The World Is Not My Oyster
What you want when you can’t get what you want
All I wanted was a cold refrigerator. And a slightly colder freezer. But last Sunday morning the freezer felt…damp. The frozen bananas, which I pulled out to make my morning smoothie, were slush bananas. There was power—the light came on—but no cold, no humming. On Monday the tecnico confirmed that what my frigo needed was a new frigo. It was six years old. Whatever.
This was going to take a while—the fridge is built in to the kitchen with matching cabinetry, and the model is hard to find. Fortunately I have a terrace, and temperatures in Rome this week are more or less in fridge range although not cold enough for frozen foods. Unfortunately we have dive-bombing attack seagulls emboldened by a lifetime foraging for pizza crusts and mortadella panino remains, so after putting my fridge contents in armored containers—homemade rendered duck fat and beef tallow, Parmigiano rinds, Sicilian blood oranges, Sardinian bottarga roe—I hauled everything outside.
Then I made a plan to cook for a few days without a fridge.
Two days earlier I had bought a couple dozen Normandy oysters, which can last a few weeks in the coldest bottom compartment of a refrigerator (cup side down, covered with a damp cloth) but only if it’s really cold, like just above freezing. Outdoor temps here during the daytime have been reaching 15C/60F which is too warm for oysters, so they had to meet the knife, soon.
Oysters fall into that category of stuff I want in Rome but can’t always have, as they are flown in from France (sometimes Holland) and are expensive when you can even find them. Someone is now farming oysters in Apulia (the heel of Italy) but I don’t trust them as Mediterranean waters are too warm. In America, when you hear about people getting sick from oysters, it’s usually in New Orleans, from the Gulf crop. I don’t go there.
My local seafood vendor, by definition expensive as he’s in Rome’s tourist center, charges €5 apiece for French oysters, which right now equals about six bucks. This is tough to swallow, no pun intended, for someone who lived 20 years in Maine and paid 50 cents each for the most bracingly fresh and salty oysters on the planet, and sometimes gathered them for free in the frigid mudflats.
Instead I ride my bike up the Esquiline hill to the big indoor public market near the train station, where Bengali vendors sell you everything from Persian dried limes (pulverize in a mortar and sprinkle over watermelon salad) to Indian rose water (add a few drops to your morning smoothie). The vast seafood emporium, wet floor glistening under fish scales, houses a dozen or more vendors, mostly also South Asian and for whom your patronage will apparently allow their daughter to marry into a good family from the way they chase after you, propelling themselves across the slippery pavement like Olympic speed skaters while shouting their catches of the day. Competition is fierce because they all have pretty much identical piles of shrimp, squid, farm-raised orata and, depending on the season, massive corpses of tuna and swordfish. But only one has French oysters, and he sells me a wooden box of 10 or 12 (they go by weight, oddly) for just €12.
What else to use up in a dead fridge? Scrounging around the top shelf, among the containers of sambal oelek, gochujang, chunjang, doubanjiang and pickled Sichuan heaven-facing chiles (all of which I figured would be fine at room temp for a week), there was a jar of mignonette sauce that I think I made a year ago. It seemed okay—basically it’s shallots in vinegar—and while normally I’m a lemon juice purist with my oysters (I keep mignonette around for guests) I decided my dead fridge indicated it was a good time to use it up. Covering all my bases, I picked a few lemons.
Sometimes I think I would like to be an oyster. It must be a contemplative life, suitable for writing or just thinking about writing like I do in the shower. But then I realize the best oysters are cold and withdrawn, like characters in Haruki Murakami novels who live in dark caves and tunnels resembling the inside of my broken refrigerator and never go out for sushi or for that matter oysters.
On Saturday I rode my bike to the Campagna Amica farmer’s market, mostly to get some fresh air. Without a fridge I couldn’t buy much beyond bread, but it was good to see other people loading up their shopping bags with whatever they wanted.