Secret Ingredients (37 page)

They hoisted twenty-two traps, good for twenty-one lobsters. As Pasternack relaunched traps by sliding them down a plank and off the rear of the boat, he whistled “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.”

“You like blue-fishing?” he asked me as we headed back.

Yes, I did.

He leaned against the gunwale. In the background: Atlantic Beach and the high-rises of the Rockaways. The sun was in his face, he was bloody and sweaty and due for a shave. Lunch had been a turkey-and-cheddar sub, and there were dabs of mayo at the corners of his mouth. “I told you, I don’t always catch the biggest one, but I’m always catching ’em,” he said. “Some guys are only about catching big fish. I’ve always been for quantity. I like to eat ’em. I’m a meat-and-potatoes guy.”

I asked what he would do with the bluefish at Esca.

Palms up, he shook his head. “There’s lots of good stuff to work with now,” he said. “Lobster mushrooms. Great corn. Good tomatoes are starting to show up. This time of year it’s easy to be a cook.” Today, though, he’d been fishing and truly hadn’t given it a thought. But tomorrow, back in the kitchen, he’d have an idea.

2005

ON THE BAY

BILL BUFORD

M
ike Osinski was an acquaintance, someone I saw every now and then in the elevator of the Manhattan apartment building we’d both lived in for nearly ten years. Although I never knew what he did exactly (something in finance; he was always wearing a suit), he seemed different from the others—affable in a way I associate with people from the Southern states, less formal, with an unpretentious good-ol’-boyness. One day, I spotted Osinski walking his dog and realized I hadn’t seen him for some time. He’d grown a graying goatee and was wearing baggy jeans and muddy work boots.

“I’ve left the city,” he said. “I’ve given up the rat race!” He seemed giddy and made big gestures with his hands. He was now living in Greenport, a town on one of the far tines of Long Island’s North Fork. “I’m working on the water! I’m a bayman!” (Baymen are the region’s traditional seafood hunter-gatherers.) He motioned for me to step closer. “And I’ve lost thirty pounds.” Osinski slapped himself to show off his abs. “Oysters did this. I harvest oysters. I’m a new man. The differences between men and women? Now I understand them. Do you know what I mean? I am a maaaaaaan!” He said the word “man” as though it should always have twelve syllables.

Osinski was born in 1954, and grew up in Mobile, Alabama, with a barefoot taste for the bounty of the intertidal beaches. (He was a youthful advocate of the Southerner’s unspoken principle that, in the Gulf states, your identity is fed by what you pull out of the warm waters for dinner.) But Long Island isn’t anything like the Gulf. I stared at my neighbor and thought, Oysters. Is that what happens when we get older—we take up hobbies?

I didn’t see Osinski for another year, when I ran into him and his dog after a morning of deliveries. Gramercy Tavern had taken his oysters—“The chef says they’re the best he’s eaten in his life”—and other restaurants had followed: Esca, the Four Seasons, BLT Fish, Le Bernardin. These were some of the most respected eateries in the city. Le Bernardin was regarded by many as the best fish place in America. “And they love my oysters,” Osinski said.

Greenport is a hundred miles from Manhattan, on the upper reaches of Peconic Bay, a fast-moving body of water squeezing between Shelter Island and the raggedy narrow end of New York on its way to the open sea. Osinski’s home, built in the 1830s, probably by a whaling captain, sits on a sandy isthmus with views of water in two directions: in front, the Peconic; in back, a brackish inlet, fed by a creek and the bay’s tides, called Widow’s Hole, after one Margaret Leverage, the wife of the whaler. (He went to sea after completing the house, and never returned.) It was a mournful legacy, but one that Osinski nervously ended up drawing from.

