Fyne Oysters

TOM BRUCE-GARDYNE INVESTIGATES SCOTLAND'S PIONEERING ROLE IN THE RESURGENT POPULARITY OF SHELLFISH

Let us roister with the oyster – in the shorter days and moister
That are brought by brown September, with its roguish final R
For breakfast or for supper, on the under shell or upper
Of dishes he's the daisy, and of shellfish he's the star.

This little ditty appeared in the Detroit Free Press in 1889, a time when the British were eating more than a billion oysters a year. As a deliciously cheap source of food they were guzzled by rich and poor alike, and had been since pre-Roman times. Indeed, it is said that Julius Caesar was so passionate about them he invaded Britain just to get his hands on her native oyster beds. Yet there were already signs that this thousand-year-old feeding frenzy was drawing to a close. In Scotland, a combination of overfishing and pollution was helping to wipe out the native stock. Once the beds lining the Firth of Forth had been stripped bare to feed the good folk of Edinburgh, those gathering the oysters were forced to look further afield. At some point they reached Loch Fyne, a long, slanting sea Loch on the Argyllshire coast, and soon the oyster was gone from here too.

Fast forward to the mid-1970s and two men began to ponder whether oysters would ever grow again in the Loch. One was Johnnie stick to deep-fried scampi. Despite this, Loch Fyne Oysters was established and 10,000 seed oysters purchased and placed along the shore at the low-tide mark. At the first proper inspection the following spring, they found to their horror that nea...

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• By : Tom Bruce-Gardyne
• In : Food
• Issue : 6
• Page : 34
• Words : 1,674