The literature of oyster-cookery may be passed over in silence. The curious may care to refer to M. S. Lovell’s Edible British Mollusks, where no less than thirty-nine different ways of dressing oysters are enumerated. It may, however, be worth while to add a word on the subject of poisonous oysters. Cases have been known where a particular batch of oysters has, for some reason, been fatal to those who have partaken of them. It is possible that this may have been due, in certain instances, to the presence of a superabundance of copper in the oysters, and there is no doubt that the symptoms detailed have often closely resembled those of copper poisoning. Cases of poisoning have occurred at Rochefort through’ the importation of ‘green oysters’ from Falmouth. It would no doubt be dangerous ever to eat oysters which had grown on the copper bottom of a ship. But copper is present, in more or less minute quantities, in very many Mollusca, and it is more probable that a certain form of slow decomposition in some shell-fish develops an alkaloid poison which is more harmful to some people than to others, just as some people can never digest any kind of shell-fish.[230] These alkaloid developments from putrescence are called ptomaines. In confirmation of this view, reference may be made to a case, taken from an Indian Scientific Journal, in which an officer, his wife, and household ate safely of a basket of oysters for three days at almost every meal. The basket then passed out of their hands, not yet exhausted of its contents, and a man who had already eaten of these oysters at the officer’s table was afterwards poisoned by some from the same basketful.
The cultivation of the common mussel (Mytilus edulis L.) is not practised in this country, although it is used as food in the natural state of growth all round our coasts. The French appear to be the only nation who go in for extensive mussel farming. The principal of these establishments is at a little town called Esnaudes, not far from La Rochelle, and within sight of the Ile de Ré and its celebrated oyster parks. The secret of the cultivation consists in the employment of ‘bouchots,’ or tall hurdles, which are planted in the mud of the fore-shore, and upon which the mussel (la moule, as the French call it) grows. The method is said[231] to have been invented as long ago as 1235 by a shipwrecked Irishman named Walton. He used to hang a purse net to stakes, in the hope of capturing sea birds. He found, however, that the mussels which attached themselves to his stakes were a much more easily attainable source of food, and he accordingly multiplied his stakes, out of which the present ‘bouchot’ system has developed. The shore is simply a stretch of liquid mud, and the bouchots are arranged in shape like a single or double V, with the opening looking towards the sea. The fishermen, in visiting the bouchots, glide about over the mud in piroques or light, flat-bottomed boats, propelling them by shoving the mud with their feet. Each bouchot is now about 450 yards long, standing 6 feet out of the mud, making a strong wall of solid basket-work, and as there are altogether at least 500 bouchots, the total mussel-bearing length of wall is nearly 130 miles.
The mussel-spat affixes itself naturally to the bouchots nearest the sea, in January and February. Towards May the planting begins. The young mussels are scraped off these outermost bouchots, and placed in small bags made of old canvas or netting, each bag holding a good handful of the mussels. The bags are then fastened to some of the inner bouchots, and the mussels soon attach themselves by their byssus, the bag rotting and falling away. They hang in clusters, increasing rapidly in size, and at the proper time are transplanted to bouchots farther and farther up the tide level, the object being to bring the matured animal as near as possible to the land when it is time for it to be gathered. This process, which aims at keeping the mussel out of the mud, while at the same time giving it all the nutrition that comes from such a habitat, extends over about a year in the case of each individual. Quality, rather than quantity, is the aim of the Esnaudes boucholiers. The element of quantity, however, seems to come in when we are told that each yard of the bouchots is calculated to yield a cartload of mussels, value 6 francs, and that the whole annual revenue is at least £52,000.
In this country, and especially in Scotland, mussels are largely used as bait for long-line fishing. Of late years other substances have rather tended to take the place of mussels, but within the last twenty years, at Newhaven on the Firth of Forth, three and a half million mussels were required annually to supply bait for four deep-sea craft and sixteen smaller vessels. According to Ad. Meyer,[232] boughs of trees are laid down in Kiel Bay, and taken up again, after three, four, or five years, between December and March, when they are found covered with fine mussels. The boughs are then sold, just as they are, by weight, and the shell-fish sent into the interior of Germany.