On the East Coast, oysters derive their names from where they’re found—they might be called a thousand things, but there is only one species,
Crassostrea virginica.
The names, therefore, can seem a little arbitrary, which was illustrated by a story told to me by Sandy Ingber, the chef at Grand Central’s Oyster Bar, of the Pemaquid. “This Pemaquid—it was a good oyster,” Ingber said. “But it didn’t sell.” Who knows why? The name had no magic or was difficult to pronounce. “So I started calling it a Bristol.” Pemaquid is near Bristol, Maine. “I couldn’t keep it on the menu.” (Ingber has since gone back to calling it a Pemaquid.) By this logic, Osinski’s oysters could be Peconics or Greenports, but he decided to invoke the pond behind his house and call them Widow’s Holes, even though the name had some unwieldy implications: no eager, neo-oysterman really wants his shellfish to invoke mortality (Here, eat my raw shellfish and you, too, can make your wife a widow). On the other hand, what exactly is a widow’s hole? “It sounds pornographic, doesn’t it?” Osinski asked, as though it were the punch line to a dirty joke, not an entirely unhappy association for the world’s most famous aphrodisiac. “Osinski’s oysters are perfectly good,” Ingber told me, “but my job is to move shellfish. Widow’s Holes—that’s a name I can move.”

The view from Osinski’s home meets just about everyone’s definition of picturesque, but on a cold December morning it was remarkably uninviting. The bay was gray. The sky was gray. The trees were black and bare. There seemed to be no horizon. Out on the water, an empty ferry was leaving for Shelter Island. Overhead, and in all directions, were formations of geese—they made me think of sergeants’ stripes in Second World War movies—on their way to somewhere else. In the shallow water where Osinski kept a boat, skim ice had formed. I had offered to help out, and was given oyster gear to put on: bright-orange overalls called bib pants, a top called waterproof sleeves, some giant gloves (wet inside), and an extra-thick wool hat (also wet). But the bib pants were uncomfortably snug—I learned later that Osinski had grabbed the wrong pair and given me a pair belonging to Isabel, his wife, not a small woman but much, much smaller than me—and my breakfast constricted alarmingly when I walked outside, tipping side to side like a moonwalker, because I couldn’t bend my knees.

I didn’t know what it meant to harvest an oyster. I had images, probably from books, of people standing in a skiff, raking the bottom and lifting dislodged shellfish with “tongs,” deftly maneuvered like giant chopsticks. My suspicion is that, in earlier times, everyone knew where and how they got their oysters, because in earlier times everyone seemed to eat them. The mystery of oysters today is why people stopped.

It happened fast. “For most of the twentieth century, most people in town were involved in shellfish,” the mayor of Greenport, Dave Kapell, told me when I called him looking for explanations. “There were a dozen canneries, plus shuckers and washers and packers and a barrel-making factory for the daily shipments to Fulton Fish Market. Discarded shells were everywhere, some in piles forty feet high, and always the stench of oyster tissue decomposing.” According to Kapell, most of the waterfront was given over to shellfish. So was most of the water in front of the waterfront, a concept I didn’t understand until I was shown a map from the fifties, a familiar enough graphic—small lots, big lots, a network of right angles—but unusual in this respect: the property was at the bottom of the bay. It is likely that Greenport underwater was more valuable than the town on land.

Today, the town is framed by the remains of two giant canneries—Lester & Toner Company, near Osinski’s home, and the Long Island Oyster Company, on the other side of the bay, a gleaming white monster with what looked like Hellenic pillars. Both businesses went bankrupt in the sixties. Lester & Toner is now condominiums; the Hellenic pile is empty. What happened?

Overharvesting, according to Dave Relyea, an owner of Frank M. Flower & Sons, in Oyster Bay (started in 1887, “the last of the big boys”): people didn’t know how to replace what they were taking out. And then pestilence (Dermo and MSX, parasites that mysteriously appeared in the fifties—no one knows from where). And predators (starfish, mainly, which arrived in the thirties and then again in the sixties, devouring whole bays). But people, principally. And pollution and the pervasive unease raised by the prospect of diseased shellfish. Oysters eat by filtering nutrients through their gills—a single oyster cleans about two gallons of water an hour—but their health corresponds to that of the water passing through them. Good water: good oysters. Bad water: bad oysters. Bad oysters: bad tummy ache, unless your oysters are really bad, in which case you have a really bad tummy ache. In Louisiana, where the fecund Gulf and the warm Mississippi encourage all kinds of growth—including the unique
Vibrio vulnificus,
a cousin of cholera—someone dies from oysters every year.

