29th March -
Fête de l’Huître - oyster festival
Saturday 29th - Sunday 30th March 2008 - 12H
Fête de l’Huître - Le Barcarès
Mas de l’Ille (exit 12)
Adults: 22€ Children (6 to 12): 10€
Oyster fans should make a special effort to visit Le Barcarès on Saturday 29th - Sunday 30th March. Music, dancing and oysters ’à volonté’ (as many as you can swallow) await you.
Reservations Office Municipal du Tourisme
Tél : 04 68 86 16 56 / Fax : 04 68 86 34 20
Facts about oysters
Oysters are low in food energy; one dozen raw oysters contain approximately 110 calories (460 kJ), and are rich in iron, calcium, and vitamin A. The National Heart and Lung Institute suggest oysters as an ideal food for inclusion in low-cholesterol diets.
Four or five medium size oysters supply the recommended daily allowance of iron, copper, iodine, magnesium, calcium, zinc, manganese and phosphorus.
The name oyster is used for a number of different groups of mollusks which grow for the most part in marine or brackish water. Inside a usually highly calcified shell is a soft body. The gills filter plankton from the water. Strong adductor muscles are used to hold the shell closed.
Fresh oysters must be alive just before consumption. They have an extremely short shelf-life, and should be consumed immediately on opening, before which they must be tightly closed; oysters that are already open are dead and must be discarded. To confirm if an open oyster is dead, tap the shell. A live oyster will close and is safe to eat.
Oysters are believed by many to be an aphrodisiac. It is also said that "If you can get a woman to eat a raw oyster, you can get her to do anything!" referring to their visual nature, very unappealing for some.
An old saying states that oysters are best to eat in months containing the letter r. This is because oysters spawn in the warmer months, from roughly May to August in the Northern Hemisphere, and their flavour, when eaten raw can be watery and bland during spawning season
All oysters can secrete pearls, but those from edible oysters have no market value. Pearl oysters ( or Feathered Oysters)produce pearls by covering an invading piece of grit with nacre (or as most know it, mother-of-pearl). Over the years, the grit is covered with enough nacre to form what we know as a pearl. There are many different types and colours and shapes of pearl, but this depends on the pigment of the nacre and the shape of the piece of grit being covered over.
The tiny crab that one sometimes sees in an oyster is a species of crab (Pinnotheres ostreum) that has evolved to live harmoniously inside an oyster’s shell. They are fairly rare.
There is no way of telling male oysters from females by examining their shells although they do have separate sexes, and may change sex one or more times during their life span.
Oysters breathe much like fish, using both gills and ’mantle’ which is lined with many small, thin-walled blood vessels which extract oxygen from the water and expel carbon dioxide.
The cultivation of oysters began more than 2,000 years ago when Romans collected oyster seed stock near the mouth of the Adriatic Sea and transported them to another part of Italy for grow-out. The Romans had such a passion for oysters that they imported them from all over the Mediterranean and European coasts.
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