How to Cook a Moose (31 page)

Last spring, on our way up the coast to visit our friend Madeleine, a doctor who lives in Camden, Brendan and I stopped for lunch at a pub in the town of Damariscotta. We ordered a dozen local Glidden Point oysters and two glasses of Muscadet to start. The oysters arrived with a small bowl of shallot vinaigrette and lemon slices; we doused them in lemon, poured a little mignonette into one each, and ate them. Our eyes widened. These oysters were cleanly tangy, on the small side, with a complex flavor that opened out the longer we rolled them around our mouths. We chewed them gently, swallowed happily, and sipped some wine.

“These are amazing,” I said.

We ordered another dozen. After that day, we began to make occasional pilgrimages, taking the hour-long drive up to Damariscotta on the theory that oysters should be enjoyed as close to their source as possible.

As it turns out, I'm not the first person to have figured this out. Native Americans and early settlers of the Maine coast once feasted on wild oysters from the Damariscotta River, leaving behind heaps of shells, charcoal, bones, and artifacts known as
middens
, piled high on the banks of the upper estuary. As Peter Smith writes in the
Smithsonian
, “the Damariscotta River has long been the epicenter of oyster shucking. Shell heaps rise on both its banks—towering middens of flaky, bleached white shells discarded between 2,200 and 1,000 years ago when American oysters flourished in the warm, brackish waters.

“[But] the early abundance didn't last, probably due to predatory snails brought on by a rise in sea level, rather than overharvesting, and neither has the subsequent introduction, in 1949, of European flat oysters. Today, though, hundreds of thousands of native oysters are once again being cultivated by oyster farmers.”

Oysters are named according to geography, defined by their location, the distilled essence of wherever they live: They are the briny, slippery, concentrated essence of the ocean. They constantly filter seawater through their gills—as much as fifty gallons a day—for plankton and other nutrients, and because they're stationary, wherever they are is how they taste.

Call me biased and locally chauvinistic, but in my opinion, Maine oysters from the Damariscotta River are, along with those oysters from the Belon River estuary of Brittany, the best in the world, even better than the famous Malpeques from Prince Edward Island. I do not know why, but maybe it's as simple as the fact that those waters just taste better to me.

I find oysters from the West Coast too creamy and less interesting on the whole; the Pacific Ocean tastes blander to me, not as complex as the North Atlantic. Oysters from New England waters south of Maine are likewise less potent and tangy than their northern cousins; those waters have warmed in recent decades, and due to overfishing and pollution, the once famously productive Chesapeake Bay oyster beds have been decimated; meanwhile, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts oysters are delicious enough, but not as good as Glidden Points by a long shot.

Gulf oysters, from Louisiana and Texas, are brackish, sexy things, enormous and full of intriguing flavor; the warmer southern Atlantic waters confer an easy taste, as well as enough toxins to knock out an elephant, so there's an added element of danger to eating them. At one oyster bar in New Orleans recently, I downed a dozen and then another dozen, dousing each behemoth in Tabasco, horseradish mixed with ketchup, and lemon, tipping each knobby shell into my mouth and slurping the half-dollar-size creature onto my tongue and letting it linger there.

I always chew oysters. I savor each one. As I swallow, I taste the length of its body down the entire length of my tongue. It is, quite frankly, the most sexual culinary experience in the world. The closest second I can think of is eating a rare and juicy steak, or a ripe mango, or sashimi so fresh it's still quivering. But these are, in fact, closer to eating than sex.

There's a good reason oysters are famously reputed to be aphrodisiacs; in addition to their inherent sexiness, they have a potent nutritive value—they contain zinc, selenium, calcium, vitamins A and B12, protein, and other energy- and life-giving elements, but they're very low in calories, about 100 per dozen, so they never make you feel stuffed or overfull, and they go down like pure nuggets of seawater and energy.

Oysters are by turns male and female, and are capable of fertilizing their own eggs. And they're more sexually productive than bunnies. In the female stage, an oyster can release up to 100 million eggs a year. A baby oyster reaches sexual maturity as a male when it's about a year old, releasing sperm into the water. A group of spawning oysters clouds the water with sperm and eggs: liquid sex.

Speaking of which, oysters are a tradition for Brendan and me on Valentine's Day, when we eat and drink and make merry all day long in a shameless pursuit of pleasure even more concentrated than our everyday decadence. After our traditional breakfast of blini with salmon roe and blood orange mimosas, we take a long walk through the woods, out onto the frozen lake, and back up the long hill. When we come home, warm and breathless, I build a fire and Brendan shucks a dozen or two very fresh raw Maine oysters, which we eat on ice by the fire with two sauces, minced shallots in champagne vinegar, plus a mixture of lemon juice, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, Tabasco, and horseradish.

The oysters are followed by crisp endive leaves festooned with capers, crème fraîche, and dill, leftover blini with mild, tangy sheep cheese, then steamed clams with melted butter, then steamed asparagus with a dipping sauce, and finally, to end this day of simple and light but luxurious and self-indulgent eating, strawberries dipped in dark chocolate.

