The receding glacier that formed Cape Cod left a hard, gently sloping sea bed. The reason Wellfleet is so highly regarded for its oysters dates to the pre- aquaculture era, when wild oysters grew naturally on a hard ocean bottom. 2 A Wellfleet oyster farmer, Jake Puffer, says that another contributor to a Wellfleet’s sapour is the ocean currents that carry seawater and nutrients from the Bay of Fundy into the harbour which acts as a catch basin. Connoisseurs say that the flavours of Wellfleet oysters vary even according to which estuary they draw nutrients from. 3 What you are eating when you are eating a raw oyster, prepared by an experienced shucker, is the meat, the seawater held in the shell and the creature’s own bodily fluids. The last two are referred to as liquor. A neologism has entered the lexicon to describe this specificity of flavour based on location: merroir , a play on the word terroir , used in winemaking. 4
Slade Associates
top: map of oyster grants in Wellfleet Harbor. right: ocean currents from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf of Maine
2 Jacobsen, Rowan. A Geography of Oysters: A Connoisseur’s Guide to Oyster Eating in North America . Bloomsbury, 2010, p.81. 3 The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity 4 The word’s invention is dated to 2003 and credited to Greg Atkinson, a writer for The Seattle Times , and Jon Rowley, an oyster promoter.
a brief history Oysters and other shellfish have been components of the human diet since our earliest ancestors walked the planet. In the Blombos Cave in South Africa, where the fewer than two thousand hominids who survived the Pleistocene extinction event migrated to, anthropologists found red ochre used in cave paintings and abalone shells, seemingly used for mixing the pigment. It is likely that the reason we can readily consume uncooked fish and shellfish is that they have been a part of our diet since before homo sapiens existed. Artefacts found in the Channel Islands of California are thousands of years older than anything found on the mainland, suggesting that the humans who migrated over the Bering land bridge, in place from 36,000 to 13,000 years ago, made their way to South America by water, navigating the coastline and a coastal diet of fish and shellfish. Carbon dating of shell middens such as the Glidden Midden in Damarascotta, Maine indicates that coastal Indigenous peoples were eating oysters at least 9,000 years ago. While they were not cultivating oysters, they were managing sustainable harvest practices. In the eleventh century in what is now Wellfleet, Indigenous Pononakanet people lived near the expansive oyster reefs, a year-round source of food as the water above a reef does not freeze, allowing the Pononakanet to over-winter on the Cape unlike other Indigenous groups who seasonally moved inland. Middens of discarded shells were used as breakwaters and a means to more easily navigate the shoreline. Henry David Thoreau, during his 1850s visits that became the basis for the book Cape Cod , noted shell middens in Truro, north of Wellfleet. 5 Tabby concrete uses oyster shells for aggregate. Tabby, known to and practiced by enslaved Africans, was first employed in the Spanish colony of Florida in 1580, eventually making its way north to the English colonies.
Hudson Museum
Emily Berlilnghot
above: the Glidden midden, Damarascotta, Maine. The bank is solid oyster shell. Tabby construction: oyster shell aggregate.
5 Henry David Thoreau, Cape Cod (1865). Penguin Books, 1986
32 on site review 49 :: shorelines
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