Imagine going out to lunch and finding something in your food. But instead of your discovery leading to something repulsive, you find an amazing treasure! That is what happened to one woman recently. Toni Elliott was having lunch at Puckett’s Boat House in Franklin, Tennessee, when she found a surprise inside her fried oysters. “She put an oyster in her mouth … and pulled out a pearl,” server Eric Horton said.
Finding just one pearl in an oyster is common, but Elliott got lucky several times over. “She ended up pulling 50 pearls out of this oyster,” Horton said. He helped Elliott collect the pearls by grabbing a container for her.
“I’m one of the longer tenured people here, so having seen that [and] being a part of that is pretty cool,” Horton said. Pearls are formed when a grain of sand enters the oyster’s shell. To protect itself from the sand, the oyster coats the sand in a substance called nacre, which eventually forms a pearl.