Each year when Thanksgiving rolls around I look forward to my aunt Linda's Corn and Oysters, which is delicious in spite of or perhaps because of its roots west of the Mississippi, so far removed from the Pittsburgh roots of the rest of my family. No one in my family of non cooks would have taken the time to experiment in the kitchen long enough to discover that buoys of grey oysters bobbing in a sea of creamed corn and topped with browned saltine crackers crumbs deserve a place on the Thanksgiving table. When I pressed her on the traditionalism of this odd union, she insisted that it has been a mainstay of the holiday for generations throughout her hometown in northeastern Colorado.
But recently I discovered that this isn't just a local favorite. Last weekend my cousin overheard a shopkeeper in Slanesville, West Virginia complaining that the seasonal influx of orders for canned oysters had begun. So, I wondered, what made this dish a hit among people in rural mountainous regions that are so far from the sea? People who can only find oysters in a can no less? Once a year Linda dares to save more and live better by shopping at Walmart. “It’s sad but they’re the only place in Pittsburgh that sells them.” What possessed her and others to serve corn and oysters on a day when food with a family or community history tend to hold sway?
It turns out that it hasn’t always been this difficult to get oysters. Americans have long had a love affair with oysters. According to Mark Kurlansky's “The Big Oyster”, Colonists adopted the taste of Native Americans early on, eating the bivalves morning, noon, and night. They ate them pickled, stewed, baked, roasted, fried and scalloped and in soups, patties and puddings. To satiate the city’s “oystermania,” New Yorkers started farming oysters on Long Island in the late 1800s. This spurred the commercialization of the oyster industry. By 1880, New York’s oyster farms were producing 700 million oysters a year shipping oysters all over the country. (Kurlansky links this enthusiasm for oysters to the growth of New York into a great city.) So, perhaps it was at this moment of oyster abundance that mountaineers seized the opportunity to eat a dish inspired by what they imagined the pilgrims on Plymouth Rock might have eaten at that first Thanksgiving feast?
Or maybe this corn and oysters casserole represent an embrace of another part of the country? Was it a riff on the cornbread oyster dressings so often found on Thanksgiving tables in the southern coastal United States? This dish is after all the perfect expression of the region’s terroir, a nod to the imprint that the land, climate, and people have made on the cuisine. Prime among the products that inform the region’s singular cuisine is corn. According to the folks at Anson Mills, a company dedicated to reviving the heirloom grains that sustained the antebellum kitchens of the Carolinas, many of America’s native corn species have their roots in the region. What better complement to one of the region’s heritage agricultural products than the oyster, which thrives in estuaries where the fresh water from rivers meets the salt water of the sea? Recipes for this combination of regional goods abound. There are scalloped corn and oysters from Virginia, oyster-cornbread dressing from Louisiana and Alabama, and even Corn Oysters (which are corn fritters that resemble oysters).
Linda isn't sure how the dish made it's way onto her family's thanksgiving table but she was happy to share the recipe, beginning with this disclaimer: “I’m almost ashamed to tell you the recipe because it’s so simple.” Nevertheless here she is recalling the method:
(That laughter at 27” is yours truly imagining my version of “however much butter you like,” which is mountain-sized.)
Simple it may be but her casserole was good enough to win over my notoriously opinionated grandmother who requested it every year afterwards. On second thought, perhaps she warmed to this casserole that was so exotic to her Allegheny roots because of her love for the humble saltine.
Those butter-bathed saltines give the dish a nice textural contrast which could be a kitsch vestige of the 1960s but the crackers actually have their origins in the 19thcentury. Their story begins with Frank L. Sommers of St. Joseph, Missouri, a baker who made them for a 1876 county fair and won the blue ribbon for his creation. In 1890 the reach of the saltine cracker expanded when Sommer’s company mergedwith several other midwestern bakeries to form the American Biscuit Company. With the 1898 merger of American Biscuit Company and the New York Biscuit Company (later known as Nabisco) saltines began to be sold nationally.
Although the saltine cracker quickly became the antidote to upset stomachs across the country, these days the coupling of oysters and corn is less amicable. Renewed support for oyster farming is reviving colonies in the Chesapeake Bay but it’s a struggle in the context of competition with watermen for territory. In the Mississippi Delta, the threat is more nebulous. Fertilizer runoff from corn farms in the Midwest flows into the Mississippi River where it has boosted algae and microbe growth in the Gulf of Mexico. The algae and microbes have consumed all of the oxygen in 5,800 square miles of water offshore, killing other marine life and creating the second largest deadzone in the world. Even in coastal regions where oysters reside, this nutrient-rich runoff has created low oxygen conditions, which weakens oysters’ ability to fight off disease. In the context of this toxic relationship between corn and oysters perhaps Linda’s casserole represents the remaining opportunity for these two staples of the American harvest to share a stage.
Our rebuff of Linda’s contribution to the Thanksgiving table as a regional oddity may have been misguided. You could say that in this dish we can see both the promise of American abundance as well as the consequences of a misguided use of our land and native species. What better day to remind us of the country’s diverse roots, of the human and agricultural kind alike, than on Thanksgiving? Well, that and you would be hard pressed to find a better way to showcase the potential greatness of a saltine.