Word: oyster
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...OYSTERS OF LOCMARIAQUER, by Eleanor Clark. By weaving history, topography, marine biology and lyrical gastronomy around -the arduous everyday lives of the French seacoast villagers who tend and harvest the Ostrea edulis, Author Clark has written a book-length monograph on the world's most prized oyster with the same beguiling erudition that characterized her Rome and a Villa...
There is a bit too much air in Author Clark's book. She lards her account with odd facts (the pearl producer is not an oyster at all but a mollusk known as Meleagrina), sketches of local characters, and wordy, impressionistic evocations of the Breton countryside. At such moments a reader's attention may well wander, but for the most part Author Clark holds him with wit and verbal polish. It is the process known as tromper le lecteur...
Author Clark, wife of Novelist Robert Penn Warren, became an oyster addict while living in the village of Locmariaquer on the coast of Brittany, chief breeding ground of the world's most prized oyster. The Locmariaquer oyster is known to science as the Ostrea edulis. To the locals it is known simply as the plate (the flat one), to distinguish it from the bumpy Portuguese oyster, which is sometimes foisted off on innocent diners as a true edulis, and which ostreophiles regard as little better than a mussel or even a clam...
When she can muzzle her metaphors, Author Clark is a mine of oyster lore. Millions of years older than man, the oyster is "prolific to the point of indecency." Since oysters are hermaphrodites, a single oyster may be both a father and a mother, changing roles several times in the course of a year. In the best of all possible worlds, an oyster might live 15 years, but only one in 10,000 makes it to maturity. The tingle-snail can bore through the shell of a full-grown oyster and scoop out the meat in six hours. The starfish...
Touch & Go. Things were not too bad until the early 18th century, when "the drag," otherwise known in France as "the oyster guillotine," was invented. That instrument, a convex iron blade 5 ft. or 6 ft. long, denuded the coasts of Europe and the U.S. by ripping up the oyster beds. It was touch and go whether the oyster would survive at all, until an inspired French marine biologist, Victor Coste, discovered in the mid-1800s the secret of collecting larvae and raising seed, making it possible to grow oysters in waters where for various reasons they are unable...