November 15, 2001
Book offers information about Northwest oysters
Washington’s oyster industry owes its origins to the fertile shellfish beds of Willapa Bay. From there the first crates of oysters were shipped 150 years ago this month to California for hungry gold miners willing to purchase a plate of oysters with a measure of their gold.
“What better way to announce a gold strike than with a complimentary round of drinks and a few fresh oysters for everyone in the house? It’s impossible to know how many of these delicacies were consumed in this way, but it’s a good guess that the number approached several million. . . Their exorbitant price – a dollar apiece for raw oysters on the half-shell – did little to dampen the prospectors’ enthusiasm for such rich fare.”
Thus writes David G. Gordon in Heaven on the Half Shell: The Story of the Northwest’s Love Affair with the Oyster, just published by the Washington Sea Grant Program, based at the UW, and WestWinds Press.
The book chronicles the Pacific Northwest oyster industry using the words of the first pioneers, early aquaculturists and contemporary scientists, field technicians and oyster connoisseurs. Gordon, science writer with Washington Sea Grant, co-authored the book with Nancy Blanton, former communications manager with Sea Grant, and Terry Nosho, a Sea Grant aquaculture specialist.
Today more than 9 million pounds of oyster meats are harvested each year from Washington waters. Valued at more than $70 million annually, Washington’s oysters are the foundation of the West Coast’s shellfish enterprise.
How it rose to this prominence is explained as the book ranges across topics historical, contemporary and biological:
- Oyster biology: “By some standards, an oyster leads a dream life. It doesn’t have to hunt for food, but simply waits for the tide to bring the next serving. Breakfast in bed never ends. Snug in a subtidal channel or secure on a soggy mudflat, an oyster can feed at its leisure, filtering up to eight gallons of food-rich salt water per hour.”
- Captain Charles Russell’s fledging oyster enterprise 150 years ago at Shoal-Water (Willapa) Bay: “In November 1851, he traveled south to Astoria, Oregon, boarded a steamboat, and sailed to San Francisco. Here, he introduced the first sacks of Shoal-Water oysters to the city’s shellfish merchants. . . thanks to Russell one of the more lucrative ventures of the 19th-century Northwest had been launched.”
- Oysterville on Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula founded in 1854: “At the height of the native oyster mania, Oysterville possessed more gold per capita than any other town or city along the Pacific Coast, with the sole exception of San Francisco.”
- Stewardship of water quality and resources: “The lessons gleaned from the Northwest oyster industry’s 150-year history may guide others – not only aquaculturists, but farmers, foresters, and others engaged in the cultivation of renewable resources – to become better stewards of our fragile planet.”
- Collaboration between scientists and growers: UW researchers led by Ken Chew, “created a genetically altered triploid oyster – a mutant shellfish with three sets of chromosomes in each body cell instead of the usual two. Like other triploid animals, this shellfish oddity was incapable of producing eggs or sperm. Unlike the meat of ordinary Pacific oysters, which usually becomes runny or chalky during the reproductive season, the flesh of the so-called ‘sexless’ oyster would remain flavorful throughout the year. . .these genetically altered bivalves have revolutionized the oyster industry.”
The impetus for the book came after Earl Brenner of the J.J. Brenner Oyster Company, the oldest continuously operating oyster enterprise on Puget Sound, donated scrapbooks of materials pertaining to the oyster industry between 1930 and the early ’60s.
Those scrapbooks made it clear how many of the industry’s most distinguished historians, the sons and daughters of the pioneering oyster farmers, had died in recent years. Along with them were going the remembrances, “the tales of their lives on the oyster beds, the stories about the first shipments of seed oysters from Japan, the anecdotes about the war years, when Willapa Bay’s residents worked around the clock preparing protein-rich shellfish to feed our troops at home and overseas,” says the book’s preface.
Co-author Blanton proposed to director Louis Echols that Sea Grant launch a project to remedy the situation. Sea Grant’s long ties to the aquaculture industry and UW departments such as the School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences and School of Oceanography made it possible to pull together elements that include mounting a Web site at http://wsg.washington.edu/communications/online/halfshell.html, creating a traveling exhibit and producing the book.
It was Ken Chew, professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, whose advice and willingness to help raise money from the industry turned the book from a planned 24-page booklet into 160 pages of Heaven on the Half Shell, Gordon says.
Promoting the book has taken Gordon to Pacific Northwest and British Columbia historical societies, bookstores and kitchenware shops for cooking demos.
That’s right, cooking demos. The book’s 18 recipes – from the contemporary Oysters Baked with Ginger Cranberry Port Sauce to the prospector’s repast of eggs and oysters from gold-rush times known as Hangtown Fry – means the book has something for cooks as well as history buffs.
“When the tide is out, the table is set,” according to the old beachcomber’s adage.
As the book concludes, “Nowhere is the table more attractively displayed than on the tide-swept beaches of the Pacific Northwest, whose beds are a heaven on the half shell, occupied by the bivalve the world loves best.”
