EDUCATING OYSTERS

Evening Star, Issue 19723, 25 November 1927, Page 13

EDUCATING OYSTERS

Now that, the magic letter “r” again figures in the month oysters are executing their annual march down the red lane at the bottom of which, ready aligned to encompass their inglorious end, are the gastronomic batteries of gourmands and gourmets (writes Surgeon Rear-admiral Charles M. Beadnall in the ‘Daily Mail’). Some .1,700,000,000 ol; them are destined to be swallowed in Great Bntain alone, and the corresponding holocaust tor America will probably exceed 6,000,000,000. Fortunately, Nature has blessed the oyster with so astounding a fecundity that it can produce as many as 60,000,000 ollspring at a sitting. If all the descendants of one oyster were to survive to but the fourth year they would form a pile us big as eight of our earths. But Nature also demands of the oyster a terrible toll of life, especially during, the first 48 hours of its existence whiloj as a tiny tadpole-like creature, it swims about seeking a permanent home. Nor is it left in peace during its sedentary ten years’ life span. Starfish will , destroy in _ one night a .whole oyster bed. Bestriding his victim, this ' five-armed, thousandlegged ogre turns his own stomach inside out, and wraps it around the oyster until the muscles of the latter relax and the shells gape, allowing of the succulent parts being digested. The whelk extra els the ojsler piecemeal through a hole in the shell bored witli his filc-liko' tongue. Crabs crush young oysters to death and suffocate elderly ones by burying them under sand.

Cultivation of the oyster goes back many hundred years, or thousands, if we accept as correct the answer'of the schoolboy who, when asked to describe' a certain austere. Biblical, personage, said: “Moses was an oyster man who made ointment for tbo shins of bis people”! Pliny, the Roman naturalist, alluded to one Sergius Grata as cultivating oysters in the Luerino lakes. So famous did those lakes become for their produce that oysters brought from distant parts were steeped'in them in order to acquire the esteemed Lucrine flavor. Juvenal relates how a certain Roman gourmet could tell: “At every hi to if his oysters had fed On Lucrinc or British or Circeiian bed.” The fact that Juvenal .says “at a bite” (morsu) makes one wonder whether swallowing the dainty whole is a recent phase in epicurean evolution. There is an oyster that grows in the marshes of Essex that is colored green by a certain diatom on which it feeds. Spurned by ns, this green oyster ;is wet-nursed at Marennes as a special bonne honcho for French epicures. While the oyster beds of France fall short in area of those of Britain or America—the Chesapeake beds alone cover 3,000 acres—their organisation is