For Rawle Jefferds and a handful of oyster aficionados, shucking and slurping is serious business
By Byron Kerman
Rawle Jefferds has very large forearms. In fact, he calls them “freakish” and admits that friends have on occasion referred to him as Popeye. He comes by these swollen appendages from an honest hobby: oyster-shucking. Jefferds, the co-owner of Seattle-area oyster-farming operation Penn Cove Shellfish, can shuck a dozen oysters in a minute. That’s nothing, though, he says: Some of the other guys on the team he assembles to compete at the annual Schlafly Brewery Stout & Oyster Festival, including St. Louis transplant Thurman Bryant, can shuck a dozen in just 30 seconds.
The highlight of the festival (March 7–8 at the Schlafly Tap Room) is a three-man “shuck-and-shoot” speed competition, pitting West Coast against East Coast shellfish mavens. “One guy shucks the oysters,” explains Jefferds. “The next guy eats that dozen oysters. The next guy hammers down a
16-ounce beer.”
In addition to witnessing feats of speed and degustation, attendees will plow through some 26,000 oysters over the course of the two-day bacchanal. And someone may very well wind up with a pearl. Jefferds says that he finds them in oysters with some frequency and that two or three pearls have tumbled forth from oysters in St. Louis since he’s been coming to the festival in 2002. Who gets to keep them?
“They typically go to the prettiest girl standing in front of you at the time,” he claims.
Speaking of affairs of the heart, does the oyster farmer subscribe to the popular notion that eating the beloved bivalve makes folks shuck off their clothes and get busy?
“Just ask my wife and 14 kids,” he quips. In truth, Jefferds, who says he eats three dozen oysters a week during the height of the season, believes eating oysters is a placebo—if you think it’s an aphrodisiac, then it is.
But what if it’s just the opposite? What about those oyster virgins too scared to slurp the quivering oyster meat off its craggy bed? You’re in good company, Jefferds says. That oft-wondered-about first person ever to crack open an oyster and eat what he found within was surely “one of the bravest diners to ever live,” he says. Or maybe just “really, really hungry.”
