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Nobody asks tablemates, “Do you want to split some shrimp?”
But everyone who eats oysters asks fellow diners, “Want to split a dozen?” Oysters are the icebreakers of camaraderie and a food best shared.
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To our surprise, we discovered that everyone brings his or her own personal, and perhaps personalized, oyster knife. They serve as conversation starters on their own, between the baskets of hot shells dumped in front of guests.
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From governors’ proclamations to famous chefs’ menus, oysters are earning praise for their workhorse Chesapeake Bay cleaning, and their nuanced regional flavors. But the oyster’s not getting enough credit for its other unique quality: its unstoppable social magnetism.
I’ve eaten oysters my whole life. I like them raw, steamed, charbroiled—almost any way imaginable. But my appreciation for this simple, gelatinous creature has broadened since our family built a weekend home on the Northern Neck.
It’s not that I’ve become more of a connoisseur of oyster varieties—I’ve been serious about that for some time. It’s that I now see the oyster for the social creature it is.
The Northern Neck and Middle Peninsula are ground zero for the cult that is oyster culture. The oyster gardening movement is ever present in our local press and the rock star revivalists such as those at Rappahannock Oyster Company in Topping have put our particular crustaceans on the pages of every hip lifestyle magazine on the East Coast.
In all these articles about the trendy little oyster, or Crassostrea virginica to be scientifically accurate, the focal point is usually gauzy idealizing of the leathered watermen who harvest them. Missed in these stories about the oyster’s contributions to the economy and environment is the species’ fundamental ability to do something most food cannot do. Said simply, oysters bring people together.
We noticed the oyster’s role in social cohesion in our first autumn spent in Northumberland County.
As soon as summer’s shadows began to lengthen, roadside banners appeared, promoting oyster festivals, oyster roasts, oyster everything, staged by civic groups, communities, and families. Even the local Republican Party had an oyster roast.
It seemed to us no coincidence that as all of us fair-weather tourists, or “come-heres,” as we are called, packed up for the summer, the local calendar filled up with communal gatherings centered around the ritual open flame and a ubiquitous local creature.
We wondered if people were using the roasts as some sort of tribal ceremony to celebrate the departure of the vacation crowd. Were they that glad to get rid of us?
This insecurity was relieved when we were invited to two oyster roasts, the big community shindig at the Reedville Fisherman’s Museum and a more intimate, driveway oyster roast at a new friend’s house in Mila on Thanksgiving weekend.
Once we got there, we realized they weren’t celebrations of our departure, at least not entirely.
At both these roasts, the oyster’s social magic was on full display. Under gray skies and chilly temperatures, large groups of people huddled outdoors, bundled under coats and gloves. Standing over empty plywood tables, they waited patiently for the opportunity to risk stabbing themselves in the wrist with a shiv, all for the prize of just a few grams of steaming protein.
To our surprise, we discovered that everyone brings his or her own personal, and perhaps personalized, oyster knife. They serve as conversation starters on their own, between the baskets of hot shells dumped in front of guests. We scrambled to borrow them, feeling like rubes.
While those roasted oysters are, no doubt, delicious and presented in a style that is as uncommon elsewhere inland as it is common here on our peninsulas, it strikes me that culinary delight is not the thing that makes these parties happen. After all, there are warmer places to eat oysters, with chairs, table service, and a wine list to boot.
Instead, it’s the primal need to eat the darn things within seconds of their coming off the fire, and in the company of others.
The oyster, as an agent of social cohesion, is not limited to these fall confabs in driveways and on museum lawns in our neck of the woods. You can see it in any oyster bar or sports restaurant in America.
Nobody asks tablemates, “Do you want to split some shrimp?” But everyone who eats oysters asks fellow diners, “Want to split a dozen?”
Oysters are the icebreakers of camaraderie and a food best shared.
This power of engagement is, perhaps, natural and not learned. We’d only been in our vacation home for three months when the first oyster showed up underneath our dock on Mill Creek. My then-four-year-old son called me over to retrieve it and no sooner was it on dry land than he said, “Let’s eat him together.”
We took that lonely but large oyster straight up to the house, rolled him in cornmeal and splashed him into a cast-iron Jacuzzi of peanut oil. My son dubbed him a “granddaddy oyster” due to his size and insisted that we each eat half of the crispy finished product in celebration of it being our first home-grown catch. Even one oyster is cause for communal activity.
In our second year on the Northern Neck, we are not eager for the summer to end. We spend weekends on the boat, or on the docks of friends, soaking up the salt air and slow pace. But this year, instead of dreading summer’s end, we know it’s merely a transition to the fall, with the grubby little bivalve as the cruise director.
This time, we’ll be ready to celebrate the season’s end like locals: with our own oyster knives in tow.
For more information about Virginia oysters, visit VAOysterCountry.com.