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A man and his vicious knife

A glimpse into the life of a mother shucker

A phone booth, a wallet stuck in a snowbank and a derelict about to relegate it to a fate mired in yellow snow – these are not the everyday items of personal transformations. But then Chris Field is not your everyday guy.

His nickname: OG – for Oyster Guy, or maybe Old Guy, or Original Gangster. Given he’s the oyster shucker (mother shucker, say some) at Bearfoot Bistro, we can likely assume the first interpretation.

So it was the dead of winter in Toronto, 1987. Chris had innocently stopped to make a call from a phone booth (the dateline is important here – this was pre-cell phone days). In the booth next door, said bum was about to relieve himself and lay the lost wallet awash. But in an iconic, or was that ironic, swoosh Chris darted from his phone booth, grabbing said wallet to rescue it from an untimely demise.

He leafed through it and found a business card from one Rodney Clarke, fishmonger.

Like a humble good Samaritan, Chris returned the wallet to its rightful owner at Rodney’s Oyster House, where he sampled his first plate of raw oysters (Malpeques) by way of thanks from Rodney. And he was offered a job in one of Canada’s more eccentric elite restaurants. (With only 40 professional oyster shuckers in a country of nearly 32 million people, they are indeed a rare breed – almost one in a million.)

"Basically, after I discussed what bizarre hiring practices Rodney had, offering jobs to strangers, I decided to take it on part time. After a couple of years I actually liked it better, and even though I got paid about 25 per cent of what I was getting at my other job, I quit that one and did it full time," says Chris. From customs broker/freight forwarder to oyster shucker with only a few degrees of separation – and 400-700 oysters popped open each night in the early days just to get the hang of things.

Rodney, who hails from Indian Head, PEI, turned out to be one of the most successful oyster house bosses in the country (see why for yourself at Rodney’s Oyster House on Hamilton down in Yaletown). By the time Chris left, the place was doing $4 million in sales annually.

So what’s the big deal about oysters?

In the years before refrigeration, they were once a "poor man’s protein" (how about a penny a dozen in New York in the 1890s?). In Ireland, a pint of Guinness and a dozen raw oysters constitutes an Irish breakfast. (If you’re not Irish, try champagne.)

The modern way to appreciate these creature’s finer points is much like learning to appreciate wine. So you need a reliable guide to show the way.

To start, you could have signed up for the Oysters 101 seminar Chris is running again at this year’s Cornucopia. But it’s sold out. So keep reading, or sign up early next year, or drop by Bearfoot Bistro and find Chris.

East is mild; West is wild

In North America you’ll find five main species of oysters raised commercially, and some 140 other species – everything from "coon oysters" in the mangrove swamps of Louisiana and Texas that raccoons love to fish at low tide to the big Japanese oysters on the west coast, which were imported in the 1920s to start the first oyster farms here and have pretty much supplanted our very small but very tasty native Olympia oyster in the wild.

When it comes to tasting, some general rules hold true. East coast oysters are milder in taste than our west coasters. Malpeques, the ones Chris first tasted, are typical with their salty, briny start and sweet finish. So unlike the typical west coast oyster, like the Japanese or Pacific, with their watermelon/cucumber finish and stronger aftertaste.

Stop in at the Bistro to check ’em out – they serve 12-23 varieties a night in the winter, varieties from all over the world. And the price is right for amateurs and aficionados alike – $9.95 a dozen.

Don’t settle for cut stomachs

But never mind variety. The most important thing is that the oyster is properly served.

"The biggest satisfaction I get is making sure that the oyster doesn’t look any uglier than it should," says Chris. "They aren’t the prettiest things in the world.

"My main beef with other oyster bars is they generally don’t have anyone really trained or who does it all the time, so they make it (the poor oyster) look like it went through a food processor. You’ve got cut stomachs, you’ve got cut gills, the meat is still hanging off the shell – you’ve got big pieces of shell, grit, dirt, sometimes the guy’s blood is in the oyster because he stabbed himself."

Enter the nasty oyster knife, a specialized tool that is sharp, short and vicious. "My knife scares the hell out of people – it has a mind of its own," says Chris, pointing out that his trade is actually quite dangerous. In France, oyster shucking is the leading cause of industrial accidents.

A shucker is using about 50 lb of pressure per square inch to pop open the shells. Chris has only put Mr. Nasty right through his hand once. That was enough.

Besides being properly shucked, it’s so important that the oysters are served at the right temperature (I told you this was like wine). Ideally, your raw oysters are served no colder than 2 degrees C and no warmer than 5 degrees C.

Now that should get you started in your own little oyster world.

If you have any other questions – like how many pearls Chris has found, or whether oysters really are an aphrodisiac, I’ll leave it to you to track down OG in person. He loves a good laugh, and a good story.

LITTLE SIDEBARS [you can drop these if space is tight]:

Oysteroid facts

The World Oyster Opening Championships, held in Galway Ireland (in which Chris has competed), are one very big deal. Sponsored by Guinness, this is the fourth biggest festival in Europe, lasting for days and drawing more than 50,000 people, including the prime minister of Ireland, who opens the event.

On the other hand, the winner of the National Shucking Championships in Canada receives a hokey trophy and a cheque for 75 bucks. Tradition has it that the winner goes across the street to the Legion Hall in Tyne Valley, PEI, cashes the cheque and buys a round for everybody in the place.

Like smoked oysters?

Try the Deep Bay Harvest smoked oysters from Cortes Island at Nesters Market. These are smoked and packed in their own liqueur – a phenomenal product, says OG.

BIGGISH UNRELATED SIDEBAR

Wild about that coffee

This year at Cornucopia, you can grabba cup of some wild – very wild – coffee. Karla Ferster, who spent years living in Oaxaca, Mexico, is the brains behind Leaping Frog Coffee, a "frog-friendly" product made from coffee beans picked from high-altitude coffee plants growing naturally wild in the rainforest of Oaxaca.

"These are plants left behind by Cortes in the mid-1600s, and since the Mayans didn’t know what to do with them, they left them alone and they proliferated throughout the jungle," says Andrew MacDonald. He heads up the Western Canada office of Saeco Co. Ltd., which is also setting up ethical "sustainable" vending machines around Whistler where you can grab a taste of Leaping Frog during Cornucopia.

These machines, imported from Italy where Saeco is based, are entirely recyclable. Besides the frog-friendly coffee, they dispense organic sugar and organic chocolate to add to your cuppa.

As the official coffee for Cornucopia, Leaping Frog Coffee will also be served throughout the event, including the Gab a Java seminars. How does it taste? "It’s wild coffee, it’s unfarmed so you actually taste the mango and the chocolate of the forest. You can smell the Mexican pine – it’s very full-bodied, very rich, and it’s very clean. A lot of people tell me there’s no aftertaste," says Karla.

On another wild note, AWARE (Whistler-Area Residents for the Environment) is the charity of benefit for this year’s Cornucopia. Proceeds from the coat check, the Trade Tasting, the silent auction and the Winemaker Dinners, as well as a percentage of Crush! ticket sales go to AWARE. Last year, almost $30,000 was raised.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning freelance writer who likes her oysters Rockefeller.