There were other factors. Osinski blames the Catholic Church (“If only everyone still ate fish on Fridays, I’d be rich”), an unlikely explanation but not without merit: people stopped eating oysters because they stopped knowing them. My Louisiana grandfather, for instance, a boomingly affable man (who also believed that if you’re from the Gulf you eat the Gulf), had loved oysters—along with crawfish and shrimp, plus swamp items like catfish and possum—and devoured them with a voracious zeal, somehow finding something in the shellfish that confirmed his Southernness. My father, a more selective eater, didn’t confuse identity with diet, and thought oysters were repellent. It takes only one generation to turn against a thing, and the next generation (mine) has no idea what it’s missing. As a result, oysters today are mainly a nostalgia food, rarely eaten at home but served in restaurants by members of a staff we’d like to believe won’t poison us. They are the very people Osinski sells to. Which was why I was accompanying him out into the freezing Peconic. Le Bernardin needed another two hundred.

Osinski’s boat had dents and scratches, and was aggressively secondhand. The front was a mess. The sight conveyed disorder and reeked of dead seaweed and rotting fish. There were bags, plastic containers, pieces of wire, buckets, a proliferation of desiccated shells, and, somewhere, an anchor, which I eventually discovered when I was ordered to find it. (I waddled forward with great difficulty—I can’t begin to describe the tidal pull that occurred when I bent over.) In the back, built up against the stern, were two platforms, like tables. This was where Osinski sorted his oysters. Le Bernardin insists on small oysters, no larger than three inches. “Women don’t like the big ones,” Osinski explained. “A frog waiter told me. It makes them uncomfortable.”

Osinski learned that the land underwater could be owned when he took a course in oystering five years ago in nearby Southold. (It was taught by Kim Tetrault, a marine biologist of a highly romantic disposition, who seems determined single-handedly to revive the shellfish of the Peconic.) Most of the bay’s underwater land now belongs to the state: you paid taxes on it like any other piece of property, but most people didn’t. The previous owners of Osinski’s property, though, had paid theirs, and Osinski turned out to own acres of underwater land. This was where we were now, about three hundred feet out, bobbing up and down in a higgledy-piggledy scattering of buoys.

Osinski grabbed one, wrapped the rope around a winch, and started cranking. Slowly, what looked like a giant chest emerged from the dark-gray bay, magnified by the water, getting bigger and bigger until it broke the surface, seaweed and sea creatures cascading off the sides. The boat tipped. It was a steel cage, about four feet in length and three feet high, and weighed nearly four hundred pounds. I helped Osinski pull it in and bring it to rest on the sorting table. He unlatched a hatch and pulled out a “purse,” a mesh bag filled with oysters that spilled out like marbles, along with flip-floppy bluefish, many different kinds of crabs, and what looked like muddy seaweed (sea squirts, in fact, which obstruct the flow of water, an oyster’s source of food, and need to be ripped out, a task I undertook with great vigor, trying to be useful, whereupon I discovered the origins of the name: my contact lenses browned over, the bay went momentarily opaque, and it was only on blinking, scratchily, that I saw how I had been covered with sea squirt). In the event, this wasn’t the cage Osinski was hoping to find—the oysters had been there only since last spring and were two inches in length. By next September, they’d be “market size.” (An oyster can grow two inches a year.)

He hooked another buoy. This cage wasn’t one he wanted, either. We pulled out another. He was looking for oysters from the previous year, two-year-olds, which should be Le Bernardin size.

“I know they’re here somewhere.” Osinski was muttering. He hooked another buoy, but the rope was tangled. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Who in the hell did that?” He yanked and pulled. Several cages appeared to have been stacked on top of each other. “Oh, I guess I did, didn’t I?” And of course he had, because he was the only one working this patch of the Peconic.

The year before, Osinski had been out on Christmas Day. Le Bernardin was a new account, and he wasn’t finding three-inch oysters for the busy New Year’s week ahead. The inlet froze, and he had to keep plowing his boat through it, breaking the surface, to ensure he could get back in. (Everyone, I learned, respects the mortal cold of this bay in the winter.) Even on the Peconic, ice formed. When Osinski returned, with thirty oysters for his efforts, his children—Susanna (then six) and Mercator (five)—were waiting for him, jumping up and down, oblivious of the implications that Daddy was not walking up from the dock with a festive bounce. It was late afternoon, and they wanted to know what Santa Claus had brought them.