I love oysters: it’s like kissing the sea on the lips.
—Léon-Paul Fargue
The Emerald Coast, named for the stunning blue-green waters lapping the shores of northern Brittany, is one of the most beautiful stretches of France’s two-thousand-mile-long coastline. From the stark beauty of Cap Fréhel to the splendid walled city of Saint-Malo, from the white sandy beaches of Val André to the towering majesty of Mont-Saint-Michel, the Brittany coast offers an intoxicating mix of natural beauty and historic charm. Gourmands will enjoy the incredible varieties of mussels, langoustines, and scallops available across the region, alongside traditional Breton specialties like galettes, kouign-amann pastries, and sparkling apple cider. And for shellfish aficionados, one small town on the Emerald Coast is a bull’s-eye destination: Cancale, the oyster capital of Brittany. Every year, thousands of visitors descend on this picturesque seaside town to sample some of the finest oysters in the world. They have their choice of quayside restaurants, but perhaps the most romantic option is simply to select a platter of oysters—at unbelievably low prices—from the small oyster market perched at the foot of the town pier. Few gastronomic delicacies can be more satisfying than sitting on a seawall on a sunny day, savoring fresh oysters nearly as large as your hand, plucked from the massive array of oyster beds in the sea below.
Humans have been gathering and eating oysters from the sea since prehistoric times, and Gaul was already blessed with miles of natural oyster beds along its coasts when the bivalve-loving Romans arrived. They delighted in the oyster harvests around Marseille and the Médoc, shipping hordes of Gallic specimens back to Italy. The barbarian invasions put an end to the oyster trade, and they became once more merely a ready source of food for local inhabitants. Indeed, for much of the oyster’s history, it has been a staple food for poor people on the coasts rather than a luxury treat for distant elites. It was not until the Renaissance period that oysters reappeared on noble tables, with a number of recipes in the earliest cookbooks. And it was only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, thanks to a series of transportation innovations and industrial transformation, that oysters could be enjoyed at any real distance from the coastline.
Fresh oysters from the market at Cancale, Brittany. Photograph by authors, 2017.
A perusal of early cookbooks reveals that until the seventeenth century, oysters were mostly eaten cooked; raw oysters were seen as unhealthy and indigestible. But both medical and gastronomic experts began to advise eating oysters raw, as cooking only destroyed all of their healthy, salty juices and thus actually made them harder to digest. Raw oysters also became known as an aphrodisiac, which no doubt enhanced their appeal. The famous seducer Giacomo Casanova was, naturally, devoted to oysters, which he only ate with champagne; Louis XIV could eat dozens of oysters in one sitting. When Le Cuisinier françois was published in 1651, cooked oyster dishes were still the norm, but by the time Menon published his La Cuisinière bourgeoise in 1746, oysters were usually eaten uncooked.1
The preference for raw oysters was not a problem for those living by the sea, but for those residing in Paris or the Loire Valley, it posed a major problem. For oysters to be eaten raw, they need to be fresh, and in those days transport was nowhere near as fast as it is now. The closest place for saltwater fish or oysters was the Normandy coast, more than 120 miles away. Usually, the coastal catch had to be salted for the journey inland.
This changed with the emergence of the chasse-marrée in the early modern era.2 Chasse-marrées were convoys of light carts that carried fresh fish and oysters, on ice, from the Channel coast to Paris and Versailles. The carts usually stopped every twenty miles for a short ten-minute break, to change horses and take advantage of strategically located icehouses. By this means, Paris could be reached in twenty-four to thirty-six hours.3 Oyster criers began to roam the streets of the capital, laden with heavy wicker baskets, hawking their wares at relatively inexpensive prices.
The chasse-marrées were also a godsend for the noble residents of Versailles and the other châteaus that hosted the Sun King on his royal visits. But perhaps their most famous appearance in food lore is actually a tragic tale of delivery gone wrong. In 1671, François Vatel, maître d’hôtel at the Château de Chantilly, had the immense responsibility of hosting a large banquet for Louis XIV on a Friday, and thus required a large amount of fresh fish from the chasse-marrée. When it failed to arrive at the expected hour, Vatel was despondent, believing he would have nothing to serve his imperious king, and he took his own life. Unfortunately, just then the chasse-marrée arrived, full of fish and oysters, and so the banquet went ahead as planned.
The rule that one should not eat oysters in the months without an r (from May to August) is partly a consequence of the chasse-marrées and the popularity of oysters during the reign of Louis XV. Oysters had become such a favored indulgence that it was not unusual to eat several dozen as an aperitif, to open up the appetite for the main course. Overconsumption began to threaten the oyster supply, and so Louis wisely decreed that during their summertime reproduction period, they should not be eaten. These were also the hottest months of the year, when even the chasse-marrée could not always outrun spoilage.
Both Louis XIV and Louis XV devoted considerable resources to the construction of the best national road system since Roman times, with more and more royal roads snaking out from Paris to the provinces. It was easier than ever for people—and oysters—to move about France. But within a hundred years, the chasse-marrée became obsolete, a victim of the tremendous technological and societal transformation that accompanied the Industrial Revolution. As French industry and trade developed, the need for faster means of transport became ever more evident. In 1827, the first railroad line in France was completed, between Saint-Etienne and Andrézieux, linking the Saint-Etienne coal mines and the Loire River. It was very primitive: only thirteen miles long, and with the wagons pulled by horses (on downhill slopes, they let gravity take over). A few years later, the first passenger train line in continental Europe began operating between Saint-Etienne and Lyon.
