Passionate and playful, this is the first comprehensive guide to identifying, serving, and savoring one of America's original and most delicious foods.

Considered one of the great sensual foods since the time of ancient Rome, and eaten in the United States since its earliest human habitation, oysters are now seeing an American renaissance. Like wine and cheese, they owe much of their flavor to terroir, or the specific environment in which they grow. Indeed, oysters are the food that tastes most like the sea. Today, there are at least two hundred unique oyster "appellations" in North America, each producing oysters with a distinct and consistent flavor-some merely passable, others dazzling.
Beautifully written and illustrated, A Geography of Oysters is an indispensable guide to the oysters of America, describing each type of oyster's appearance, flavor, origin, and availability. Readers will learn how to shuck, how to pair wines and oysters, and how to navigate a raw bar with skill and panache. The book includes recipes, maps, black-and-white photos, and a color guide, as well as lists of top oyster restaurants, producers, and festivals. Painting a picture of the quirky characters who farm oysters and the gorgeous stretches of coast where these delicacies are found, A Geography of Oysters is both terrific reading and the guide that foodies of all types have been waiting for.


REVIEWS:
"Jacobsen, managing editor of the magazine, The Art of Eating , presents the ultimate macropedia for oysters, covering not just geography, but also philosophy, consumerism, epicurean splendor and the proper way to grow a pearl. The first of the guide's three sections, Mastering Oysters, covers such cocktail party talking points as "A Dozen Oysters You Should Know" and "The Aphrodisiac Angle," and presents a primer on how and why oysters taste as they do. Chapter two accounts for half the book's page count and is a travelogue across the Maritime Provinces of New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, a movable feast up and down the east and west coasts of North America. Jacobsen ends his res