ROUSES.COM
17
E
rsters, erstas, oysters,
Crassostrea
virginica
, a dozen. Raw, baked, or
fried. Stuffed in a loaf or po-boy.
Bienvilled, Rockefellered, and charbroiled.
The creamy, plump pearl of a centerpiece
in gumbos, stews, and a countless variety of
other dishes. Everyday of the year or just in
months that contain the letter “R.”
No matter what you call them, or how and
when you prefer to eat them, oysters and
the Gulf Coast are largely synonymous.
From the very first explorations of the
area, people took note of the Gulf ’s bounty
of bivalves. Landing on what he would
christen the Chandeleur Islands in 1699,
French-Canadian pioneer Pierre Le Moyne
d’Iberville noted that, “We landed at a large
island covered by tide-water, where we
found a great quantity of oysters, which are
not of so good a quality as those of Europe.”
Several decades later, French naturalist
and explorer Antoine-Simon Le Page du
Pratz found local oysters more to his liking.
“Near the lake [Pontchartrain] . . . we meet
with small oysters in great abundance, that
are very well tasted,” he wrote. Further
away from the lake, he discovered larger
specimens that we Gulf Coasters would
readily recognize today, “oysters four of five
inches broad, and six or seven long. These
large oysters are best fried, having hardly
any saltness, but in other respects are large
and delicate.”
Oysters soon became a go-to food source
for the nineteenth-century Gulf Coast.
Fished from coastal waters, the bivalves
saved the lives of many soldiers and other
settlers stationed throughout the area
when France was frequently unable to send
supplies. Biloxi would, for a short period, be
referred to as “The Seafood Capital of the
World.” An influx of Bohemian migrants
and Dalmatian immigrants worked the canneries and fishing fleets.
Over several generations, several of the foundational oyster-tonging
families, many from Croatia, built oyster-processing empires that
stretched from Texas to Florida.
With the population and development of the Gulf Coast in the
1840s and 50s — before the proliferation of full-service, sit-down
restaurants — oyster saloons and stands dotted the cities and
towns of the Gulf Coast. Visiting Manhattaner Abraham Oakey
Hall described a two-block stretch of New Orleans’s St. Charles
Street (not yet an avenue) as “redolent of oysters and lunches, juleps
and punches.” Along the river, the scene was less idyllically poetic;
there he observed “oyster stands, where dirty mouths and flickering
tallow candles grinned ghostly satisfaction.”
Of course, the neighborhoods fronting the Mississippi levee have
cleaned up quite a bit in the past century and a half. But several
New Orleans restaurants still exude that raw, slightly salty/slightly
muddy charm indicative of Oakey Hall’s era. At the 100-plus-year-
old Acme Oyster House (724 Iberville St.), which almost certainly
sells more oysters than any other Gulf South establishment, “it’s
all about presentation” according to Master Shucker Michael
“Hollywood” Broadway. Since 1982, he’s been poking and prodding
oyster meat from shells under Acme’s neon lights.
Raising the Bar for Gulf Coast Oysters
by
Rien Fertel
photo by
Denny Culbert
