Food and Flavor: A Gastronomic Guide to Health and Good Living

by Henry T. Finck

Osmosis comes into play in "floating," as he further points out: "By this process the body of the oyster affects a plumpness and largeness which materially increases its selling qualities, as it increases its weight and size and, therefore, the profits of the dealer. The principle of this process depends upon the fact that when a soft substance like an oyster, containing a mineral salt in its composition, is brought in contact with water, a process of diffusion takes place which is known in chemical physics as osmosis, whereby water passes through the cell walls and enters the cells of the oyster and the mineral substance thereof is forced out into the external water. Larger volumes of water pass into the cells than accompany the particles of mineral matter to the outside of the cells and the result is a swelling of the oysters and consequent increase in the size and weight by the addition of pure water, but at the expense of the natural salt, mostly chloride of sodium or common salt, which the oyster contains."

Thus does science confirm and explain the epicure's perception that oysters are denatured by being soaked in fresh water—deprived of the tang of the sea, which tang to any one who knows anything about the art of eating constitutes ninety-five per cent. of the value of an oyster.

There are exceptions to my statement that small oysters are the best. Some epicures prefer the large, adult Lynnhavens to the small Blue Points; and the Lynnhavens certainly are among the finest in flavor. But men who do prefer the naturally large oysters, or oysters that have been legitimately fattened in salt water, ought to be the first to fiercely resent the floating which is done to deceive them as to the real size of the oysters they pay for, and gives them denatured oysters, bloated and sickened with sewage water.

Three centuries ago Massachusetts boasted oysters a foot in length, and in Maine a shell has been found measuring three inches over a foot. We need not worry, however, at the decreased size of our bivalves; it makes them more tender—though, to be sure, also less nutritious. In any case, however, the nutritive value of an oyster is so insignificant as to be practically negligible. How ludicrously small it is, is shown by Dr. Wiley. For one hundred pounds of shelled oysters, he says, only about ten pounds of meat are found. In ten pounds of the meat there is over 80 per cent. of water; so that "the actual nourishment contained in 100 pounds of oysters is reduced to a little over one pound!"

Could anything more triumphantly demonstrate the comparative importance of Flavor over nutriment in this, the most delicious of all sea foods?

Yet it is to this all-important Flavor that our dealers show such brutal indifference, not only in the various ways pointed out in the preceding pages but in other ways. For instance, oysters spoil even more rapidly than fish and should therefore be kept alive to the last possible moment before serving. Yet how lamentably seldom is this done! It can be done not only in cities on the coast, but in those of the interior, it being possible to keep oysters alive and in excellent state for consumption for a week or ten days or even longer.

It would be unjust to the oystermen to accuse them of perpetrating all their crimes against shellfish from sheer greed for extra gain. Ignorance also comes into play. Only one opener in fifty seems to know that the best thing by far about an oyster is the liquid in its shell. Watch the other forty-nine and you will see them wantonly wasting this precious, fragrant liquid, and in many cases they will serve the oyster on the flat shell, so that you get no juice at all. Always ask for them on the deep shell and don't be afraid, after you have transferred the morsel to your mouth to drink the liquid from the shell. It may not look elegant, but elegance be hanged!

Dealers who wish to get rich quick by creating an unprecedented demand for oysters with the real tang of the sea should bear all these things in mind and further prepare themselves by reading pages 158 to 164 of Dr. Wiley's Foods and their Adulteration. Then let them remember that honesty is the only profitable policy. The public is not in a mood to be fooled and trifled with any longer.

In the autumn of 1912 Dr. Wiley called attention (in "Good Housekeeping" for November) to the important fact that under present conditions not only is it seldom safe to eat raw oysters, but that they are particularly risky in two of the "R" months—September and October—because of the danger of pollution due to the crowding at the seashore, which is becoming greater and greater as the summers wear on, many of the resorts being near beds in which oysters thus become sewage-contaminated even before they are "floated" by dealers.

In September, 1912, the Bureau of Chemistry published its Bulletin 156 on Sewage Polluted Oysters as a Cause of Typhoid and other Gastro-Intestinal Disturbances, by George W. Stiles, Jr., Chief of the Bacteriological Laboratory. He reviews the literature on the subject, showing how in many cases epidemics of typhoid and other diseases were traced to the eating of raw shellfish, and then relates how, with a detective ingenuity worthy of a Sherlock Holmes or a Burns, seventeen cases of typhoid and eighty-three cases of gastro-enteritis following a banquet held at Goshen, N. Y., in October, 1911, were traced directly to eating Rockaway oysters floated at Indian Creek, and twenty-six other cases, ten of them typhoid, were traced to the eating of Rockaways, some of which came from the same lot furnished for the Goshen banquet.