Oysters from the creeks

The murky waters of Mersea Island harbour the true food of love: native British oysters. Prized by shellfish aficionados, their sweet, subtle taste evokes the sharp sea air and salty marshes of coastal Essex.

The Company Shed is an unlikely gastro hotspot. A wooden hut next to a boatyard on the shingle shore of Mersea, Essex, it has plastic windows, concrete floors and laminated menus. The tables, cloaked in bright PVC, are laid with school-dinner cutlery and rolls of disposable kitchen towel. Yet on an ordinary winter weekday you'll be lucky to get a table.

It's all because of the briny treasures that lie in the creeks around Mersea, a small, flat island separated from mainland Essex by half a mile of salt marsh. These plankton-rich waters are one of the few remaining strongholds of the native British oyster, and The Company Shed serves the choicest specimens. "Some customers come just to eat natives," says Richard Haward, owner of the crowded café and wet fish shop where aficionados queue for hours to enjoy plates of freshly shucked shellfish. "They come out of the woodwork each September when the season starts and in April they disappear."

http://www.allaboutyou.com/Richard is a seventh-generation oysterman. His family has fattened oysters in the same Mersea creek for more than a century. He now harvests and purifies more than a million each year, but only a fraction of these are natives. The rest are rock oysters, also known as Pacific or gigas oysters, which are farmed prolifically around the UK. "When people come to my stall to buy oysters I ask them which kind they'd like," says Richard, a regular at London's Borough Market. "Most shoppers point to the rock oysters and say, ‘That's an oyster. What's the other thing?'"

It's a sign of how scarce the native oyster has become that many people - Company Shed regulars aside - don't recognise it. Also known as the European or flat oyster, the native oyster has a fan-shaped, ridged brown shell, quite distinct from the irregular lumpy shell of the gigas. "The closest most people get to a native oyster is finding sea-bleached shells on the beach," Richard says, opening up one of each type with an expert twist of his knife. Lying side by side in their half shells, glistening provocatively in puddles of seawater, their meats don't look that dissimilar, although the native's is smaller and darker. But once slipped into the mouth the contrast is clear. The rock oyster delivers a fleshy hit of throat-catching saltiness, while the native oyster is subtler, sweeter, firmer. "Some people swallow them whole," Richard explains, "but a native should be chewed."

In the pricey London restaurants where he sends much of his catch, these oyster-lover's oysters sell for two to three times as much as their Pacific cousins. Their value would astonish Richard's ancestors: they sold natives in the late 19th century, when natives were so abundant that they were viewed as a cheap source of protein for the poor (and why their shells surface often in the back gardens of London terraces). While rock oysters are farmed - often in bags on trestles - along the UK coastline, native oysters only thrive in a few locations, including Loch Ryan in south-west Scotland, the Fal estuary in Cornwall and Whitstable in Kent. Those from Mersea, often referred to as Colchester oysters, come from two different sources: the Colne estuary on the east side of the island and the Blackwater estuary on the west.

Steering his late father's boat past the moored yachts that crowd Mersea harbour, motoring slowly westwards into the low-lying creeks that penetrate the mainland, Richard explains why his native oysters are among the plumpest and tastiest on the market. "Every oyster is a product of its environment. Ours come from the Blackwater, which is one of England's saltiest rivers. We take them when they're four or five years old and re-lay them to fatten in the creeks, where the mud is so rich in nutrients washed off the salt marsh that the meat sometimes takes on a green tinge."

In Salcott Creek, where the Haward family's seven acres of sea bed are marked by withies (bare tree branches) poking forlornly out of the shallows, Richard hangs a metal dredge over the back of the moving boat, which skims the top of the oyster beds 12 feet below. Sun breaks through a steely sky, turning the water's surface from grey to green, and Richard elaborates on the importance of the right conditions. "There's an old saying about the native oyster: the first thing it thinks about doing is dying," he says. "If it's too hot, they'll die. If it's too cold, they'll die. If there's too much fresh water or too much silt, they'll die."

