diving-girl”.
I think it was the romance of possibly finding a pearl that first convinced me to eat an oyster. That, and my adolescent determination to appear bold and sophisticated – much like a young Anthony Bourdain defiantly volunteering to eat one of the “raw, slimy things” and changing his whole life. While I never bit down on a pearl, I did become the kind of sophisticate who will drive for the well-priced glistening, coppery Pacifics sold at the roadside shack on the way to Tāwharanui or head to the east coast after a hike for plump winter oysters so fresh they quiver when squirted with lemon. In Aotearoa, we are lucky to never be far from the coast, never far from fresh kaimoana, so we can eat our oysters like this: raw but for a few bright drops of citrus to cut the butter, their briny scent mingling with ocean air, the best way to eat them.
In saying that, I do like a fried oyster, or an oyster fritter – both of which Clevedon Oysters do gorgeously from their weekend galley. To enjoy oysters even more cheaply (although not quite so cheap as gathering your own), you can often buy sacks of wholeshells (Matakana Oysters often has them, and a great video on how to shuck) or order them online from places like Mahurangi Oysters. It’s hard mahi, but by the time you’ve shucked a couple of kilograms you’ll be an absolute pro, and if you bugger them up you can take a leaf out of Monique Fiso’s book – literally – and use a couple to make a deeply oystery emulsion to intensify flavour of all your perfectly shucked ones.
Some oyster season recommendations:
This interview with Wini Geddes (Ngāti Awa, Ngaitai ki Tōrere) of Ōhiwa Oyster Farm – one of the first 100% Māori-owned oyster farms in the world – by Charlotte Muru-Lanning is worth a revisit. If you’re visiting Whakatāne, Tio Ōhiwa also offer oyster tours which include a cruise around the Ōhiwa Harbour as well as shucking, tasting and a complimentary meal.
A nice little round up of where to get Bluffies in Tāmaki Makaurau right now.
…or if you really love Bluffies, why not make a trip for the festival on May 25th? There’s a few tickets still available!
For the bivalve-averse, food writer and chef Sam Mannering has shared a recipe for cinnamon oysters – although it is for paid subscribers.
An essay by one of my favourite food writers, Alicia Kennedy, who is vegan but eats oysters – more common than you think – on her first. Writing on oysters is so often about the first!
New season fruit and veg is cropping up at Farro!
Unearth our beautiful selection of fresh autumn produce! From the jumbo ’joas you’ve been waiting for, to a menagerie of mushrooms; all sourced fresh from the morning markets and whisked straight to Farro for that just-picked taste. Our seasonal selection ensures you're always tasting the best of nature's bounty, while supporting local growers and snagging some of the best produce prices in Tāmaki Makaurau.
Weekly bites
Blue top milk or a Strawberry Up & Go – which would you say is the healthier option? According to our current health star system, it’s the Up & Go which sports a 4.5 star rating despite its laundry list of dubious ingredients and equivalent of 4 teaspoons of sugar. Plain old whole milk, on the other hand, is rated 4 stars. With the almost decade-old system potentially on the chopping block if new health minister Shane Reti follows through on his pre-election promises, Rachel Judkins divulges the mysteries of a flawed system and discusses the various other options Aotearoa could end up with.
In the mid-1980s, The Economist published The Big Mac Index to illustrate the purchasing power of different currencies around the world. The idea was simple: you want to know how much your dollar is worth in another country, so you compare the cost of a Big Mac at home with a Big Mac overseas. If the burger is cheaper over there, that could mean it has a weaker currency, or that they’re less expensive to produce, or they pay their workers less. This month, California’s new law came into effect, setting the minimum wage for fast food workers at $20. This New York Post article suggests that at many restaurants, these costs are already being passed on to consumers – although a Big Mac in LA will still only cost you $5.19, almost half of its cost here in Aotearoa where we pay $9.60.
Kiwi households are wasting more than $543 million worth of fruit, vegetables and meat each year. With a goal of halving our household food waste by 2030, climate action group Love Food Hate Waste has launched their Eat Me First campaign which includes distributing free, reusable Eat Me First stickers for people to use in their own fridges – a visual prompt to help us eat everything we buy. They have also created some excellent resources to help households tackle food waste as well as the Community Tip page where conscientious folks offer use-it-up recipes and ideas. Some of my favourite tips including blending banana peels for rose food, using up extra milk by making rice pudding and using too-soft kiwifruit to make hot sauce with jalapeños, coriander, a bit of garlic and lemon juice.
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Snack of the week
T.Grand Assam Malt & Oat Milk Tea 400ml for $2.50 at Munchy Mart, University of Auckland Campus
On Thursday mornings after I finish my slot on 95bfm Breakfasts – 8.10am, tune in! – I sometimes treat myself with a nostalgic spree at Munchy Mart. In all honesty, a lot of the highly processed junk I used to froth doesn’t appeal as much anymore, especially not before 9am, but a little box of chilled ice tea never goes amiss. Having not seen the malt and oat flavour before, and having recently reminisced with my dad about the cartons of Oak malt milk he used to buy me as a kid when we lived in Australia, picking this one up was a no brainer.
Despite the sprays of cereal grasses featured on the packaging, the text at the bottom reassures me that this is “malt and oat artificially flavoured”, a fact that is underlined by the hauntingly long ingredient list and the taste. On first sip, it was a bit gross: watery and, yes, artificial – although not in the mildly pleasant way of, say, banana milk. Until suddenly, it was. As I continued to suck from the skinny straw, the liquid improved as though by magic. There were actually layers of flavour, the initial sugariness mellowing to the natural sweetness of oat, malt combining with assam to create something almost caramel and inexplicable roundness of coconut lingering on the tongue. It became not bad, drinkable certainly, although I couldn’t help wishing I was home so I could blend it with espresso and ice – now that would be good. Do I plan on buying this again? Not really. And yet… can I imagine being gripped by cravings for this at some point in the future? Absolutely. 6/10
Mā te wā,
Lucinda
