Oysters Rock. Fella

I. "Food is...a universal experience." - James Beard

The late cookbook author extraordinaire James Beard famously observed, "Food is our common ground, a universal experience." This especially rings when enticing aromas waft from the kitchen as family and friends gather around the holiday table. And that table stretches beyond "this time of the rolling year," to quote Charles Dickens. Easter and Thanksgiving, as much as Christmas, have their aromas and flavors. Halloween, of course, carries its own bag of goodies.

Alongside the traditional holiday fare - baked ham for Easter, roast turkey for Thanksgiving, ham and turkey for Christmas - revelers have ventured outside conventional oven walls to reawaken dormant taste buds. For example, why not try a lamb roast for Easter dinner?

...Even though there's something mildly unsettling about dining
on the docile avatar of Jesus on the day of his Resurrection...

Several cultures beyond the borders of Italy serve lasagna at Thanksgiving, either as an accompaniment to turkey or a stand-alone entree. According to Hali Bey Randeme, a former food editor for Better Homes & Gardens, lasagna does "all the things I want a Thanksgiving dish to do." One can make lasagna ahead of time, it serves everybody, and, unlike its feathered rival, reheated lasagna is the best lasagna!

Succulent, melt-in-your-mouth prime rib is sliced up as another T-bird alternative on Thanksgiving (pictured below).

It should go without saying, however, that no matter the holiday or the attendant main course, Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas menus all demand the incorporation of French's French Fried Onions and Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup green bean casserole.

II."It was a bold man who ate the first oyster." - Jonathan Swift, author of Gullliver's Travels 

Although it doesn't really count as a Yuletide alterna-dinner, a growing tradition in homes and restaurants is the Christmas Eve tureen of oyster stew.

In New England, oyster stew was frequently associated with Thanksgiving. It was in the Southern U.S. that the stew was often served on Christmas Eve. One explanation for the spread of the consumption of oyster stew at that time of year was offered by the late Southern chef, Bill Neal, who believed that before the advent of refrigerated food transport, cold weather for shipping seafood from the coasts couldn't be guaranteed before December, so oysters became a symbol of the arrival of the winter holiday season, appearing in markets by Christmas Eve and on tables that night at oyster stew.

Also, Irish Catholic immigrants would not eat meat on Christmas Eve, dining instead on ling fish stew. Back on the Old Sod, cooks made a simple stew from dried ling (an Atlantic cod-like fish), milk, butter, and pepper. Based on a similar taste, the ling recipe was adapted for oysters.

Oysters, clams, mussels, and scallops all belong to the same family of marine bivalves. Bivalves can best be described as soft-bodied mollusks enclosed between two halves of a hinged shell. They all have the ability to produce a pearl, although the types of pearls vary. The largest oyster discovered measured 15 inches. Giant clams can reach six feet across, one of which produced a 14-pound pearl, although it looked more like the "Blob."

Oysters and mussels are rooted to wherever their shell is attached, while clams and scallops can move about in their surroundings. Scallops scoot through the water by clapping their shell halves together, clams scutter across the sea bottom with the aid of a large foot that resembles an oversized tongue (pictured below).

Oysters have been consumed since ancient times in Greece, Rome, and China. In North America, the indigenous populations on both coasts had been harvesting oysters in large quantities for over 3000 years. It was a startling revelation to the first colonists to see prodigious mounds of oyster shells near the coastline of native settlements.

In Europe, dining on oysters was confined to the wealthy until the mid-17th century and eventually became a common tavern food. Likewise, after European colonization, oysters were enjoyed in North America by all classes. In stuffings, chowders, pan roasts, and raw in the shell - canned, pickled, dried - oysters made their way across the country in the 1860s.

In 1892, a Pittsburgh newspaper estimated that annual consumption of individual oysters in London at one billion and in America at 12 billion. As a matter of fact, by the early 1890s, the huge demand for oysters depleted the limited supply. Increasing restrictions on oystering seasons and fishing methods inspired the rise of "oyster pirates" (a term often used in the writings of Jack London), leading to the Oyster Wars of the Chesapeake Bay that pitted poachers against armed law enforcement agents - dubbed  the "oyster navy" - from Virginia and Maryland.

Oyster pirates poach the waters of Chesapeake Bay in 1884.

Clams were worshipped in the Moche civilization of ancient Peru and used as money by the Algonquin Indians of North America. Scallops symbolized femininity in many cultures, the shell of which represented the protection and nurturing of a mother. Probably not by coincidence, Renaissance artist Sandro Botticelli's 1486 masterpiece "The Birth of Venus" depicts the arrival of the goddess of love and procreation on a large scallop shell (pictured below).

