Erin Byers Murray, author of Shucked, at the Island Creek Oyster Bar in Boston. Photo by Alison Cook

A pang of envy shot through me when Erin Byers Murray told me she was thinking of quitting her job as an editor at the Boston edition of DailyCandy.com, the well-known shopping and events website, to go work for a year on an oyster farm. Not just any oyster farm, either: Island Creek, the Duxbury, Massachusetts cooperative that has become famous for the quality of its bivalves.

To an oyster fetishist like me, it sounded as wild and alluring as running off to join the circus. "You've got to do it!" I urged her. "If I were your age, I'd do it in a heartbeat."

It was kind of presumptuous for me to be advising a young woman I had just met. Purely by chance, we were seated next to each other at the counter of Mario Batali's Babbo on a cold New York city night three years ago. We eyed each other's dishes, started talking about them and soon discovered we were both food writers with a Houston connection. (Murray's parents live in The Woodlands, and she summered and worked here while she was in college.)

What was even more presumptuous, it turned out, was my thinking that I could have cut it on an oyster farm for more than a day or two. Murray's Shucked: Life on a New England Oyster Farm, the recently published book about her Island Creek experience, left me keenly aware of the bone-chilling, muscle-crunching labor behind that beautiful plate of Moon Shoal oysters I can savor locally at such restaurants as Brasserie 19.

This winter, with the Texas coast closed to oystering because of the drought-induced red tide bloom, Houston oyster-lovers will have to look further afield, to Louisiana and the colder waters of New England and Canada, for their halfshell fix. I never hear Houstonians complain about the quality of cold-water oysters from the East Coast, but the bellyaching about their price ($1.50 to $2 apiece, and sometimes more) seems eternal.

Oysters from Island Creek growers at Island Creek Oyster Bar in Boston. Photo by Alison Cook

To the gripers, I say "Read Shucked." Once you've spent a vicarious year on the tides, freezing your butt off while harvesting, culling, washing, counting and bagging oysters into cumbersome hundred-count sacks, you'll begin to appreciate why farmed oysters aren't cheap.

The sheer physical labor involved in oyster farming sort of stunned me. (Indeed, the best chapters in Murray's book, about her life on the water in Duxbury Bay, left me feeling beaten up and in dire need of Ibuprofen.)

Then there's the painstaking attention to detail as you shepherd the tiny oyster seed through infancy in a hard-to-maneuver "upwellers," rack and bag the young ones in a series of metal cages, and finally plant them on the bay floor on the cooperative's million-acre lease. Where they will filter the bay waters until they are harvested at precisely the size and shape Island Creek has become known for. Nothing to it.

Oh yeah, and along the way there's oyster poop, as Murray dubs the baby bivalves' secretions, which must be repeatedly scrubbed away lest it smother the poor things; and a nasty menace known as "sponge." Managing 12 million baby oysters is not quite the idyll I had imagined.

Erin Murray always flips her finished oyster shells, the better to admire their shape, colors and markings. Photo by Alison Cook

Not that Murray's tale is all grit and groan. At one point, she goes to stage for a day in the kitchen at Per Se, when the Thomas Keller New York branch was under the stewardship of chef Jonathan Benno. Anyone interested in restaurants (or oyster cookery) will be fascinated by the step-by-step composition of Per Se's signature "Oysters and Pearls"--a dish based exclusively on specially culled Island Creek oysters.

Murray was lucky in that she arrived at a pivotal moment for Island Creek, when its founder, Skip Bennett, was turning it from a small brand beloved of Boston-area restaurants and chefs into a national presence--and a partner in a sleek showpiece Boston restaurant, the Island Creek Oyster Bar, on Commonwealth Avenue near Fenway Park.

The far wall at Island Creek Oyster Bar is composed of thousands upon thousands of oyster shells in a metal cage. Photo by Alison Cook

I met Murray there for oysters on the halfshell while I was in Boston this fall. We had shared a couple of dozen (including some Island Creeks) at the late Tesar's in The Woodlands two years ago, when she was at the start of her farm stint, and I remember noticing how she handled the oysters almost reverently, remarking on a particular algae-related shade of green here or a pattern of calcified bumps there. As she finished eating each oyster, she turned it ritually upside down on the round tray of ice, the better to see the markings and the pattern they made, like some stony wet flower.

Now, in Boston, Murray seemed even more invested in each oyster as an object, running her fingers over the shells as if she were reading some mystic Braille. We ordered four different varieties of oysters from growers in the Island Creek cooperative farm, named according to where they were grown on the leases around Duxbury Bay. A fifth variety, Cuttyhunks, came from further down the Massachusetts coast, toward Rhode Island.

All of them were raised within 50 miles of each other, Murray pointed out, telling me, "You'll be able to taste the difference."

The oyster-shell wall at Island Creek Oyster Bar, close up. Photo by Alison Cook

I could. Rocky Nooks hit me hard with a blast of salt, while the farm's signature Island Creeks came on salty and meaty followed by a bloom of vegetal flavor on the end. Moon Shoals were sweeter, with a soft, round celery-like flavor and a finish that seemed to go on forever.

"They're monsters," said Murray, cradling a Moon Shoal in her hand as if it were a baby. "They're grown on the sandy bay bottom, which is why their cups are so deep, and there's so much meat."

The Cuttyhunks just weren't there yet. They had a clean, brisk salt flavor, but there wasn't a lot going on.

What makes the difference? "It's all about the food stores," Murray said. "Whatever plankton they fed on just wasn't as rich." Even in oysters grown five miles apart you'll be able to taste a difference, she said, because water flow and temperature can change drastically along the same coastline, affecting the oysters' food sources.

Those differences are something Houstonians are only now coming to terms with as we grow more familiar with the new named varieties of oysters harvested in different areas around Galveston Bay. We've been used to cheaper, mass-produced oysters, and the idea of distinguishing among them is very young.

But sitting with Murray in the splendor of the Island Creek Oyster Bar, savoring the farm's oysters as if they were unique jewels, I couldn't help but wonder if going in the Island Creek direction of intensive husbandry might be the eventual salvation--partly, anyway-- of a Texas oyster industry that is currently on the ropes, not just because of red tide but because of hurricanes and an oil spill as well.

The ceiling treatment at Island Creek Oyster bar incorporates an oyster cage like the ones Erin Byers Murray worked for her book. Photo by Alison Cook

That was the tantalizing question I was left with after reading Shucked. The book is embedded with ideas, from aquaculture methods to intelligent, integrated marketing, that might have an application here in Texas.

Murray will be in Houston in January, at the height of the oyster-eating season to sign her book and consume some oysters, too. She'll be at Brasserie 19 (where the oyster program offers Island Creek varieties on a regular basis) on Friday, January 13, from 5 to 7 p.m. And she'll be signing at Hubbell & Hudson in The Woodlands on Saturday, January 14, from noon to 3 p.m.