Pages tagged France
Quiberon
The Breton bay where flat oysters are still caught as spat and grown in deep water. France now produces about 2,000 tonnes of flats against 80,000 of cupped oysters.
Utah Beach
The oyster of the D-Day shore at Sainte-Marie-du-Mont, by the Baie des Veys. Of the Manche's three crus it is the soft, crunchy one, sold as a spéciale.
Fine de Claire Verte
Marennes-Oléron's green-gilled oyster: finished in clay ponds, colored by a blue pigment from a diatom, and graded under the region's first Label Rouge.
Isigny
A Normandy oyster grown on tables in a sheltered estuary fed by four marshland rivers, prized for fleshiness and sold as the 'spéciale d'Isigny'.
How Japan Saved French Oysters
More than five billion Japanese spat, 562 metric tons of Canadian broodstock, and a debt France repaid after the 2011 tsunami. The rescue behind every French cupped oyster.
Hemingway's Portugaises
The oysters Hemingway ate in A Moveable Feast were Portuguese oysters. Within fifty years a virus had wiped them out of France.
The Diseases That Redrew the Oyster Map
Why the Chesapeake lost its oysters, France lost two species in a decade, and Australian farms fear summer. Four diseases, and what they changed on the plate.
Marennes-Oléron
The marshes, huts and finishing ponds behind half of France's oysters, and the best way to taste a Fine de Claire where it was made.
Inside the Claire
What two to four weeks in a shallow clay pond does to an oyster: less crowding, drifting salt, a different diet and a blue diatom that turns the gills green.
Arcachon Bay
The bay west of Bordeaux where growers learned to catch wild spat on tiles: colored huts, seven ports in Gujan-Mestras and tastings on Cap Ferret.
Size Numbers Explained
French calibers are weights; American grades are counts per gallon. Neither measures quality, and the French rulebook admits it. How the numbers work, and why N°2 and N°3 suit most eaters.
Arcachon
The lagoon near Bordeaux where French oyster farming was organized in the 1850s, and whose spat now stocks farms across France and beyond.
Cancale
The Breton port on the Bay of Mont-Saint-Michel, where oysters grow under some of the world's biggest tides and are sold at the harbor market.
Fine de Claire
The entry grade of Marennes-Oléron's pond-finished oysters: softer and less salty than a sea oyster, with a filling index of 7 to 10.5.
Morlaix
A north Finistère bay that farmed flat oysters until the 1970s epidemics, then switched to Pacifics in bags. Carantec is its oyster town.
Pacific Oyster
The Asian oyster that replaced failing native oysters from Washington to France, and whose taste depends almost entirely on where it grows.
Paimpol
A Breton bay whose oyster farming was reshaped by growers from Morbihan, Charente and Vendée in the 1950s, and by the loss of its flats in the 1970s.
Pousse en Claire
The rarest Marennes-Oléron grade: grown, not just finished, in the pond for four months at five per square meter, with new shell growth you can see.
Spéciale de Claire
The meatier Marennes-Oléron grade: finished in clay ponds, with at least 10.5% meat, more volume in the mouth and more sweetness than a Fine.
Bouzigues
A Mediterranean lagoon oyster that never sees low tide: cemented three at a time to ropes, hung from tables and grown fast in warm water.
Prat-Ar-Coum
A five-generation family farm in the Abers of north Finistère, growing cupped and flat oysters from birth to market in about three years.
Pied de Cheval
Cancale's giant flat oysters, too big for the top grade and named for their hoof-like shape. A rarity to share, not a dozen to slurp.
Tsarskaya
A spéciale from Parcs Saint-Kerber in Cancale, created in 2004, grown three to four years and sold with a filling index above 10.5%.
Belon
The flat oyster that made a small Breton river famous: raised elsewhere in Brittany, then finished in the Bélon estuary for its hazelnut taste.
Gillardeau N°2
A family-house oyster from Bourcefranc-le-Chapus, raised partly in Ireland and Normandy, laser-marked with a G, and sold on the generosity of its meat.