Speaking of love, pleasure, beauty, and procreation, let's talk about the long-held belief that oysters possess aphrodisiac qualities ("Aphrodite" being the root word of "aphrodisiac"). For centuries, folklore held that consuming raw oysters stimulated the libido. Casanova, the storied 18th century Italian adventurer, gambler, author, and lover, was said to breakfast on 50 oysters daily as an aphrodisiac. His memoirs, Story of My Life, listed 122 affairs with women (compared to Charlie Sheen's self-professed 5000 conquests).

Casanova wrote of sharing oysters with one woman, "I placed the shell on the edge of her lips and after a good deal of laughing, she sucked in the oyster, which she held between her lips. I instantly recovered it by placing my lips on hers."

A contemporary researcher, Dr. Antimo D'Aniello of Naples, maintained, "I do think these mollusks are aphrodisiacs. If the male is having difficulties, they have to eat a lot of mussels or oysters." He said, "The Italians have been right about this for centuries - since before Casanova, from the time of the Romans."

In March 2005, scientists determined that oysters are in fact aphrodisiacs, and that springtime is when they have their highest potency. Previous speculations about the erotic power of oysters centered on the refueling quality of the high zinc content of marine mollusks, along with complex sugars and proteins; zinc is an essential component of human sperm. American and Italian researchers found that bivalves are rich in rare amino acids that trigger increased levels of sex hormones. Oysters also contain dopamine, a neurotransmitter that helps to govern brain activity and influences sexual desire.

III. " 'O oysters, come and walk with us!' the Walrus did beseech.
'A pleasant walk, a pleasant talk, along the briny beach.' " - Lewis Carroll

In literature, the most celebrated depiction of oysters occurs in the nonsense poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" from Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll's 1871 follow-up to his children's classic, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Recited to Alice by the rotund twins Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the poem relates the sad fate of a bed of naive oysters who become dinner for the eponymous beachcombers, pictured below by Carroll's inimitable illustrator, Sir John Tenniel.

In Hollywood's 1933 all-star "Alice in Wonderland" (which featured W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Gary Cooper as the White Knight, and Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle), the poem was presented as an animated vignette (pictured below) created by Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, a duo best known for founding both the Warner Bros. and MGM animation studios.

Walt's 1951 disappointing attempt to "Disney-ize" "Alice in Wonderland" included a bloated, cuted out version of the poem (pictured below).

Elsewhere on the screen, oysters were referenced in a notorious scene long excised from Kirk Douglas' 1960 production of "Spartacus," directed by Sidney Kubrick. Roman Senator Marcus Licinius Crassus (Laurence Olivier) shares a bath with male slave Antoninus (Tony Curtis), and questions, not at all subtly, if the long-lashed minion has a preference for eating oysters or snails. When creepy Crassus admits, "My taste includes both snails and oysters," Antoninus stealthily absconds to join the rebel army led by fugitive gladiator Spartacus.

The unsettling seduction scene was originally yanked after censorship demands from the Production Code Administration and the Catholic Legion of Decency but was put back in for the 1991 restoration, with Tony Curtis re-recording his dialogue and Anthony Hopkins ("The Silence of the Lambs") re-dubbing the late Laurence Olivier's voice.


IV. "Why, then, the world's mine oyster, which I with sword will open." - William Shakespeare

The first time we saw an oyster bar in the movies was in 1975's "Hard Times," director Walter Hill's evocative Depression-era saga of a vagrant bare-knuckled fighter freight-hopping through Louisiana. In probably the defining role of his career, Charles Bronson (minus the cockamamie mustache that defined so many of his 1970s and '80s roles) played the drifter looking to fill the "in-betweens," with James Coburn as a smooth-as-snakeskin gambler and Strother Martin as a "dyed-in-wool hophead" who patches the scrapper up between back-alley bouts.

James Coburn and Charles Bronson discuss an early business
proposition in a New Orleans oyster bar in "Hard Times."

Historically, oyster bars as a distinct eatery began appearing in Europe in the 18th century. By 1850, every major town in North America had at least one oyster bar - or oyster cellar, parlor, saloon - almost always located in the basement of a building, where storing ice was easier. The oldest, and continuously operating, oyster bar in the U.S. is Boston's Union Oyster House (pictured below), which opened 190 years ago, in 1826.

