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The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell Review
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Pizza’s, weiners, and spagehtti, but seafood? Before reading this book I had no idea that anyone (except the indians, and we all know what happened to them)aite anything from the waters around New York. Between the street run off, the overflowing sewers and being well chummed by the remains of mafioso, it was inconceivable that the waters of NY were at one time one of the most productive estuaries (where fresh water mixes with salt water)in the world. But as soon as the New Yorkers realized it, they started in true New York fashion to destroy it. Seemingly as fast as they could. It only took them about 300 hundred years and did not let outbreaks of oyster related cholera and other diseases stop them. It is no wonder that most NY oysters were cooked. Only the brave, ignorant or suicidal would eat a sewage marinated NY oyster raw.
These are only a few of the facinating facts that you can rake out of this interesting book. I found the segments of NY City history facinating too. Read this book then watch Scorsese’s Gangs of New York again. It will give you new insight into a period of our nation’s largest city.
The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell Overview
Before New York City was the Big Apple, it could have been called the Big Oyster. Now award-winning author Mark Kurlansky tells the remarkable story of New York by following the trajectory of one of its most fascinating inhabitants–the oyster, whose influence on the great metropolis remains unparalleled.
For centuries New York was famous for its oysters, which until the early 1900s played such a dominant a role in the city’s economy, gastronomy, and ecology that the abundant bivalves were Gotham’s most celebrated export, a staple food for the wealthy, the poor, and tourists alike, and the primary natural defense against pollution for the city’s congested waterways.
Filled with cultural, historical, and culinary insight–along with historic recipes, maps, drawings, and photos–this dynamic narrative sweeps readers from the island hunting ground of the Lenape Indians to the death of the oyster beds and the rise of America’s environmentalist movement, from the oyster cellars of the rough-and-tumble Five Points slums to Manhattan’s Gilded Age dining chambers.
Kurlansky brings characters vividly to life while recounting dramatic incidents that changed the course of New York history. Here are the stories behind Peter Stuyvesant’s peg leg and Robert Fulton’s “Folly”; the oyster merchant and pioneering African American leader Thomas Downing; the birth of the business lunch at Delmonico’s; early feminist Fanny Fern, one of the highest-paid newspaper writers in the city; even “Diamond” Jim Brady, who we discover was not the gourmand of popular legend.
With The Big Oyster, Mark Kurlansky serves up history at its most engrossing, entertaining, and delicious.
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