The Big Oyster Quotes

“Both the steamboat service to Albany and the Erie Canal were destined to be swiftly fleeting marvels, eclipsed by the next idea. Only seven years after the Seneca Chief brought whitefish to New York Harbor, the city’s railroad age had begun. The”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

“This is New York: skyscraper champion of the world where slickers and know-it-alls peddle gold bricks to each other and where the truth, crushed to earth, rises again more phony than a glass eye. —BEN HECHT,
Nothing Sacred, 1937”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

“In 1893, Ranhofer published The Epicurean, his twelve-hundred-page, four-thousand recipe “Franco-American Culinary Encyclopedia,” which, though it made its way into few household kitchens, became a bible for American restaurants and hotels. Though”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

“The two most common gastronomic observations made about nineteenth-century New York were that the oysters were cheap and that the people ate enormous quantities not only of oysters but of everything. In 1881, exiled Cuban independence leader José Martí wrote of the newly fashionable Coney Island resort: The poor people eat shrimps and oysters on the beach, or pastries, and meats on the free tables provided by some of the hotels for such meals. The wealthy squandered huge sums on purple infusions that pass for wine, and strange, heavy dishes, which our palates, delighted by the artistic and the light, would surely find little to our taste. These people enjoy quantity; we enjoy quality. This was not much improvement over the observations of James Fenimore Cooper, who in the 1830s had called Americans “the grossest feeders of any civilized nation known.”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

“In modern times it has been found that oysters are rich in zinc, one of the building blocks of testosterone.”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

“Dickens’s American Notes was regarded as an insult by most Americans in part because he chose to examine and criticize at length slavery, the prison system, and even an asylum for the mentally ill, which he, not always a reliable reporter, identified as being “on Long Island, or Rhode Island: I forget which.” He said that American men spit and that they pirated books, both of which were true. He thought the press was abominable and the prairie not as good as Salisbury Plain and also lacking a Stonehenge. But the ill-feelings of Americans may also in part stem from what the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, in probably the best of the nineteenth-century European books on America, Democracy in America, identified as an American trait: an unyielding resentment of any criticism from abroad. American Notes, in fact, has many favorable things to say about New York. For that matter Fanny Trollope loved New York, was one of the first to declare it the leading American city, and found it pleasantly different from the rest of America: New York, indeed, appeared to us, even when we saw it by a soberer light, a lovely and a noble city. To us who had been so long traveling through half-cleared forests, and sojourning among an “I’m-as-good-as-you” population, it seemed, perhaps, more beautiful, more splendid, and more refined than it might have done, had we arrived there directly from London; but making every allowance for this, I must still declare that I think New York one of the finest cities I ever saw, and as much superior to every other in the Union, (Philadelphia not excepted,) as London to Liverpool, or Paris to Rouen.”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

“The only thing New Yorkers ignore more than nature is history. They have a habit of not spending a great deal of time pondering the history of their city. That is because of a sense that it has always been more or less the same, or, as Edmund Wilson, one of the more venerated New Yorker writers of that magazine’s heyday, explained his waning enthusiasm for reading history in his old age, “I know more or less the kind of things that happen.”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell

“Though [New Yorkers] live by the sea, they take vacations to go somewhere else to be by the sea. Of the many odd things about New Yorkers, there is this: How is it that people living in the world’s greatest port, a city with no neighborhood that is far from a waterfront, a city whose location was chosen because of the sea, where the great cargo ships and tankers, mighty little tugs, yachts, and harbor patrol boats glide by, has lost all connection with the sea, almost forgotten that the sea is there?”
― Mark Kurlansky, The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell