Oysters for Dinner

I grew up in Florida, on the east coast. For most of my youth I was in a town called Ft. Pierce, but when I was older we moved to the very nearby village of Jensen Beach. The point is that it was coastal and warm -- and that while I was growing up I ate a lot of oysters.

I can't quite remember the name of the place we would drive to to buy oysters; it was more than an hour up the coast. We would buy them by the bushel in burlap bags (I'm not that old; this was the '70s). They were cheap and muddy, and we'd dump them on our front lawn and hose them off.

I did a bit of oyster shucking even as a kid, but I've never gotten great at it. At a certain point my family got lazy and we started steaming them open on the grill. They weren't really cooked; once they opened up we took them right off and ate them.

They were good. They were a little dirty, but I loved them.

Fast forward. For reasons I don't care to go into, I now live at the other, far end of the east coast. I live in Maine. It's at least as cold here as it was warm in Florida. Here, if you want to surf or swim, you wear a wet suit, even in summer. I do it sometimes, but I don't like it. There's something unnatural about putting a layer of neoprene -- or anything else for that matter -- between you and the ocean.

I noticed soon after moving up here that oysters are expensive compared to down south. Down there, quarter oysters were routine during happy hour. (Yes, I lived there for a while when I was legal.) Dime or even nickel oysters were not unheard of.

Up here, a typical, reasonable price is $18 a dozen. That's a buck-fifty per oyster. A buck fifty'd buy half a dozen oysters during a quarter-oyster happy hour.

Guess what? They're worth it. Cold water oysters are that much better.

The oldest oyster growers in Maine have been around for 30 years, but it's still a fairly new industry. Because the water is colder, they grow slower. In Florida, oysters reach maturity in a season, I understand. In Maine it takes three years. And they taste better.

I still haven't learned to shuck oysters properly. Here in Portland, Maine, we have good seafood. My favorite place is Harbor Fish Market; it's on a warf, and very picturesque. The fish is fresh and good, and they take good care of it.

Today at Harbor Fish i bought a dozen raw oysters -- Winter Points, from just up the coast a ways, in the town of Bath. I struggled a bit with the shucking -- a couple didn't seem to have a seam -- but I got it done in the end. And they were delicious.

If you're ever in Maine and want oysters, many of the locals will send you to J's Oyster Bar. It is my opinion that you should resist the advice. Avoid it. J's seems like an authentic place -- it's not fancy or pretentious -- but I have sat at the bar and watched them RINSE their raw oysters. They shuck them quick and carelessly, and they don't wash them that well before shucking. They end up gritty, like the ones I had as a kid on my front lawn. So then, to remove the grit, they wash them --  I mean, they wash the bare oysters after they are shucked.. And when they wash them -- as any experienced oyster eater knows -- they wash away the taste of the sea. You're left with a chunk of bad texture. The experience is ruined.

So where should you go? Sorry, there's not a good place right now. There's an oyster bar on Commercial Street, with a good selection of fresh oysters and a decent bar -- Old Port Oyster Bar or something -- but the rest of the food is awful. So maybe you should go there and just eat oysters.

For a while there was a place called Scales in the Portland Public Market. Scales was owned by the people who own our most famous restaurant -- Fore Street -- but they closed down when the Public Market closed, which has been maybe 3 years ago. At Scales the shuckers knew what they were doing -- you could count on plenty of liquor on the shell, and minimal grit -- and you could get perfectly fried seafood with fries in a paper cone for less than $10 (oysters, clams, scallops, fish -- whatever you like). They served good white wine in unpretentious little juice glasses. And then they shut down the public market -- it was losing money -- and we lost Scales. They told us then that they would be resurrected as soon as they found the right spot, but it hasn't happened yet. So for now I have no good place to eat oysters. Except home, and I don't do that much.

But I did it tonight, and the experience of shucking them left me only slightly wounded -- just a small cut on my left hand. It didn't bleed much.

So what has any of this got to do with jazz, etc.? I'm tempted to write, 'if you don't know, give it up' -- but that would be obnoxious. Not everyone loves oysters like I do.

Yet there's something about the experience of shucking an oyster, then sucking it off the shell with a little of your own blood, that feels about the same as jazz. It's life, encompassed. Like jazz. I know that's pretentious; blame it on the gin.

By the way, during that dinner I listened to a 1956 reissue of the 1950 LP Masterpieces by Ellington, bought at a little record store in Biddeford, Maine a couple of weeks ago. A little noisy, but amazing music and superb mono sound. It contains the only version I have of Mood Indigo that has vocals.