5/12/2003. Oysters for Breakfast.

We spent the most recent of May’s long weekends (Thursday, May 8, anniversary of the end of World War II) along the upper coast of Brittany. Having spent the night in St-Malo, Denis and I were backtracking towards the seaside town of Cancale. “There are beautiful parcs à huitre in Cancale,” he told me. “Cancale is famous for its oysters.”




Parc à huitre? I mused to myself, picturing a kind of natural oyster reserve—a marine park of sorts. But instead we pulled into a small parking lot next to a jetty. This was a park designed not to observe oysters in the wild, but rather on the palate. The tide was out in the bay of Cancale, exposing a vast expanse of artificial pools, stacks of baskets, and racks of crates used for ostericulture--oyster farming. Everything was encrusted with seaweed, giving it a craggy, underwater look, for this is one of France’s oldest oyster farms. As we watched, a truck drove right down the beach between the ranks of oyster beds to collect a morning’s harvest.



But before strolling into the oysters’ home, as it were, Denis had a more direct interaction in mind. In a double row along the jetty was stall after stall of oyster vendors. Their wares had just been plucked from the sea and the briny aroma of oysters—the quintessence of ocean—was thick on the air. Nearby, an area in front of a low wall, perfect for perching on, was deep in oyster shells and squeezed-out, discarded lemon halves. I was beginning to get the idea. “Oysters for breakfast?” proposed Denis.



Cancale is home to a prized oyster known as la plate de Cancale. This thin-shelled oyster is small and delicate and flat, as its name indicates. Compared to a common oyster (an oyster creuse or “hollow”), the plate de Cancale has a shell that is almost smooth, and rounded in shape with a point at one end, like the petal of a rose. Its flesh is as delicate and refined in both flavor and texture as its appearance, and it is an entirely distinct species (Ostrea edulis) from the common oyster (Crassostrea gigas).

In fact, this delicate oyster is the indigenous oyster of the Breton coasts and yet it is the least numerous, and therefore the most expensive. The plates were plentiful until 1868, when a Portugese freighter laden with a cargo of living common oysters wrecked off the Cancale coast. The liberated creuses lost no time in establishing a firm toehold and began multiplying like—well, like oysters. As is so often the case with an invading exotic species, the aggressive creuses quickly pushed the retiring plates almost to the brink of extinction.

The enterprising folk of Cancale had managed to capture some larvae of the plates about 10 years before this cataclysmic invasion, and had thus “re-invented” ostericulture, which was already practiced on a large and sophisticated scale on the Breton coasts by the Romans. Thus a population of plates was nursed along in modest numbers until another disaster struck. In 1973, these delicious oysters of the delicate constitution were wiped out by a virus. But the Cancallais, with the tenacity of an oyster clinging to its rock, were not to be deprived so easily of their prized plates. A crop of naissains--baby oysters of Ostrea edulis was imported from Japan and the Cancallais began doggedly to build up their stocks again, a rather slow process as an oyster must grow for 4 to 5 years before being harvested. Since that time, the cultivation of the prized plates has continued, with a production that, as the French say, remains confidentielle mais délicieuse.



Ostericulture begins with oyster larvae—microscopic shell-less oysterlets just hatched out of their eggs. These are introduced (in a suspension of water, of course) into a pool containing a ‘collector’—consisting of nothing more than a stack of terracotta roofing tiles. The collector provides lots of safe surfaces for the larvae to attach to. After a few months, they have developed shells and are big enough to be removed from the collector. They are then put in a sort of rigid mesh bag (visible in the photo) where they are allowed to grow for several years. Then, just prior to harvest, they are moved into pools for affinage, a word with no real equivalent in English. Think of it as the final transformation into a most succulent morsel—refinement, perhaps—like the careful aging of a fine cheese. Finally, graded, scrubbed, and soaked in several baths of clear water, they are brought to market.



So just how delicious are the oysters of Cancale? Well, Denis and I were about to find out. Having perused the offerings of all the vendors and observed where the afficianados were congregating, we headed for the tempting stall of Mme Annick Prod’homme-Louvet. She had all sorts of oysters--plates and creuses in many sizes. She also had some gargantuan wild oysters. Could she open them for us? ”Bien sur, j’ai tout ce qu’il faut, monsieur.” She would open and serve them for a supplement of 50 centimes. What a deal!

We decided on 6 plates and 6 sauvages (wild oysters). You can easily see the difference in the main photo. That is the lovely platter she entrusted to us—complete with a lemon half and strict instructions to eat the wild oysters first, followed by the delicate plates. We carried our precious cargo over to that wall where so many oysters had met their demise before ours, and we weren’t alone. The folks next to us, slurping down 3 platters, proffered us a glass of Muscadet and raised theirs in a toast. What were we toasting? Why, the fertile bay of oysters reflecting the sky, the tang of salt in the air, the cajoling cries of the vendors behind us, and oysters for breakfast!

Share