The Union Oyster House (pictured top in the 1920s), regarded as
one of the oldest operating restaurants in the country,
was listed as a National Historic Landmark in May 2003.

On a spring 2015 episode of the popular A&E reality show "American Pickers," antique collector Mike Wolfe wagered if he could eat six dozen oysters-on-the-half-shell, cohost Frank Fritz would have to shave off his trademark beard. The action went down at Herby-K's historic roadside restaurant in Shreveport, Louisiana (pictured below).

Incredibly, Wolfe wolfed down all 72 raw oysters, and Fritz' fuzz was buzzed. Southern Living magazine called Herby-K's "one of those classic hole-in-the-wall spots with a legendary reputation."

V. "Even an oyster has enemies." - Jack Nicholson, paraphrasing A.K. Tolstoy

As already alluded to, some believe oyster stew was introduced by Irish immigrants, who came to escape the potato famine and whose Catholicism prohibited the eating of meat at Christmastide. In their homeland, the traditional Christmas Eve dinner featured a stew made from a local fish called ling. North America offered no ling, so the enterprising emigrants substituted oysters, similar in taste and texture to the Atlantic fish.

Which brings us to the unique contribution oyster stew has made to cinema; this is, after all, the Moviehouse. The classic battle between bivalve and boob was depicted in the 1941 Three Stooges short "Dutiful but Dumb," featuring Moe, Larry, and Curly as inept tabloid photographers sent to the Eastern European country of Vulgaria (a goof on Bulgaria). When confronted by one ornery oyster that greedily snatches crackers off the stew's skim in a local bistro, Curly runs the gamut of inimitable grimaces, face-pawing, and man-child squeals of frustration and fleeting triumph.

After Curly baits a string with an oyster cracker, only to be squirted in the face with a geyser of stew, the battle-of-nitwits culminates hilariously when he resorts to indiscriminate gunplay.

The iconic vaudeville bit was originally filmed by silent movie star Billy Bevan in a 1926 short titled "Wandering Willies," directed by the sultan of slapstick, Mack Sennett, featuring the haphazard escapades of hungry hobos Bevan and Andy Clyde. Hoping for a free lunch, Bevan cops a cop's uniform and shows up at a sidewalk cafe for a "courtesy" bowl of oyster stew, only to be thwarted by a very fresh oyster.

Billy Bevan inaugurates the cracker-baiting string gag
in "Wandering Willies."

The Stooges, with Shemp Howard in tow, retooled the joke in 1948's "Shivering Sherlock" (pictured below). Moe copes with a cranky clam in a bowl of chowder, and his antics uncannily mimic those of his kid brother Curly in "Dutiful but Dumb," right down to the flustered face-clawing and barking at the bowl.

The gag was resurrected in yet one more Stooges short, 1954's "Income Tax Sappy," but this time with Larry facing off against a combative claw in a tureen of lobster gumbo.

Lou Costello coped with a spitting oyster in a tureen of stew in the 1945 Abbott and Costello comedy "Here Come the Co-Eds" (pictured below).

 

Lou tussled with a frog in a twist on the man vs. soup routine in the 1947 Abbott and Costello picture "The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap" (pictured below), featuring Marjorie Main (best known for her multiple portrayals of backwoods matriarch in a string of low-budget backlot "Ma and Pa Kettle" comedies from the early 1950s).

In the latter-day Bowery Boys comedy "Jungle Gents" (1954), Huntz Hall performed yet another variation on the premise when his character, Sach, prepares to cook oyster stew. After reaching into a bucket of snapping oysters, he lets out a blood-curdling scream and runs out, frantically trying to shake loose a number of the oyster shells firmly clamped onto his face and hands. "Jungle Gents" was directed by Edward Bernds, a frequent collaborator with The Three Stooges.

Sach's tropical fling with Anatta (Hawaiian-born
Laurette Luez), a native girl whose grasp of English
is restricted to "Kiss! Kiss! Kiss!", is interrupted at
the end of "Jungle Gents" by a Tarzan-like apeman,
played by Clint Walker, in his screen debut.

VI. "Obviously, if you don't love life, you can't enjoy an oyster." - The Oysters of Locmariaquer
       by Eleanor Clark

The final word on oysters and oyster stew comes from a History Channel web posting titled "Oyster Stew on Christmas Eve: An American Tradition" by food writer Stephanie Butler. "Perhaps this year," she noted, "it's time to revisit the oyster stew, and see what made this simple, satisfying dish so popular for so many Irish-American families."

Oh, and one more thing - don't forget the green bean casserole!