One babe is welcomed, and wooed as a lord,
Another is shunned like a leper;
One to the world’s wine, and honey, and corn,
Another, like Colchester native, is born
To its vinegar only, and pepper.
The Americans always seem to do things on a larger scale than we, in our effete little island, are able to do. They excel even in the fecundity of their oysters. The British mollusc Ostrea edulis produces about a million young in a season. One of the American variety, Ostrea Virginiana, about ten times as many.
There is a great Oyster cult in the United States, and the different manners of cooking, preparing, and serving the oyster are manifold. A book might be written on the pros and cons of cooking an oyster at all, and opinions as to its legitimacy differ, even among the erudite on the subject. Be that as it may, the Americans certainly owe much of their nerve-strength, hustlesomeness, and vigour to their enormous oyster consumption. It is the ideal food to replace and restore nerve power. It is hardly too much to say that the oyster is the foundation of America’s commercial success.
Oliver Wendell Holmes says somewhere that two immense oysters should be carved in marble and placed on top of the Washington monument in Baltimore, instead of the statue of the immortal George. “I am not in favour of removing the Father of his Country from off his imposing pedestal, but should like to compromise matters by making him sit on a pile of oyster-shells in lieu of a curule chair.”
When Thackeray went to Boston in 1852 he had some trouble with the very large American oyster. “He first selected the smallest one of the half-dozen (rejecting a larger one because, as he said, it resembled the High Priest’s servant’s ear that Peter cut off), and then bowed his head as though he were saying Grace. Opening his mouth very wide, he struggled for a moment, after which all was over. I shall never forget the comic look of despair he cast upon the other five over-occupied shells. I asked him how he felt. ‘Profoundly grateful,’ he said, ‘as if I had swallowed a small baby.’”
But Thackeray was not an authority, for he ranked “the dear little juicy green oysters of France” above the “great white flaccid natives in England that look as if they had been fed on pork.” This is ungenerous.