Want to feel like a merman or mermaid? Do a “Shelly” and slurp down a martini.
You forget just how good an oyster is until you have one. And then you wonder why you bother eating anything else. The way the briny juices and creamy flesh take over your mouth and then your brain is as mystical as it is physical; the closest you’ll get to being a mer-creature.
I get this feeling every time I eat an oyster. But this isn’t about oysters: this is about the shells. Their bowl fits into the curve of your palm. The outer shell is rough, ragged, tactile. For poet Seamus Heaney, they “clacked on the plates”. The inner shell is smooth, iridescent, glowing. Slug down the actual oyster (“my tongue was a filling estuary, my palate hung with starlight”) and the shell itself has many uses.
Mostly calcium carbonate, they can be crushed and ground for the production of bricks, used to filter water and to maintain the pH balance in soil. More importantly (to my mind), they also do a lot for gin.
Oyster-shell gins are remarkable for their minerality, salinity and depth. There must be a dozen on the market already, from North of Eden on the Sapphire Coast of NSW and Wharf Street from Forster on the Mid North Coast, to Bass & Flinders on the Mornington Peninsula.
Now we really have something to drink with oysters – like the oyster-shell martini at Saint Peter at the Grand National in Paddington, Sydney. The bar infuses Archie Rose gin with long-spine sea urchin, adding drops of house-made oyster shell acid that float on top like lily pads.
In Melbourne, Pearl Diver bar adds to the oyster’s mystique with its Sea & Shell martini, made with Saint Felix oyster-shell gin and served with a spherified olive in an oyster shell.
The clever lads at Never Never Distilling in McLaren Vale, South Australia, are even pushing “the Shelly”, a ritual in which you first slurp down your oyster, then fill the shell with their frozen oyster-shell gin before slurping that down, too.
I’m keen on this idea of re-utilising oyster shells as vessels for drinks, sauces and other seafood. Boiled clean, we can use them as spoons and scoops or fill them with sea-salted butter. Smart, huh?
But really, they’re already designed to be the perfect vessel. For an oyster.
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Terry Durack is the chief restaurant critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and Good Food.
