The Big Oyster (14 page)

Fulton was interested in establishing steam service between New York and Connecticut as well, but the route, Long Island Sound, was still subjected to hostile British warships. It was not until after the War of 1812, with the Treaty of Ghent in 1815, that hostilities finally ended and steam service was established between New Haven and New York. Soon after, the New Haven ferry went on to Providence, altering forever the character of southern New England by joining it to New York as much as or more so than with Boston. A steamboat to the Raritan River in New Jersey connected New York to Philadelphia.

New York was now shipping enormous quantities of fresh oysters upstate and to Europe and, not producing enough for all its markets, was buying up Long Island, Connecticut, and New Jersey oysters. In 1807, the city suspended the law that had barred letting oysters enter the city in the summer months. In 1819, the first cannery opened in New York City for canning oysters and codfish, providing another way to trade New York oysters over long distances. And another new idea was about to change New York and the New York oyster trade.

The Lenape, the Iroquois,
the Mohawk—many of the inhabitants of what was to become New York State—had had myths that the great North River flowed through from another sea to the Atlantic. Now the Salty People were going to make that true. It wasn't a water route to China, but for the New Yorkers of the nineteenth century it was something much better—a waterway to the growing American West.

Both Fulton and Livingston strongly believed the future of America was on Western waterways and they tried to establish steamboat service on the Mississippi and other Western rivers. But the governor of New York had a different idea.

In 1808, after steam service to Albany proved to be a success, New York assemblyman Joshua Freeman introduced to the assembly a resolution to consider building a canal connecting the Hudson River to the Great Lakes. Freeman was from Salina, a salt-producing area between Lake Erie and Albany, and salt producers wanted to move their very bulky product by water to New York City and foreign markets and to the Great Lakes and Western markets.

Steamships had shown how transportation could build New York. In the early nineteenth century, one-sixth of the population of the United States lived in the New York area and with the help of steamships, New York City handled about a sixth of the nation's commerce.

But not everyone was enthusiastic about the canal idea. New York City was still agricultural, even Manhattan was still two-thirds farmland, and Manhattan farmers did not want to compete with the goods that could be brought in from upstate. Many New York City merchants initially opposed the canal because they believed that it would devalue New York products. New York City's most influential politician, Governor DeWitt Clinton, from a famous and well-connected family—his father James was a Revolutionary War hero and his uncle George served as vice president under both Jefferson and Madison while the canal project was looking for sponsors—was the canal's greatest champion. Work began in 1817 and was not completed until 1825 at an estimated cost of five dollars per inhabitant of New York State.

The first canal boat, the
Seneca Chief,
sailed into New York Harbor with two kegs of Lake Erie fresh water, which were dumped into the Atlantic near Sandy Hook. Also on board were Great Lakes whitefish, still fresh, a canoe made by Lake Superior tribesmen, and potash from the upstate saltworks. The city fathers sailed out on a steamer and hailed the
Seneca Chief,
“Whence come you and where are you bound?”

The reply recorded for posterity was “From Lake Erie bound for Sandy Hook.”

The Erie Canal connected New York Harbor to the Great Lakes and the rapidly expanding northern Midwest. Its success led to other canals, like the Ohio Canal that linked the Great Lakes to the Ohio River, which ran into the Mississippi. Soon New York City was connected by water to a considerable part of the North American continent, opening its products to the West.

By the time the canal was completed, New York Harbor was handling more than a third of U.S. commerce. This was in no small part due to the Erie Canal. The most important New York State export was flour. New York shipped inexpensive flour all over the world. But it was also shipping fresh oysters. Before the canal was even completed, advertisements started appearing in western New York newspapers for fresh oysters. Once the Erie Canal was completed, steamboats and even sailing sloops would go to Albany to unload. Some days there would be forty New York oyster boats unloading in Albany, where the oysters were put on canal barges or on wagons to be sent to other New York State destinations such as Lake Champlain.

Since the Hudson froze over in the winter, the oyster sloops would take one last order for winter supplies along the Hudson in December. By choosing thick-shelled oysters and carefully packing them with the deep cup side on the bottom, the New York City dealers ensured the oysters would last through the winter. They even attempted to train the bivalves to keep tightly shut while out of the water. Producers discovered that oysters are educable. The grower would choose plump, large oysters and replant them closer to shore where they would be exposed for a few hours a day in low tide. After a few days, they would move the oysters a little farther up so that they were exposed for a few minutes longer in low tides. Producers continued the process, moving them every few days. The oysters learned to take a long hard drink before the water retreated and eventually would hold the water the entire time they were exposed.

New Yorkers were not unique in training oysters for shipment. The French, before shipping oysters to Paris, would spread them out in the water and every day tap each oyster with an iron rod, instantly causing the bivalve to close tightly. A nineteenth-century American observer quipped that a French oyster was trained “to keep its mouth shut when it enters society.”

