THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 5, 1995 TAG: 9503010084
SECTION: REAL LIFE PAGE: K3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY KRYS STEFANSKY, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
STANDING on two wooden Coca-Cola crates, stacked one on top of the other in the back of his daddy's seafood restaurant in Virginia Beach, 10-year-old John W. Keeling learned how to shuck oysters.
It's been 55 years. Keeling is taller now, and older. Today he can find that hollow place in the hardwood cutting board that'll hold a crusty mollusk in place, just so, without even looking.
About the time of morning most working folks are sipping a second cup of coffee, he's pinning an oyster down with a rubber-gloved hand. With the other, Keeling feels for the invisible seam in the lip of the bivalve with his steel-bladed stabbing knife. He pushes hard.
The knife tip slides in with a raspy sound. It scrapes past rough shell and on to the pearly inside. The oyster splits open.
Keeling is a free-lance oyster shucker, an invisible man behind the shellfish that gourmets pluck and gobble from restaurant salad bars, catered receptions, parties and conventions. He shucks about 250 an hour, a rate, he reckons, that's not particularly fast. Indeed, his work barely dents the total oysters harvested by local watermen. Last year they culled 775,000 pounds of them from Virginia waters.
Keeling slides his knife under the muscle, cutting it free. He tosses away the bottom half of the shell and places the other half on a baking tray. The shell lines up next to dozens of others, all cradling raw, plump mollusks, glistening, limp and ready to eat.
His shucking technique is old-fashioned. Today's shuckers tend to go in through the back end of the oyster shell, he says, where the two halves hinge. Keeling says that tears the muscle and makes the oyster look bad. He goes in from the side so he can cut the muscle and keep it whole.
``It's not how fast you do it; it's how good you can do it. It's how pretty they are on the salad bar. I like to look at them,'' he says.
He knows that the wiggly bits of muscle are never going to be popular with everybody. ``They wouldn't win any beauty contests,'' he says, eyeing them in mock sadness and stretching plastic wrap over a finished tray of wet, gray oysters on the half shell.
Keeling has a reputation in the local food industry for being a steady shucker who delivers a clean product, without grit, mud or bits of shell stuck to the meat. Even if the little rascals are stubborn.
``Eastern Shore Seasides are hard to open, and Lynnhaven oysters used to be pretty hard. These come from Poquoson. They're a little easier,'' he says, tapping a shell with the tip of his knife. ``They're about average-sized. They don't leave them in the rivers long enough anymore for them to get big.''
Keeling doesn't have to worry about Lynnhaven oysters these days. This former waterman has 112 acres of oyster beds lying idle there since the river was closed to oystering about eight years ago.
This time of year, he's especially busy shucking.
``This is the season for oysters, in winter when the water's cold,'' he says, all 6 feet 4 inches of him stretching toward the ceiling in the food prep room behind the kitchen of Tandom's Pine Tree Inn in Virginia Beach. ``People used to say oysters were only good when there was an `r' in the month, but that was a superstition.''
Keeling doesn't understand the popularity of raw oysters himself, being a cooked-oyster lover, but he can tell when they sell well - Christmas, New Year's Eve, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. For eight years he's worked at the restaurant on Wednesdays, weekends and during oyster emergencies.
``Sometimes I've had them call me at night - `We've just run out of oysters!' - and I grab my knife and glove and go,'' he said.
He's only stabbed himself once - when he held a cooked oyster in his palm to open it. Never made that mistake again, he said. And he's only found a pearl one time. That was in a cooked oyster, too.
``It was all burnt,'' he recalled. ``Actually, if you ever found a pearl, it would be under a gill and I don't take time to look.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo
MORT FRYMAN/Staff
John W. Keeling figures he shucks about 250 oysters an hour. ``It's
not how fast you do it,'' he says. ``It's how good you can do it.
It's how pretty they are on the salad bar.''
by CNB