Secret Ingredients by David Remnick

Author:David Remnick
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781588368232
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2008-08-18T16:00:00+00:00

Recently, I was visited by a memory of a trip I took with my grandfather to an ice factory when I was five years old. It was August 1959: a hot, sultry Louisiana morning and a cold ice factory. My grandfather pulled up to a loading dock—unpaved, a bright-red Louisiana clay—and a man brought us a block of ice wrapped in straw. In the early morning, lots of people were buying blocks of ice wrapped in straw. My grandfather lived in a paper-mill town, and although he had a refrigerator (we’d be making hand-cranked ice cream), most homes still had iceboxes.

The ice factory is gone and its passing is connected with what happened to oysters. My father never bought a block of ice. His was the first generation to enjoy refrigerated mass-market foods. His favorite was Salisbury steak, a factory-made meat that kept long enough to be shipped anywhere. An oyster can’t be eaten this way. It needs to be kept cool by ice, because it has to be eaten when it’s fresh. That’s how you eat oysters—before the ice melts. You have to chew to know the difference, Malinowski told me, which is another way of saying that the difference is everything. Osinski used the word terroir: in an oyster, as with wine, you should be able to taste the place it came from; in this still-living creature you will find the water and the food it ate—these living, fragile, handmade creatures tasting wonderfully of the health of the planet.

2006

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