At Home With Andrea and Chris Pickerell

Chris Pickerell is pickling oysters on a winter’s Sunday in Southold. “Big Uglies” were harvested from the water behind his offices at Cornell Cooperative Extension, down the road from his family’s farmhouse.

“I just got them out of the water this morning, from a creek behind the lab,” Pickerell said. “They’re too big to eat on the half shell.”

As the plump oysters are boiled in a pot on the kitchen stove, their gills turn green in accordance with the type of algae in the waters. This is all good.

Even better, peppercorn, clove, allspice and one super hot, albeit frozen, pepper from the summer’s garden are laid out on the countertop.

Those ingredients, plus salt and vinegar, will be prepared pretty much the same way they were hundreds of years ago.

Pickerell, the director of Cornell Cooperative Extension’s Marine Program, is passionate about, well, a lot of things. Most of those things revolve around oysters, liquor and the maritime history of New York City. The main object of his affection these days is the much sought after oyster jar, which was used to pickle oysters, prolonging the bivalve’s precious edible life.

Back in the day, the oysters were shucked before being placed in a pot of boiling water, but Pickerell took the easy way out and scrubbed them vigorously with a brush to remove any loose particles. When the shells open, he takes them out of the pot and places them with some of the liquid in a stainless steel bowl.

Pickerell takes a tiny cast iron pan and heats up the spices for a few minutes.

“We can’t just have one of anything,” laughs his wife, Andrea, as she points out a stack of black pans on an open shelf.

The couple have known each other since they attended grade school in Southampton together and have been thrifting ever since.

Andrea grew up in Water Mill. Pickerell moved to Southampton from Huntington when his father, Howard, a bayman, followed the clams after the population had been depleted in 1979.

Pickerell went on to study biotechnology at Rochester Institute of Technology. When he returned home for a visit, the couple reunited at the Hansom House in Southampton. “Chris got a bit of a glow-up,” Andrea said. “He grew his hair long and started working out.”

When their group of friends decided to head to Bay Street in Sag Harbor, Andrea needed a ride. “Chris said, ‘I’ll give you a ride,’ and that was it,” she said. “We’ve been together 38 years.”

They bought the 1875 house 20 years ago. “It was a wreck,” Pickerell said.

“It was gross,” Andrea added.

Blue shag carpet, matching blue toilet, shower in the kitchen and every other rotten thing was eventually gutted. “We did the kitchen first,” Pickerell said.

“We washed dishes upstairs,” Andrea said. “Chris built everything.”

“Everything is second hand,” Pickerell said.

One of his first jobs was doing clam restoration with Chuck Steidele of Coastal Farms in Southampton. Clams came from uncertified waters and were depurated by placing them into certified, or clean, waters, where the bivalves purged out their stomach contents and any contaminants.

“I handled 300 bushels of clams per day,” he said.

Andrea moved with Pickerell to Ithaca when he went to Cornell University to study plant science for a graduate degree. He considered going for a Ph.D.

“We decided together, we were not going to do that,” he said.

“And we were going to not live here,” she said.

However, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Suffolk County needed help, and Pickerell took the job. In April, Pickerell will have gone from technician to director of the marine program, with 80 employees, in 32 years.

As you enter the kitchen from the outside, a stainless steel table, rescued from a printing shop, sits in a nook under an archway.

Pickerell takes a large, white mortar and pestle and crushes the toasted spices.

He’s not using a ceramic oyster jar from his collection. Those remain proudly on display on the shelves in the front room, the same room that houses the bar.

The front room opens to the backyard, thanks to French doors, which are flanked by two found shelving units.

“We picked this up off the side of the road,” Andrea said of one of the pieces. “Look at it. It’s perfect.”

Take a seat at the bar and you’re taken back in time. An Edwardian hat worn by a naval officer sits on top of a cabinet. A shillelagh, a wooden weapon, sits on a side table. A rifle from the American Revolution hangs above the couch.

Pickerell raps a firing glass, that he purchased for $3, on the bar, demonstrating its thick bottom, made to resemble the bang of a gun.

A pewter tankard he picked up at a tag sale in Greenport proved to be even more of a bargain when he took it to its birthplace, the Wheatsheaf pub in London, and the owner let him fill it up with free beer.

“Chris has a knack,” Andrea said, referring to her husband’s canny ability to resell collectibles. “I used to be into bottles but not so much anymore. I lost interest. The one’s I kept have special meaning.

His favorite bottle has to be a dark green, glass, gin bottle that had been buried in the grounds of Manhattan for hundreds of years. The unusual patina is reminiscent of ocean waves.

He even has an oyster shell that was dug out from underneath the rubble of the World Trade Center, before the Hudson River was filled in to create “downtown.”

There are a lot of shelves in the house. Since the shelves are all white, they blend in well with the white walls, yet show off Chris’s maritime collection beautifully, not to mention Andrea’s ironware.

A large jar stands out, used to catch octopus. But Pickerell clarifies, he only bought it because it is covered in oyster shells.

“It’s all about the oyster jar,” Andrea said.

Oyster jars were made in Manhattan from the 1740s to the 1840s. Pickerell was first offered two oyster jars in 2015. “Not the most attractive things,” he said. Intrigued, he did a little research and was told to buy them immediately. “People will sell their kids for them.”

Today, Pickerell owns 45 of the 90 known to survive, the earliest being 1774. Ten of the jars were shipped to Manhattan for the exhibit “Shifting Shorelines: Art, Industry, and Ecology Along the Hudson River” at the Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University recently.

Oyster jars were originally made from wood, then later, around 1750, potters made them from clay around the city and New Jersey and they were fired into ceramic.

“Everybody ate oysters,” Pickerell said. “Everybody loved oysters.”

However, at that time, buying oysters from May to August was outlawed due to a misunderstanding about the life cycle of the oysters in New York. Pickling oysters gave the oystermen money in their pocket.

The jars made a 3,000-mile journey from New York to Guyana and Suriname in the West Indies, where sugarcane was grown.

Ship captains favored the pickled oysters and would chuck the single-use jars overboard. They also gave them away as gifts once in the islands, and those too would be tossed aside, many found in canals and rivers.

Pickerell pours the mixture of oysters, oyster liquor, vinegar, salt and spices into a tall mason jar, approximately the same size as his prized possessions. You can see the 20 to 30 oysters through the clear glass.

Back in the day, a cork was used to plug the jar and wax kept it sealed tightly. Either way, the oysters will last at least six months. The pickle will build heat over time.