With money coming
fast into the great port city, New York was able to expand, pave streets, build sidewalks, and extend roads farther up into Manhattan. Three months after the first steamboat to Albany went into service, the city experimented with its first fire hydrant, on the corner of Liberty and William streets. As the city grew, the plan for a street grid in Manhattan provided for east–west streets spaced closer together while the few north–south avenues were farther apart because the city planners were certain that the bulk of traffic would be east–west between the two waterfronts, the Hudson and the East River.

Despite the prosperity, the city offered not one first-class restaurant. According to legend, New Yorkers first noticed this situation in 1825, when the first Erie Canal boat was greeted in New York Harbor by Governor DeWitt Clinton and Mayor Philip Hone. There was no restaurant, they realized, good enough for a celebration. But that was not the worst of it. Nothing will stir a second look at the hometown restaurants like a visit from a beloved Frenchman. Actually, thirty years earlier, an exiled Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, later to become one of the all-time most celebrated French food writers, had passed two years in New York, escaping the French Revolution by eking out an existence as a French teacher and violinist. He had found the food pleasing. But he was impressed with the bounty of products in the market, the value of good food simply prepared in homes. He described shooting his own wild turkey in Connecticut and having his hosts roast it. He had no restaurants or cuisine to write about. In 1825, a far more famous Frenchman with even more names, Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de Lafayette, the French officer who at the age of nineteen had resigned his commission to come to America with his troops and fight for the Revolution, returned for a visit.

The sixty-eight-year-old marquis had imagined a quiet sojourn, but from the start he was met with canon salutes and cheered by large crowds. Even the seas around the city seemed to mark the occasion. Suddenly there was an explosion in the population of a particular variety of sea drum fish, ever after known to New Yorkers as Lafayettes.

The city's leading citizens wanted to throw not just a dinner for the marquis but a series of banquets, and among the taverns and oyster cellars, there were no establishments that they felt were fine enough in the mile between the Battery and City Hall that was New York City. Considering that New York had been under military occupation during his last trip, he may not have been in the least disappointed by the current arrangements, but a sense of municipal mortification set in.

At the time, Swiss-born Giovanni Delmonico was a wine merchant. In 1818, when he was only thirty years old, he had been the commander of a three-masted schooner trading a profitable route between New York and Havana. He picked up tobacco in Havana, sold it in Cádiz, Spain, where he bought wine that he sold in New York, where he picked up lumber to sell in Havana. In 1824, he took his considerable savings, anglicized his name to John, and established himself in New York, using his connections to buy French and Spanish wines in bulk and bottling them himself. According to some, he was among the first to respond to this appalling lack of restaurants, but according to others, he was simply anticipating the likely growth of the city because of the canal. It was probably the combination that he saw as an enormous opportunity. He went back to Switzerland to gather his older brother, Pietro, a successful pastry maker in Berne. They sailed back to New York, Pietro now Peter, with sea chests filled with, according to their nephew, Lorenzo, $20,000 in gold pieces. New York has always loved its rags-to-riches stories, and for years it was said that the Delmonicos arrived penniless and raised their money selling peanuts on the street. The truth was a lesser story, but a far better way to get started in New York.

Since one was a wine merchant and the other a pastry maker, they opened a café, the first place in New York to offer French pastry, in a two-story brick house at 23 William Street in the heart of the business district, and called it Delmonico. It was a simple place with six pine tables. Playing to their expertise, they sold pastries, cakes, coffee, wines, and Cuban cigars. Another first for New York was cups of thick and foamy hot chocolate. Initially, most of their customers were Europeans, of which there were many, most of whom had written home about the barbarous state of New York food and rejoiced in the new café. For the Americans, the initial curiosity was the first female cashier they had ever seen, a new concept, entrusting women with money. The woman, in fact, was Peter's wife.

Delmonico's introduced New York to what would become one of its basic institutions, the business lunch. They sent for their nephew Francesco, and in a break with family tradition that forecasted the direction the business was going, he Francofied rather than anglicized his name to François. By 1831, they were no longer advertising themselves as “Delmonico & Brother, Confectioners” but as “Confectioners and
Restaurant Français.
”

They had competitors, such as a café on Broadway between Pine and Cedar owned by a Frenchman, François Geurin. But it was largely the success of the Delmonicos that caused a major shift in New York culture. Up until then, despite the Revolution and the War of 1812, New York cooks, when they wanted to excel, had aspired to cook the best British food, using recipes copied from British cookbooks or British cookbooks themselves, which were still in common use. Also, a number of supposedly American cookbooks were written by British cooks.
American Domestic Cookery,
published in the early 1800s in both England and the United States, was written by Maria Eliza Ketelby Rundell, who was actually British.

But toward the middle of the nineteenth century, fine dining in New York, led by Delmonico's, developed French aspirations. In fact, as Delmonico's became the most celebrated restaurant in America, French dining, with greater or lesser degrees of success, started to become synonymous around the country with “fine” dining.