Shellfish

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From the extravagant Tyrian purple pigment, secreted by the Murex snail, to the Judaic ban on fish devoid of fins and scales; from the glamour of pearls, the oyster’s response to alien intrusions, to the vulgar co-option of mussels and clams as a proxy for female genitals; from legends about the immortality of lobster to nightmares about giant sea insects; and from aphrodisiac powers (bogus) to violent allergies (real) – for most of recorded human history, shellfish has concentrated fantasies, anxieties and interdicts. And that’s because it’s thrilling.

Unlike most of the fish described in this book, shellfish – it’s not even really fish, but more on that below – is a mental voyage. Hardly anyone enjoys shellfish from birth: we learn to. Calling it an acquired taste might suggest we import our liking for shellfish in one fell swoop. We don’t: we grow into shellfish as smokers grow into cigarettes. Shellfish is, of course, much less likely to kill us than cigarettes – though on occasion, tragically, it will. In other, thankfully exceptional instances, it can make us forget ourselves. Domoic acid, a marine biotoxin, has been known to lodge itself inside bivalves: once consumed by mammals, it causes amnesic shellfish poisoning (ASP), an irreversible form of memory loss.

Where fish may please us, shellfish dares us. Rather than offer, shellfish conjures – a marine squall, a shard in our heel, a lungful of brine as we first learned to swim. Out of a scallop shell, as myth would have it, Venus was born; and it is scallop shells, affixed to trees, that guide the pilgrim to Santiago de Compostela. Fertility and beauty. Vengeance and transcendence. A link to the out-there. If fish is the thing, shellfish is the metaphor. Oysters (Ostreidae) are rarely eaten to fill stomachs (even though in Japan, the practice of breading and deep-frying them – kaki furai – does bring them closer to fish fingers). They’re eaten to evoke. We don’t chew oysters. They transit our mouths like comets, setting off intimations of minerality. In Seamus Heaney’s words, “My palate hung with starlight: / As I tasted the salty Pleiades / Orion dipped his foot into the water.”

Mucuslike, hard-plated, bug-eyed or antennaed: the fascination of shellfish admittedly encloses a kernel of repulsion. Molluscs may remind us of garden slugs or nasal secretions; crustaceans – of various crawlies. Indeed, as members of the Tetraconata clade, shrimp and lobster are genetically much closer to cockroaches than they are to fish. Possibly the rarest, most bizarrely shaped and costliest of all shellfish are the percebes found off the Iberian coast (Pollicipes pollicipes), which look like gnarled bouquets of dinosaur feet. Shellfish throws barriers in our way, physical and psychological. But think of the endorphins released by a strenuous run; of the meditative delights of abstract art; of the cerebral high born of breaking a code. The finest pleasures are those that don’t come easy.

Here as elsewhere, effort correlates with value. Up until the nineteenth century in some cases, and across much of the world, the relative difficulty of harvesting shellfish led to its use as currency: shellfish was, one might argue, the bitcoin of its time. To this day, in Chinese and Japanese scripts, the character for “mollusc” (貝) also denotes money, or features as a radical in composite characters that signify a monetary transaction: its origins lie in representations of the cowrie shell. Away from mercantile associations, shellfish keeps us going in unseen ways. Molluscs are filter feeders: they neutralize pollutants and control algal biomass. Their presence correlates with biodiversity hotspots. But there’s more. In recent years, with climate change’s scorching breath down our necks, we’ve woken up to the capacity of molluscs for carbon sequestration. Farming shellfish, some research suggests, could be a more effective form of climate action than planting trees, with comparatively minimal inputs by way of irrigation, food or fertilizer. An oyster, moreover, will remove – or “sink” – carbon permanently. Eating oysters, in other words, might be one of the best things you can do for the environment. (This is not, mind you, a licence to stop recycling your garbage.)

And yet, the present section doesn’t contain oyster recipes. True, frying or grilling oysters can be rewarding. Elsewhere, we suggest adding them to an all-in-one béchamel-based Chilean fish dish. Still, a raw oyster is unbeatable. You might be offered lemon juice, vinegar, tabasco, Worcestershire sauce, chopped shallots, ponzu dressing or whatnot: we recommend you shrug it all off. Unless it fits into a wider culinary endeavour, an oyster shouldn’t be tamed, qualified or defanged. Like a glass of wine, it needs no adornment: it is an experiential closed loop, a gustatory Moebius strip. Shucking aside, scraping it gently off its shell is all you need to do.