It's all delicious, of course, but the oysters are the high point,
the
point, the thing that tells us it's Valentine's Day, the thing that propels us to shuck off our clothes and feast again.

Chapter Ten

Holy Donuts, Wholesome Potatoes, and Bean Holes

I walked into the Holy Donut's Exchange Street shop in Portland at ten o'clock on a Wednesday morning. In a nice touch of life-soundtrack serendipity, Al Green's “Love and Happiness” was playing on the speakers. I got in line, and when it was my turn, I asked for the last gluten-free, dark-chocolate and sea-salt donut in the rack, which was in a covered case separate from the regular donuts, and an iced coffee. The friendly tattooed counterman gave me my order with easygoing dispatch. As I added cream and simple syrup to my iced coffee, I told him, “I'm here to talk to Leigh. She's expecting me.”

The Holy Donut is, quite simply, one of the best things about my new life in Portland. Since I gave up gluten in 2002, at the very top of my list of the food items I most desperately missed were donuts.

During the many years I lived in Brooklyn, way, way back in those happy days before I realized I couldn't eat them, I would hike over to Peter Pan Donuts on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint whenever I needed a fix. I'd order a chocolate honey-dipped and a cruller
and a cup of their not-bad coffee and sit at the counter and indulge myself.

I don't have much of a sweet tooth. I could live happily ever after without brownies, cupcakes, cake, ice cream, pie, cookies. But donuts—or doughnuts, as they were once spelled—are another thing entirely. They're not baked; they're deep-fried—crisp and just greasy enough and, at their best, not too sweet. They're nuggety bombs of decadent toothsome animal deliciousness; they stick to your ribs and give you a zingy kick and don't make you crash. Other sweets seem like a waste of stomach space to me. Donuts give you the ultimate bang for your buck. They were my Paradise Lost of pleasure eating for many, many years.

Several months after I moved to Portland, the first Holy Donut opened on Park Avenue. I don't remember how I first heard about Leigh Kellis's gluten-free Maine potato donuts, but shortly after the amazing news of their existence reached my ears, I was standing in line at the counter, waiting for a fresh hot cinnamon-sugar donut just out of the fat. I ate it immediately, standing next to the counter, holding it in its wax-paper lining, letting it melt on my tongue, swooning at my first donut in about ten years.

This was the real thing: shaped by hand, with that genuine old-fashioned homemade feeling; light, nutty, cakey on the inside and crisp on the outside, with the sandy crunch of cinnamon sugar between my teeth. I finished it and bought another one and ate that one more slowly, licking cinnamon sugar off my fingers.

In the next months, Leigh added more flavors and glazes to her gluten-free choices: dark-chocolate sea-salt; pomegranate with chai
glaze; lemon that tasted bright, fresh, zesty; Maine blueberry; coconut milk–glazed dark-chocolate . . .

While I waited for Leigh, I looked around her new, second location, appreciating its brightness and airy coziness. The Old Port is tourism central, a maze of crooked cobblestone streets and gift boutiques, well-preserved historic buildings and gelato shops. Cruise ships regularly dock on the pier on Commercial Street and disgorge hundreds of passengers at a time, who walk slowly through the streets in crowds. The Old Port is different from the rest of the city, in that it's geared to visitors, not locals.

But the new Holy Donut felt like an unpretentious neighborhood joint, just like the original. It has homey decor—a scuffed tile floor, exposed-brick wall, couches and a big potted ficus in one window, tables in the other. Ceiling fans whir overhead; good music plays, not too loudly, on the sound system.

I sat at the only empty table and bit into my donut. I was starving because I'd been up since seven-thirty and hadn't eaten breakfast; I'd been saving my appetite for this, and it was worth it. The dark chocolate had melded with the riced potato in the batter to form a velvety-textured wall of flavor that dissolved on my tongue. Then came the bright crunch of sea salt on the satiating outer layer of clean, delectable oil. I took another bite. My eyes fluttered with joy.

As I sipped some iced coffee (a rich, roasty special blend from Coffee By Design), I saw Leigh heading toward my table. She's a slender brunette in her late thirties with sparkling green eyes and chiseled cheekbones. She's as gorgeous as a movie star, but she doesn't play it up; she was wearing a plain sleeveless shirt and jeans, her hair up in a ponytail, dangly earrings her only concession to glamour.

“I'm Leigh,” she said, shaking my hand. “I'm sorry to keep you waiting; I'm just trying to finish up back there.”

“Take your time, no rush,” I said. “I'm having a great time with my donut and iced coffee.”

While I waited, I noticed that the line at the counter kept expanding, then shrinking, then expanding again. The place was consistently full, mid-morning on a weekday, with families, businessmen, writer types, tourists, but it felt neither crowded nor precious, and not overly loud. The high ceiling absorbed the ambient noise, and the spaciousness gave a sense of calm.

Several minutes later, Leigh sat down across from me.

“There are three guys working behind the counter,” she said, “but I'm the only one who notices details, so I have to constantly be on it.”