Audioscript

My name is Robert Pendergast and I grew up here on Prince Edward Island kind of a double life. Secret agent in the summer time, beach boy here at the beach learning to cut grass and windsurf and take horse trails then in the winter time I was the Irish and the Canadian descendant up in the west end of PEI. Before I ever even chucked one oyster, I was sharpening my knife and I almost cut my tip of my little finger off, so my first injury was before ever touching the oysters that day. Just giving kind of a run down on the technique that I would use, what I’m always on the lookout for is an oyster with, you know with a good cup and a nice flat lid with kind of a solid heavyweight for its size, you know that’s an oyster that has a good thick shell. So these oysters are Cove aux baies, they come from around Souris and in fact if you’re standing at Cove aux baies working on the oysters or standing in the shed you look over, you see the boat leaving for the Magdellan Islands. So that’s where you are, you’re in Souris at the mouth of the Souris River and basically what I’m doing is I’m looking for a spot in the heel or here in the hinge of the oyster and what I’m looking to do really is just break the suction by giving it a twist. Once I’ve given it that twist I want to keep it open and clean my knife off a bit and all I do then is really come under the shell and above the meat, I try to keep as much meat as possible intact. And so in a competition you’d be judged for that quality also by leaving the meat as intact as possible, you know these oysters, this one for example or that one would be considered probably perfect, there’s no puncture in them, this one it’s a little bit torn here on the mantle so they’d probably be adding two seconds on every oyster like that. So you just do that you know the most important thing I guess is you can compete all you want but if you enjoy opening oysters and being part of that kind of a culture then you know people they’re gonna notice that and it’s gonna make their experience a little bit nicer. For me it’s a nice, it’s a really nice side,  kind of a passion and a side apart to my profession that I didn’t expect when I first started studying cooking, that I’d be opening open oysters and that might be my best product you know.
 

Additional Resources:

Oyster fishing, Miscouche, P.E.I.

Oyster farming, Caraquet, N.B.

Oyster fishing, Miscouche, P.E.I.

Clam fishing, Inkerman, N.B.

Report on the Oyster Fisheries of Canada

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