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this newfound trove of oysters. Hard-shelled clams were more valuable to them, even though most Dutchmen preferred to eat oysters. Clamshells were money. The Dutch had adopted the Lenape currency for trade with all the American tribes and with their metal awls and drills they could make wampum far more efficiently than the people who had invented it. It was a matter of picking up clamshells and fashioning them, which cost the Dutch very little in material or labor. Some wampum was made from conch shells. They used inmates of jails and poorhouses to make wampum or to string Indian-made beads, and in time it began to look suspiciously as though the company was taking people to these institutions to make sure there was a good supply of wampum makers. But the Indians of eastern Long Island were considered the best wampum makers. The Dutch showed their acumen for economics, regulating the value of wampum and the price of fur pelts. Though they were never able to control the “money supply”—the amount of wampum in circulation—they devaluated and reevaluated wampum to the Dutch guilder like a regulated currency and also fixed the price of fur pelts in wampum. In this way they could keep the price satisfactory to induce the Indians to supply the pelts but still keep the cost of buying pelts low while the cost of the furs in Europe continued to rise.
    Isaack de Rasière came to New Netherlands in 1626, at the age of thirty, as chief commercial agent for the West India Company and secretary of the province. Shortly after arriving, he wrote a letter to the Amsterdam Chamber of Commerce in which he observed that Indians allied with the French “come to us for no other reason than to get wampum, which the French cannot procure unless they come to barter for it with our natives in the north, just as the Brownists [Puritans] of Plymouth come near our place to get wampum in exchange.” The Dutch had put themselves in the enviable position of being the primary producers of the currency of trade.

    Upon his arrival
in New Amsterdam in April 1628, the Reverend Jonas Michaëlius, the first minister of the Dutch Reformed Church to go to America, wrote of the “large quantities of oyster shells to burn for lime.” But oysters were considered less a profitable resource than one of the pleasures of this Eden.
    The Dutch, like the French and the British, were tremendous oyster eaters. Oysters and mussels were essential components of Dutch cuisine and a frequent subject of the great seventeenth-century Dutch still-life paintings with their complex composition and soft lighting. The Dutch invented the term
still life—stilleven.
Not only are oysters present where they would logically be expected in these paintings, such as a tray of opened oysters in a still life by an unknown artist titled
Preparation for a Feast;
Clara Peeters’s still life of oysters with cod, prawn, and crayfish; Jacob Foppens van Es’s
Lunch Table with Fish;
Abraham van Beyeren’s
Preparation for a Meal,
showing beef innards hung by the windpipe, a plucked rooster, and both opened and unopened oysters; Frans Snyders’s
The Fish Monger;
or Joris van Son’s still life of seafood representing water, but oysters also whimsically appear in paintings of other subjects, such as Jan van Kessel’s still life of fruit with opened oysters, Clara Peeters’s pastry and cookies with opened oysters, or Jan Davidsz de Heen’s
Still Life with Glass and Oysters.
All of these paintings were done during the period of New Netherlands. The mother country liked its oysters.
    The only known cookbook from the seventeenth-century Netherlands,
De Verstandige Kock,
“The Sensible Cook,” was first published there in 1667 with no author’s name. Although it first appeared several years after the British takeover of New Netherlands, the population was still largely Dutch and the book, which clearly made it across the