Cancale, France. Ahhhh. Warm sun, clear skies, gentle ocean breeze, incredible beaches and beautiful sights.
And oysters.
Now I’m not much of an oyster fan. My Dad used to eat smoked oysters on saltine crackers when I was a kid. Saltines were the height of cracker sophistication back in the 50s when I was growing up. Dad would take a saltine, build a dam of butter around its four sides, put the oyster in the middle and smother it with worchestershire sauce. And pop the whole thing into his mouth. Yum. Or maybe not so much.
Now, decades later the only oysters I eat, note that they are few and far between and were consumed decades ago, are oysters Rockefeller. You know the kind. Smothered in melted cheese with enough spinach that you can pretend you’re eating healthy seafood after all.
No oysters Rockefeller here. They come raw or not at all. I’ve come around to sushi and sashimi, but haven’t quite made it to raw oysters. I’m a Philistine, but I think I’d rather eat a raw egg.
Cancale is a Breton village of four or five thousand souls. There are more restaurants in town than there are people. Well, not really, but darn close. I can count at least 20 in the three block stretch of harbour, not counting the ones on the hill just off the harbour and not even considering the ones in town. The town sits on the coast of a big bay that opens into the Atlantic, just down from its more famous cousin Mont Saint Michel.
We’ve had three other trips to Brittany, and on these trips, we were very focussed on a journey of remembrance, almost a pilgrimage, paying our respects at a variety of World War I and II memorials, historical sites and cemeteries. This time, we decided to be tourists, so we picked Cancale, which is famous for its oysters. It supplies all of France, but particularly the high end Parisian restaurants with oysters, and quite possibly other shell fish as well. Different websites give different numbers, but I believe the seven plus square kilometeres of oyster beds here harvest about 25,000 tons of oysters each year. That’s a lot of oysters.
At low tide you can see the oyster beds. Oysters are on every menu in town (along with crepes and galettes which were apparently invented in Brittany) and you will be hard-pressed to find a single menu item that doesn’t come with them. So you can get sea bass, with eight oysters. Or salmon with six oysters. Apparently Roman soldiers enjoyed Cancale oysters, and so did the Sun King himself. Now that’s an industry with some legs!
I generally don’t know east from west but I am even worse in France, so, if you go to the bottom of the hill our house is on, you turn left at the bottom to get to the oyster market. Eight or ten booths about the size of a display at a trade show sell oysters just harvested that morning to anyone who wants to buy them. They come in whatever numbers you want, usually by the dozen and are priced by size, so the bigger the oyster the more expensive it is.
People wander into the market,buy a basket of oysters, then go sit on the pier behind the market and shuck and eat them on the spot, throwing the shells onto the beach. They’ve been doing this forever it would seem and the beach is I don’t know how deep in generations of oyster shells.
Every tourist store in town sells the small oyster knives as souvenirs. We watched the server at one restaurant fill orders, although I must say not mine, I had moules a la creme with frites. The entire side wall of the outdoor restaurant was made up of baskets each holding a different size of oysters. She would go to the appropriate basket, count out the required number, go to a nearby table and with the biggest bread knife you ever saw, opened them, put them on a platter and served them. And I believe we were the only ones not eating oysters that day.
We think we might have to risk it one day before we leave Cancale. We’ll see.
The oyster market in Cancale.
Years of oyster-eaters have tossed their shells on the beach.
When the tide is out, you can see the oyster beds.