Oysters Shuck
I never cared for raw oysters. Given the choice, I favored bowls of warm mussels swimming in saffron-laced broth over platters of slippery oysters. Fried oysters were an altogether different experience. I loved the slightly chewy texture of cornmeal-dusted oysters, especially when they were paired with cool remoulade and stuffed into a soft white roll.
Illustration by Casey Brand, 2020
I was 23 when I returned from a year learning to cook professionally in France. I was back in my hometown and hoping to land a job at a relatively new, buzzed-about restaurant in the area. Naturally, I had to start at the bottom: the oyster station. During my job interview, the chef had asked me if I could shuck oysters. I said yes confidently. I figured that I must have wrestled with a few oysters at some point in my life—I was from Savannah, Georgia, after all.
After my interview, I panicked. The fear of embarrassing myself on my first day loomed large. I called my mom and we rushed to a nearby seafood market and bought as many oysters as we could carry. Once home, I realized that I had never even seen an oyster knife. My mom popped a few open and I marveled at how easy she made it look. She adored raw oysters, but we never ate them at home. When she was a child, oysters on the half shell were a delicacy that she ordered at steakhouses with her father. Now, she ate them at low country boils and oyster roasts, where they were steamed over a fire in a wet burlap bag. I stuck to cheese and crackers.
Luckily, I had started working at the restaurant in mid-February, the tail end of the slow season. I fretted over my clumsy technique and tried to seem like I knew what I was doing. I was constantly looking over my shoulder at the kitchen clock, timing how long it took for me to shuck each oyster. I rejoiced when I could finally twist a shell off in under ten seconds. Wiggle and twist, wiggle and twist.
As St. Patrick’s day approached, I was washing and shucking more than a hundred oysters a night. I awoke each morning with stiff, aching hands covered with tiny cuts from the slick shells. I borrowed hand braces from my dad and wore them to sleep.
Perfect oysters became a point of pride for me. I scrubbed the shell exteriors until they were immaculate and arranged them in the ice chest artfully. I punctuated the rows of oysters with whole lemons and tiny vials of peppery mignonette sauce. The ice chest was one of the first things that guests saw when they entered the restaurant, so the stakes were high.
I memorized how each type of oyster felt as it clicked open. Connecticut oysters were gentle, while knobby Georgia Harris Necks opened with a crack. I admired the opaque pearlescence of Kumamotos and the eerie translucence of the tiny crabs that hid within the folds of certain varieties. After shucking each oyster, I carefully wiped away any specks of dirt while leaving the precious liquor untouched.
Every once in a while, my sous chef encouraged me to taste an oyster. Perhaps I had misjudged the mollusk; maybe I just preferred the cucumber notes of a West coast oyster over the unrelenting brininess of an East coast oyster. My theory proved wrong—I struggled to swallow the slimy creature every time. How could something so lovely taste so foul?
By the end of my tenure on the oyster station, I was shucking nearly 1,000 oysters a week. I hated oysters. They were beautiful, but I still hated them.