On Shucking

Oysters, communal eating, and slowing things down.

I love oysters. I think they’re a terrific food¹, they’re great for the environment², and you can eat about a hundred of them and still not feel full³. What more can you ask for in a food source?

By all accounts, humans have been eating oysters since time immemorial. In grade school, we took field trips to the Crystal River Indian Mounds, named in part for the midden heaps of oyster shells, consumed by pre-contact Native Americans and discarded. On a pre-admission visit to Tufts, my dad took me to the Union Oyster House, the oldest restaurant in the US, where Daniel Webster was known to order a three dozen oysters and pint of brandy. History can be traced through oysters.⁴

Despite my enthusiasm for bivalves, it’s only been in the last 10 years that I actually learned how to shuck them myself. Up until then, I’d been reliant on others. But at a Christmas party with Mrs. CWD’s family, I was formally initiated into the Cult of Shuckers. I’ve gone gangbusters on it ever since. When a friend⁵ offered up some freshly harvested oysters on the Friday after Thanksgiving, I, of course, had to say yes.

Shucking an oyster is harder said than done. With the right knife⁶, a glove and a towel⁷, a little effort, and a few sacrificial oysters, you can pretty quickly pick up how to do it. And once you do, it’s a skill that proves infinitely useful.

Since at the time, Mrs. CWD was still temporarily off raw shellfish, and no one else staying at the ranch was into oysters, my father-in-law and I took a couple dozen outside to enjoy before we dug into some Thanksgiving leftovers. As we were shucking, Papa CWD remarked on the sense of gathering you get eating something like oysters: where it’s just a group of people standing around a table, talking, drinking, eating, enjoying⁸. In a world where everything is optimized for speed and efficiency, there’s something to be said about being forced to slow down, concentrate a little bit on what you’re doing, and eat only as quickly as you can pry open a shell that’s evolved to stay closed⁹.

Nat Eliason, in his lovely newsletter

Infinite Play

, wrote a little about this idea, much more broadly, in a recent post called “De-Atomization is the Key to Happiness.” Nat’s thesis is that we’ve become too hyper-focused, too specialized, too atomized in life, in fitness, in food. By focusing on optimization, we lose out on “rich, multivariate experience[s] with friends, fun, [and] exploration.” Much like crushing a Peloton workout alone in a dark room¹⁰ is poor facsimile¹¹ for a long bike ride with friends¹², sucking down a meal replacement shake in between Zoom calls is no replacement for enjoying a well-prepared lunch with your spouse¹³.

One of the main reasons I started writing this newsletter was to key into a little of this communal aspect of food. Many of you are friends or family and I don’t get to cook and eat with you as often as I’d like. By sharing some dumb thoughts and hastily written recipes with you each week, it gives us a chance to break bread virtually. Even if it’s just Nana CWD most weeks, I love reading comments and thoughts on the recipes, love getting photos of your meals, love talking about life, fatherhood, and oysters around an outdoor table¹⁴.

That being said, I don’t have much of a recipe for you this week. Instead, we’ll cap things off with a recipe for cocktail sauce from Papa CWD. While I normally just take my oysters straight up with a squeeze of lemon, I understand many people prefer to spice it up a little with some fixin’s. Nothing wrong with that, and from what I’ve heard, the recipe below is a crowd-favorite. Give it a shot next time you’re slurping a few oysters down — and if you ever find yourself with an excess of shellfish, you know who to call¹⁵!

Papa CWD’s Cocktail Sauce

My recipe is very simple and is always made to taste. Use a small cocktail glass, fill it halfway with horseradish¹⁶. Add ketchup, a dash of Worcestershire sauce¹⁷, and squeeze in two lemon wedges, then mix it all up. I like it heavy on the horseradish so it looks very light in color, but the rest of my family likes it more red, so they use more ketchup¹⁸.

Sorry there are no exact measurements, but this is how we always do it¹⁹.

1. And a nutrient powerhouse!

2. See here.

3. Once, on a family trip to Ireland, we stopped at Morans and ate no less than a gross of oysters amongst three or four dedicated slurpers.

4. Maybe an exaggeration, but bear with me. I’m passionate about oysters.

5. And reader!

6. A few good options here, here, and here.

7. I used to be a big shot and skip the glove and towel… a slip of the knife followed by a Friday evening visit to the Mass General ER changed that real quick.

8. Oysters are a classic example, but you can experience this with a lot of other things: crabs being another great one.

9. Which for me is unfortunately very quickly.

10. That being said, sometimes your body is asking for a crushing workout alone — and that’s okay too. Just ask

Sam Sager

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11. In college, I once I used “facsimile” like this in a paper on James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, describing the use of the “manmade” glass as a “poor facsimile” for “nature’s” ice. My professor (RCC, for those in the know) circled the word and flagged it as bad word choice, but I, to this day, think the metaphor works.

12. Isn’t that right, Uncle Steady?

13. And again, sometimes that’s all you have time for and can do — and that’s okay. Remember: everything in moderation, including moderation!

14. It also gives me the opportunity to flex my creative writing muscles on a semi-regular basis, so I’m grateful for that as well!

15. Again, thanks, Bill! Believe it or not, I was actually going to order some oysters from Island Creek, my usual go-to, but the prices have gone up something like 50% since the last time I ordered them. I couldn’t justify the quantity required for just two people, so I passed and thought we’d be going oyster-less this Thanksgiving — so I’m extra appreciative of your surplus!

16

I like to use fresh, but my mom always used prepared horseradish.

17

I tend to go without, by my dad always added it.

18. Ed Note: Basing your food on color/presentation is a pro level move.

19. No need to be sorry, Papa — we never use exact measurements on CWD!