Mussels are very sensitive to cold weather. In 1874, during an easterly gale, 195 acres of mussels at Boston, in Lincolnshire, were killed in a single night. They soon affix themselves to the bottom of vessels that have lain for any length of time in harbour or near the coast. The bottom of the Great Eastern steamship was at one time so thickly coated with mussels that it was estimated that a vessel of 200 tons could have been laden from her. In some of our low-lying coast districts mussels are a valuable protection against inundation. “An action for trespass was brought some time ago for the purpose of establishing the right of the lord of the manor to prevent the inhabitants of Heacham from taking mussels from the sea-shore. The locality is the fore-shore of the sea, running from Lynn in a north-westerly direction towards Hunstanton in Norfolk; and the nature of the shore is such that it requires constant attention, and no little expenditure of money, to maintain its integrity, and guard against the serious danger of inundations of the sea. Beds of mussels extend for miles along the shore, attaching themselves to artificial jetties running into the sea, thereby rendering them firm, and thus acting as barriers against the sea [and as traps to catch the silt, and thus constantly raise the level of the shore]. Therefore, while it is important for the inhabitants, who claim a right by custom, to take mussels and other shell-fish from the shore, it is equally important for the lord of the manor to do his utmost to prevent these natural friends of his embankments and jetties from being removed in large quantities.”[233]
The fable that Bideford Bridge is held together by the byssi of Mytilus, which prevent the fabric from being carried away by the tide, has so often been repeated that it is perhaps worth while to give the exact state of the case, as ascertained from a Town Councillor. The mussels are supposed to be of some advantage to the bridge, consequently there is a by-law forbidding their removal, but the corporation have not, and never had, any boat or men employed in any way with regard to them.
Poisoning by mussels is much more frequent than by oysters. At Wilhelmshaven,[234] in Germany, in 1885, large numbers of persons were poisoned, and some died, from eating mussels taken from the harbour. It was found that when transferred to open water these mussels became innocuous, while, on the other hand, mussels from outside, placed in the harbour, became poisonous. The cause obviously lay in the stagnant and corrupted waters of the harbour, which were rarely freshened by tides. It was proved to demonstration that the poison was not due to decomposition; the liver of the mussels was the poisonous part. In the persons affected, the symptoms were of three kinds, exanthematous (skin eruptions), choleraic, and paralytic. Cases of similar poisoning are not unfrequent in our own country, and the circumstances tend to show that, besides the danger from mussels bred in stagnant water, there is also risk in eating them when ‘out of season’ in the spawning time.
Whelks are very largely employed for bait, especially in the cod fishery. The whelk fishery in Whitstable Bay, both for bait and for human food, yields £12,000 a year. Dr. Johnston, of Berwick, estimated that about 12 million limpets were annually consumed for bait in that district alone. The cockle fishery in Carmarthen Bay employs from 500 to 600 families, and is worth £15,000 a year, that in Morecambe Bay is worth £20,000.
Cultivation of Snails for Food; Use as Medicine.—It was a certain Fulvius Hirpinus who, according to Pliny the elder,[235] first instituted snail preserves at Tarquinium, about 50 B.C. He appears to have bred several species in his ‘cochlearia,’ keeping them separate from one another. In one division were the albulae, which came from Reate; in another the ‘very big snails’ (probably H. lucorum), from Illyria; in a third the African snails, whose characteristic was their fecundity; in a fourth those from Soletum, noted for their ‘nobility.’ To increase the size of his snails, Hirpinus fed them on a fattening mixture of meal and new wine, and, says the author in a burst of enthusiasm, ‘the glory of this art was carried to such an extent that a single snail-shell was capable of holding eighty sixpenny pieces.’ Varro[236] recommends that the snaileries be surrounded by a ditch, to save the expense of a special slave to catch the runaways. Snails were not regarded by the Romans as a particular luxury. Pliny the younger reproaches[237] his friend Septicius Clarus for breaking a dinner engagement with him, at which the menu was to have been a lettuce, three snails and two eggs apiece, barley water, mead and snow, olives, beetroot, gourds and truffles, and going off somewhere else where he got oysters, scallops, and sea-urchins. In Horace’s time they were used as a gentle stimulant to the appetite, for
“’Tis best with roasted shrimps and Afric snails