Author: Jessica Leigh Hester / Source: Atlas Obscura
The year 1903 was a bad one for oysters—or, rather, it was an unsavory time for the New York gourmands who craved heaping piles of goodly mollusks.
In February of that year, from his float at the base of Gansevoort Street, which runs straight to the Hudson River, one anonymous exporter lamented that the oysters were so spotty and small that “it is scarcely worth bringing them to market.” Succulent large ones, or even acceptably average contenders? Those, he said, “are as scarce as grapes in Greenland.”And the little ones were not going to get much play in the city’s seafood bars. “New York does not like the small oyster,” the exporter continued. Restaurants and hotels demanded mollusks with a theatrical streak, “that would make a show in a fry, or panned, or stewed.”
As the 19th century rolled into the 20th, New York newspapers were full of dispatches about oysters—enormous ones in particular. One described bivalves that washed ashore in Australia, measuring more than a foot across the shell. Another reported that one had turned up on the banks of Christchurch, on England’s southern coast, weighing in at 3.5 pounds.
For a time in the 1800s, the city drooled over Saddle Rock oysters—a splendid, sizable variety that carried with it a whiff of myth. (They were said to be named for their home, an equestrian-shaped rock in in the East River, where a bed was revealed during low tide one day in 1827.) Though this crop was exhausted soon after, the name lived on, and was attached to many large varieties. Just how big New York’s biggest oysters usually were, though, remains…
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