French railways developed much more slowly than in countries like Britain and Germany; by 1842, only 353 miles of rail had been placed. This was partly due to the country’s lagging industrial development, as well as fierce opposition from the existing transport companies running France’s extensive canal, river, and coastal shipping networks. An entire infrastructure of trade and profit was bound up in waterborne transport, and these interests did not want to see it scuttled by a shift to rail transport. There was also a measure of sociocultural opposition to the railways, as rural residents throughout France were horrified at the idea of serene pastures and forests torn up by the iron engines of progress. The Rouen Chamber of Commerce, for example, objected to the construction of the Paris-Rouen railroad in 1832, arguing that it would disrupt traditional ways of life and damage the existing trade and transport networks the city depended upon.
Nevertheless, in 1842 the government approved plans for a national rail network, with five great lines connecting Paris to the most important regional cities. The private companies that built the railroads also constructed the monumental train stations of Paris, such as Gare de l’Est and Gare du Nord, that are still in use today. Steam locomotives, imported from England, were introduced, with then-astounding speeds of 75 miles per hour. The worst fears of the canal operators were realized, as their freight traffic declined precipitously.
Railroad development did not proceed smoothly. The private rail lines did not connect with each other, only with Paris, which created a great deal of inefficiency. The network’s shortcomings were revealed in the 1870 war with Prussia, when the German railway system played a major role in the rapid Prussian mobilization and eventual victory. But by 1914, France possessed the most developed rail network in the world, extending to more than 37,000 miles of track.
One of the great Paris rail stations, Gare du Nord (North Station) was built by the rail company Chemins de Fer du Nord and opened for service in 1864. Today, with more than 200 million travelers each year, it is the busiest rail station in Europe. From the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, the New York Public Library. “Gare du Nord.” New York Public Library Digital Collections.
The development of the rail network had an enormous effect on all sorts of food trades in France. Normandy cheeses like Camembert, for example, were introduced to Paris, and fruit and vegetable farmers in the sunny south of France could supply more far-flung locales. The southern vineyards of the Languedoc now had access to a huge new market in the northern cities and were increasingly planted with inferior varieties that produced cheap, light wines (called petit rouge) for the working classes. By the end of the century, the Languedoc had become France’s most productive wine region, supplying 44 percent of national production.4 This new availability of cheaper southern wines sent northerly vineyards like those around Chablis into decline. The invention of the refrigerated railcar made it possible to transport fresh meat and fish over incredible distances. Regional cuisines became better known as a growing wave of tourists explored the provinces. At the same time, the old network of roadside inns that dotted the French countryside began to disappear as travelers increasingly chose the train over the coach.
And of course, the railroad had an immense impact on the oyster trade in France. It was now possible for residents of Paris and central France to get oysters in less than a day, and not only from Normandy but from other renowned oyster production sites in Brittany, the Bay of Arcachon, and the Mediterranean. In Charente-Maritime, south of La Rochelle, a railway line opened in 1876 with the explicit purpose of transporting oysters. It was called the train des mouettes (seagull train), for obvious reasons, and while it eventually ceased operating, it was reopened in the 1980s as a tourist train—the oldest French steam train still in use.
The railroads were also responsible for one of the great touristic transformations of the nineteenth century: the rise of the seaside resort. The extensive coastlines of France had long attracted noble and wealthy visitors, but such getaways were not accessible to the middle and working classes until railroads made it possible to reach the coast more quickly and cheaply. As railroads snaked their way to the French Riviera, or the Atlantic beaches, tourists from all over France—indeed, all over Europe—discovered the sublime benefits of coastal living. This usually included fresh local oysters, available in nearly all French seaside towns. And so raw oysters became more popular across Europe, and France cemented its reputation as the world’s supreme purveyor of oysters, a status it continues to hold today.
Even with the expansion of the modern oyster farming industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, oysters retained intense parochial loyalties. Like so many other products we have discussed thus far, oysters have their own distinct terroir (or as some wags refer to it, a merroir), which grants unique flavors to each locale. Oysters from Normandy are more delicate than those from the Vendée; Arcachon oysters are a bit saltier than those from Brittany. To boost the terroir effect, it’s a good idea to pair your oysters with a dry white wine from roughly the same region—a sauvignon blanc from Bordeaux, for instance, or a Loire Valley Sancerre—although, of course, champagne remains the ideal paramour. Some people swear that Guinness stout pairs delightfully with oysters, but we must confess to not having dared attempt this combination yet.
The French oyster industry has suffered many tragedies over the years and remains extremely vulnerable to environmental disaster. The original native variety, the pied de cheval, or flat oyster, was virtually wiped out by overharvesting and disease and today makes up only a small percentage of the tens of thousands of oysters farmed each year. The Portuguese oyster gradually replaced the flat oyster all along the French coastline, but an apocalyptic disease struck this variety in the 1970s, virtually eliminating the French oyster industry. Fortunately, the Pacific oyster (sometimes called the Japanese oyster) was successfully introduced to French oyster beds, and the world’s oyster lovers breathed a sigh of relief. But since 2008, French oysters have again been suffering from disease and pollution, possibly exacerbated by a changing climate, and overall production has nearly halved. There is no tranquillity for the oyster producers of France.
France is still the leading oyster producer in Europe, and also its leading oyster consumer; more than 90 percent of French oysters are eaten domestically. About half the yearly crop is consumed just in the Christmas period, as oysters are a traditional holiday treat, often served as an appetizer for the Christmas Eve feast. They are still usually served raw, with perhaps a bit of lemon or a light vinaigrette made of red wine and shallots. Of all the gastronomic blessings that France enjoys, few rival its exceptional oyster harvests.