OYSTER SEASON WELCOMED

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27018, 18 April 1953, Page 9

OYSTER SEASON WELCOMED

Tastes Apparently Do Not Change

A FAVOURED FOOD IN VERY i ANCIENT TIMES (Specially Written for “The Prese”) [By GRAHAM WEAR] The first of this season’s oysters have at last arrived in Christchurch, several weeks late, because of a dispute at Bluff between the fishermen and the merchants. The delay has sharpened the demand for them. Most of the oysters eaten in the South Island are taken in Foveaux Strait, from a mud bed about 13 to 20 fathoms below the surface. The oyster boats, each with a crew of five men, work from dawn until they return to port about 4 p.m., seven days a week, at the height of the season. A good haul for a boat in one day is about 100 bags. The oyster dredge—a sort of net and chain bag, fronted by an angled iron scraper—is trawled along the bottom, and the oysters, together with all kinds of fish, weeds, and rocks, are dragged off the bottom into the bag. The dredge-load is sorted, and everything not oyster, as well as the under-sized oysters, is thrown back.

The Fpveaux Strait oysters are one of the more than 100 species*»of the family Ostreidae; they are known as the Australian mud oyster, or Ostrea angasi. This sub-group is confined to Foveaux Strait and the waters of the southern coast of Australia and Tasmania.

Although every variety is not eaten (actually only about 10 or a dozen of aU the species have any commercial significance) all true oysters are normally edible—and nourishing. Anaemic patients are often prescribed oysters because of the quantities of iron and copper they contain; and their meat also has iodine, phosphorus, and calcium. Most of the essential vitamins are present as well. Oysters feed by filtering off with their gills minute plankton organisms in the water, entangling them in mucus and conveying them to their mouths. Unwanted material is carefully collected together and finally expelled from the shell.

It is a curious fact that our O. angasi changes its sex time and again during its adult life, usually completing one male and one female phase each year. A female oyster of good size may release several million eggs in one spawning, but few of these ever reach maturity. In addition to competition from other shellfish, they have to withstand the' attacks of jellyfish, whelks, sea anemones, many types of young fish, oyster drills, and other parasites, and man.

Unwise Exploitation In many parts of the world unwise exploitation by man has wiped out completely what were once rich oyster beds. For. this reason fishing is not permitted in New Zealand during the summer breeding season, which is also the time of the year when warm weather would make contamination more dangerous. Because of thi§ possibility of food-poisoning, the adage which Sir William Butts first penned in 1599 in his “Dyets Dry Dinner”: “The oyster is unseasonable and unwholesome in all the months that have not the letter r in their names” (or,, as John Wilson in “Noctes Ambrosianae” would have it. “a month without an r has nae richt being in the year”) is still valid in the northern hemisphere.

Oysters have been eaten since prehistoric times; their shells are commonly found in the “kitchen middens,” or household refuse dumps, of the neolithic age. The ancient Greeks knew them, too. Pliny mentions them in his “Natural History”; and Strabo, a Greek philosopher, tells us in the fourth book of “Geography”—written* about 7 B.C. — that particularly succulent oysters are to be found “beyond the mouth of the Rhodanus [Rhone].” The word “oyster" is derived from the Greek “ostreon,” which is probably connected with the word for “bone.”

There seems to be no mention, however, of Greeks actually cultivating oysters; the Romans appear to have been the first to control and protect breeding grounds by artificial methods. Beds of “ostrea” are mentioned by Latin writers in about the first century B.C. Even then the demand apparently exceeded the supply, for Julius Caesar comments on the excellence of the British oysters, and, on his advice, oysters were imported to Rome from Britannia for centuries.

I can find few references to oysters in the literature of any European country during the “Dark Ages,” although one Italian city-state despot notes that oysters in wine make quite a good meal after a hard day’s warring. But it was not until the time of the Reformation that oysters really came into their own again. English literature .of the sixteenth century contains many references to the excellent qualities of the “oister”

Oysters on Trees Sir Walter Raleigh recorded with some surprise in 1595 that one salt river he discovered on the Guinea (South American) coast “had store of oysters upon the branches of the trees, and were salt and well tasted. All their oysters grow upon these boughs and sprays, and not upon the ground.” In the eighteenth century, oysters must have been a rather expensive delicacy, for it is then that the saying: “Who eats oysters on St. James’s Day will never want,” was first hdard. St. James’s Day (August 5) was the first day of the oyster season in England, when oysters were the rarest of luxuries, eaten only by the wealthiest of the wealthy. By the nineteenth century the bottom had apparently dropped right out of the oyster market, for they were selling in the fish markets at times for as little as 4d a hundred.

Today there are never enough oysters to satisfy the New Zealand demand. It is not uncommon for the

Bluff fleet to take more than 1000 bags of oysters a day. Most of them are loaded into refrigerated railway vans as they are for transporting all over New Zealand, but some are takfen to factories for canning, for New Zealand canned oysters are sent all over the world. The oysters to be canned are “shucked” (shelled) either by hand or by an opening machine, which was invented in Bluff. The men and women who still open the shells with knives flick them open almost as fast as it can be done mechanically.