When an oyster is covered with wet burlap over smoldering charcoal, it wallows in its juices and the flavor intensifies. More warmed than cooked, it retains all the sensual mouthfeel of a raw one with the added lick of fire. Unlike urbane oysters that are bright and glistening in their clean marine liquor, presented on the half shell on a bed of crushed ice, oyster roast oysters can be quite hideous to see, bunches of them stuck together and smelling of the sea, all gnarled and splotched with pluff, the oysterman’s term for the fine silt that sticks on them when they are harvested and clings to them when they are roasted, so that merely touching a cooked cluster will smudge your fingers.
The oyster roast is a cultural touchstone of the Lowcountry—a communal feast where amenities are minimal and camaraderie is huge. The rare restaurant that serves an oyster roast along the South Carolina coast is ebulliently colorful, parking lot paved with millions of crushed shells, tables topped with newspaper instead of cloth, oysters quite literally shoveled from the grate onto the table, where the only utensil provided is a knife to wedge into the place the oyster has begun to spring open. The knife is used to detach a slippery nugget of marine meat, then to bring it to the mouth. Once it is dispatched, the connoisseur tilts the shell back to drink down its warm, salty liquor. At Bowen’s Island outside of Charleston, the big tables have holes in their centers, under which are garbage cans, so eaters can easily dispose of shells. The heavy ker-plunk of emptied shells getting tossed into the cans sets a beat to which slurping and sucking sound a sweet melody.