The Greeks have not said much in praise of oysters, but then they regarded Britain much as we now do Greenland. The Romans, however, highly appreciated them. Horace, Martial, and Juvenal, Cicero, Seneca, and Pliny, have all enlarged upon the various qualities of the oyster; and it was to Sergius Orata that we owe the introduction of oyster-beds, for he it was that invented the layers or stews for oysters at Baia. “That was in the days when luxury was rampant, and when men of great wealth, like Licinius Crassus, the leviathan slave-merchant, rose to the highest honours; for this dealer in human flesh in the boasted land of liberty served the office of consul along with Pompey the Great, and on one occasion required no less than 10,000 tables to accommodate all his guests. How many barrels of oysters were eaten at that celebrated dinner, the ‘Ephemerides’—as Plutarch calls The Times and Morning Post of that day—have omitted to state; but as oysters then took the place that turtle soup now does at our great City feeds, imagination may busy itself as it likes with the calculation. All we know is, that oysters then fetched very long prices at Rome, as the author of the ‘Tabella Ciberia’ has not failed to tell us; and then, as now, the high price of any luxury of the table was sure to make a liberal supply of it necessary when a man like Crassus entertained half the city as his guests, to rivet his popularity.
“But the Romans had a weakness for the ‘breedy creatures’ as our dear old friend Christopher North calls them in his inimitable ‘Noctes.’ In the time of Nero, some sixty years later, the consumption of oysters in the ‘Imperial City’ was nearly as great as it now is in the ‘World’s Metropolis;’ and there is a statement, which I remember to have read somewhere, that during the reign of Domitian, the last of the twelve Cæsars, a greater number of millions of bushels were annually consumed at Rome than I should care to swear to. These oysters, however, were but Mediterranean produce—the small fry of Circe, and the smaller Lucrinians; and this unreasonable demand upon them quite [pg 133]exhausted the beds in that great fly-catcher’s reign; and it was not till under the wise administration of Agricola in Britain, when the Romans got their far-famed Rutupians from the shores of Kent, from Richborough, and the Reculvers—the Rutupi Portus of the ‘Itinerary’ of which the latter, the Regulbium, near Whitstable, in the mouth of the Thames, was the northern boundary–that Juvenal praised them as he does; and he was right; for in the whole world there are no oysters like them; and of all the ‘breedy creatures’ that glide, or have ever glided, down the throats of the human race, our ‘natives’ are probably the most delectable.” The Roman emperors later on never failed to have British oysters at their banquets.
Vitellius ate oysters four times daily, and at each meal is said to have got through 1,200 of his own natives! Seneca, who praised the charms of poverty, ate several hundred a week. Horace is enthusiastic about them; he notes the people who first provided him with them, and the name of the gourmet who at the first bite[37] was able to tell whence the particular breed came.
“When I but see the oyster’s shell,
I look and recognise the river, marsh, or mud
Where it was raised.”
The shell is often an indication of the particular locality whence it is brought, and no doubt the modern oyster dealer, if not the ordinary eater, can always tell rightly. For although London swears by her Milton and Colchester “natives,” Edinburgh has her Pandores and Aberdours, and Dublin her Carlingfords and “Powldoodies of Burran.”
OYSTERS (Ostrea edulis).
A, Oysters of twelve to fifteen months; B, five or six months; C, three or four months; D, one to two months; and E, twenty days after birth.
“There is one little spot,” says the author of the entertaining but veracious little work quoted before, “on the shores of Cornwall which I cannot pass over, because from it came one of the colonies on the banks of the Thames from which the Whitstable boats still draw their annual supply. Into Mount’s Bay, the Helford River, upon which stands the little town of Helstone, empties itself, opposite Mount St. Michael’s, into the sea, and in the estuary of that little river, [pg 134]a person of the name of Tyacke, within the memory of the ‘oldest inhabitant,’ rented certain oyster-beds, famous among Cornish gourmets for a breed of oysters, which, it is said, the Phœnicians, ‘a long time ago,’ had discovered to be infinitely preferable to the watery things they got at home. These Helford oysters are regularly brought to London.... Determined to make his venture, Tyacke loaded a fishing-smack with the best produce of his beds, and coasted along the southern shores, till passing round the Isle of Thanet he found himself in the mouth of the Thames. Little did the elated oyster-dredger think that mouth would swallow up the whole of his cargo; but so it came to pass. It had long been evident to those on board that oysters which travel, no less than men, must have rations allowed on the voyage, if they are to do credit to the land of their birth. Now the voyage had been long and tedious, and the oysters had not been fed; so Tyacke got into his boat, and obtained an interview with the owner of the spot when he reached the shore. He asked permission to lay down his oysters, and feed them. This was granted, and after a few days the spores of ulva latissima and enteromorpha, and of the host of delicate fibrous plants which there abound, and all of which are the oyster’s delight, made the whole green and fat, and in the finest condition for re-shipment. Four days, it is said, will suffice to make a lean oyster, on such a diet, both green and plump; and Tyacke, joyful at the improvement which he daily witnessed, let his stock feed on for a week. It was towards evening that he bethought himself, as the tide was out, that if he meant to reach Billingsgate by the next morning it would be wise to re-ship his oysters before turning in for the night. The boat was lowered; but, as he attempted to land, he was warned off by the owner of the soil, who stood there with several fierce-looking fellows, armed with cutlasses and fowling-pieces, evidently anticipating the Cornishman’s intention, and determined to frustrate it at all hazards.