ington, where it was once an important 
feature of the local economy. The tiny, 
1 ’/ 2 -inch-long bivalve, with its distinc- 
tive violet-tinged inner shell walls and 
intense marine taste, was a unique 
and toothsome part of pioneer days 
in the Pacific Northwest. Delicate 
“Olys” were the favored sweetmeat 
of Gold Rush San Francisco. In our 
ill-favored era, there are none for sale 
in San Francisco. Why you cannot 
even buy one at an oyster bar in Se- 
attle. Instead, you find insipid Pacifies 
( Crassostrea gigas) grown locally 
from Japanese seed. They are huge, 
attaining a length of ten inches, and 
they grow fast. Young ones, eaten di- 
rectly from the shell, do have a certain 
tang to them. But full-size Pacifies, 
shucked industrially and assiduously 
washed — the normal practice on the 
West Coast — are as flat in flavor as 
a hunk of wet foam rubber. Mean- 
while, the elegant little Oly has all 
but vanished into the folklore of Puget 
Sound and the Northwest Coast. 
James G. Swan, an early settler in 
the Washington Territory — and a pio- 
neer Indian ethnographer, inveterate 
diarist, debauchee, and opportunist — 
worked in the oyster business in its 
infancy during three years (1852 to 
1855) he spent at Shoalwater Bay. 
Swan, who took a precise interest in 
what he ate, wrote of the “strong, 
coppery taste” of the Shoalwater Bay 
oysters, which he attributed to the 
mud flats where they grew. “What 
is called a coppery taste,” he went 
on, “is simply a strong, fishy, salt- 
water flavor, which, however, is driven 
off by cooking.” 
Taste changes over time, and the 
coppery, “fishy” taste Swan boiled or 
fried away is probably the taste mod- 
ern oyster lovers seek. Still, it is risky 
to rely on descriptions of flavor from 
the past. After all, in his memoir of 
Shoalwater Bay, Oysterville, Willard 
R. Espy states that “the Puget Sound 
oyster, known as the Olympia, had 
a copper taste offensive to refined San 
Francisco palates. But the same gour- 
mets who rejected the Olympia oysters 
sang hosannas” to the oysters of Shoal- 
water Bay. 
Presumably, all those Northwest 
Pacific oysters in the middle nine- 
teenth century were examples of 
Ostrea lurida, what we would call 
Olympias. Their coppery taste, or lack 
of it, will probably remain a subject 
of gastronomic confusion. There is no 
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