Mersea's oyster beds were killed off by the freezing winter of 1962-3, then devastated again by a blood parasite in the 1980s. Nationwide, populations have been in decline since the early twentieth century, largely due to overfishing and disease. Now they face a new challenge, one that Richard identifies as he hauls in his dredge and empties it onto the deck. Among the unwanted slipper limpets, dead shells and muddy twigs that he picks through with icy fingers, at least half of the live oysters are gigas.

"We lay only native oysters in these creeks: the gigas came by themselves," Richard says. He explains that when rock oysters were introduced to Britain from Canada in the mid 1960s, re-energising a beleaguered oyster-farming industry, they were spawned in hatcheries and put into the sea to fatten. It was thought they wouldn't spawn naturally here because the water was too cold, but they're now reproducing freely all around the British Isles, colonising reefs left vacant by disappearing natives. The advisory body to the Government, Natural England, believes they're a threat to native ecosystems, while in Ireland the environmental group Coastwatch is calling for them to be controlled in order to save traditional oyster fisheries.

For Richard, the newcomers present an opportunity. He sells 20,000 a week, compared with 6,000 natives - at such a rate he can ensure that they don't take over his shellfish beds. But he believes it is the Pacific oysters affordability and year-round availability that are suppressing demand for natives, which cannot be sold between mid May and August due to the breeding season (hence the old expression about only eating oysters when there is an ‘r' in the month). "The native oyster is a different creature: it's delicate and slower growing, which means it is difficult to farm and more expensive to buy," he says. "But the native oyster-eating population is declining. Younger people don't know what they are. They need to be persuaded that the native oyster is worth eating and worth paying for, or it won't be viable to farm it."

Richard has teamed up with other local oystermen to apply for a fish-tick label from the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) to raise the profile of the Mersea native. The Tollesbury and Mersea Native Oyster Fishery Company, which dates from the 1870s and represents 12 local producers that own the right to gather oysters from the Blackwater river, aims to be certified as a sustainable fishery by May this year [2010].  "As shellfish producers we have always taken care of our environment," Richard says. "Now that it's fashionable we've decided to shout about what we do. It's a way to draw attention to what's special about the native oyster, so we can justify a fair price for what we produce."

Richard and his colleagues aren't the first people to shout about Mersea's oysters - they've been famous ever since the Romans based at Colchester found them in the mud and declared them a delicacy. Their distinctive tang comes from the water in the same estuary where Maldon Sea Salt is gathered, and their taste evokes the sharp sea air and soggy marshes of coastal Essex. Other oysters do not taste the same, and now the people whose livelihoods depend on them are seeking recognition. Oyster farmers from both the Colne and Blackwater fisheries are working together to achieve a Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) for the Colchester native oyster, which would give it the same heritage status as the Whitstable Oyster (which can be native or rock) and Arbroath Smokie, as well as world-famous foods such as Stilton cheese and Parma ham.

With or without logos and labels, however, seafood lovers will always be drawn to Mersea. Not just because of its superior oysters - which, like all oysters, are rich in zinc, a fertility-boosting nutrient that may account for their romantic reputation - but for the chance to eat them at a wobbly table in a spartan shed by the seafront. Now managed by his daughter, Caroline, and son Tom, The Company Shed started life 20 years ago when Richard's wife, Heather, began selling oysters and locally landed fish out of the window. "There was a tatty old table and chairs in there and one or two people sat down to eat what they'd bought," Richard remembers. The set-up has hardly changed since: diners bring their own bread and wine (the Hawards recommend Mersea Island Vineyard) to accompany shellfish platters and grilled seafood. "We're open until five," Richard warns. "But the queue can get so long that we sometimes stop it two hours before last orders. " Like a slow-growing native oyster, it's an experience worth waiting for.

Richard Haward's oysters (01206 383284, www.richardhawardsoysters.co.uk) are available from The Company Shed, Mersea (01206 382700), at London's Borough Market on Fridays and Saturdays and by mail order. The Company Shed opens Tuesday-Saturday from 9am to 5pm and Sunday from 10am to 5pm, as well Fri-Sun evenings 6.30pm to 9.30pm

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