Oyster adventure

The hunt for Maine-made mollusks

By Jill Strauss

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HAND PICKED: Kevin Scully, with “crew,” on the Damariscotta.

Any good oyster, fresh and crisp from cold waters is pure bliss for me. Consider the Oyster, MFK Fisher

I had just finished reading MFK Fisher’s 1941 classic book on oysters when I realized it had been awhile since I had succumbed to a dozen of the soft, succulent creatures. Fisher acknowledges that “American oysters differ as much as American people,” and she admits to being especially fond of the ones from Long Island Sound. I resolved, however, to find and slurp down some Maine-raised Crassostrea virginica on the half shell.

I based my decision on a few factors: such as the contention by many oyster connoisseurs and marine scientists that some of the best farm-raised oysters in the USA are currently being harvested from the Damariscotta River. This is partially due, they say, to the fact that this particular estuary is one of the cleanest in the Northeast, with ocean water from the Atlantic flushing in twice daily.

Another consideration for me was taste. I wanted to eat an oyster that had not yet spawned. And in the summer, when waters are warmest, oysters spawn. Spawning depletes oysters of their gorgeous glycogen and their lusciousness, but if the water temperatures stay cold in the summer, and if the oysters are managed carefully, Maine-raised oysters do not engage in this enervating activity.

I began my adventure with a call to an oyster-loving acquaintance of mine who enjoys the company of fishermen and boat people. She once mentioned to me that the only place she ever went for oysters was J’s Oyster on Commercial Street, so I asked her if she still frequented the place.

“Yes, I do. I’ve been going since the ’80s because the drinks are good and the company’s good.”

“So you would recommend the place?”

“No, not to you.”

“Why not to me?”

“Because you have to be willing to let your hair down . . . Not everyone is college educated there. I mean, it’s not for the educationally snobbish.”

I dismissed this as an insult from a contact who clearly did not know me very well. Certainly, I said to myself, I could belly up to J’s bar and converse with the regulars. But when I entered the restaurant the overwhelming smell of burning cigarettes forced me to retreat to a table near an open window. Eventually, I turned my attention to the elderly couple in back of me. The husband was stabbing one of his 13 raw oysters with a little red plastic fork.

“Do you come here often?” I asked the man after he finished swallowing.

“No, we’re visiting from Florida,” he said happily.

“We’ve been warned not to eat the oysters back home right now,” his wife chimed in, “so we’re glad to get some from the cold, clean waters of Maine.”

I was just about to order a few raw ones myself when I decided first to ask the waitress where the oysters were from.

“The Chesapeake Bay,” she replied.

“But why not from Maine?” I asked.

“They’re cheaper from the Chesapeake,” she replied bluntly. “And the supplier is more reliable.”

This information killed my desire to eat them. After all, if I was going to eat uncooked filter feeders in the summer, which always entails some added risk, I wanted them to be fat, full of life, and from Maine. Rather than oysters, then, I ordered locally harvested baked scallops, followed by Izzy’s Cheesecake — both of which were sweet, rich, and satisfying. And, to prove I wasn’t “educationally snobbish,” I didn’t even mention to the waitress that “desert” was misspelled on the menu.

A few days after my outing at J’s, I attended an Oyster Festival at Ri Ra, the Irish pub on Commercial Street. As I approached the outdoor raw bar, a customer in front of me popped my favorite question: Where are the oysters from? The reply (“They’re Spinney Creek Oysters from Long Island”) so confused the customer that the fishmonger who said it was forced to stop his shucking and elaborate. The oysters, he explained, were cleaned in a state-approved depuration plant in Maine, but the creatures were actually harvested in Long Island. I’m not sure the customer completely understood that this meant the animals had been placed in tanks with sterile circulating water, which diminished their taste as well as their fecal coliform number, but the man decided against follow-up questions. He picked up a plate of six shiny oysters and washed them down with a pint of Guinness.

I thought of drowning my Maine-oysterless sorrows on the pier, but on my way there I stopped at Harbor Fish and, lo and behold, I spied a sign that read in big, bold letters: “Damariscotta Oysters.”

“They’re from Glidden Point Oyster Company,” the clerk told me, “and you’re in luck! Jumbos are on sale for $1.25 each.” I bought a dozen, placed them in my ice-filled cooler, and took them home.

Jumbos are usually reserved for cooked oyster dishes such as Oysters Rockefeller, but it seemed unthinkable to cover my naked treasures with buttered breadcrumbs and spinach, so I didn’t. Instead I squirted them with lemon and sucked them down. In spite of their large size, the flesh was delicate, the liquor was briny and so refreshing that I called Barbara Scully, co-owner of Glidden Point Oyster Company (GPOC), and invited myself up for a visit. “I want to see what you do to produce such a wonderful product,” I told her.

“It’s all Mother Nature and a lot of handling,” Scully told me as we boarded a skiff and set out on the sparkling Damariscotta to visit her sites. As we surveyed the scenery, the 38-year-old marine scientist filled me in on the oyster-farming process and her guiding philosophy: to make enough money to live in Maine and to do things the hard way, if necessary, in order to preserve the environment. Eventually, we pulled up to a 34-foot long work barge upon which three teenagers were busily scrubbing and sorting muddy oysters. “This is our crew,” Scully said, and almost on cue Scully’s 40-year-old husband and partner, Kevin, pulled his boat up to the barge. Kevin had spent the day diving for oysters and when I shook his hand I marveled at how cold it was.

“We are the only oyster company in Maine that harvests oysters exclusively by diving,” Scully said proudly as we motored back to shore.

Clearly, the Scullys’ conscientious management techniques are paying off. Last year GPOC shipped nearly 600,000 oysters to high-end customers such as Legal Sea Foods in Boston and the Old Ebbitt Grill in Washington, D.C. Scully even sells her product to individuals from other oyster capitals. “A lot of my clients from the Chesapeake Bay say they will eat my oysters and my oysters only,” she boasts modestly. It’s not just their attractive texture and slightly brackish flavor that epicures find so desirable, though. Scully says people tend to trust her oysters since Vibrio vulnificus bacterium, a naturally occurring, disease-causing organism, is not known to be viable in the frigid waters of the Damariscotta.

Oyster aficionados are often blindly loyal to their own oyster-producing states. MFK Fisher emphasizes this point in Consider the Oyster. The famous food writer once met a man from Corpus Christi “who put his gun on the table while he stated quietly that anybody who said Texas blue points weren’t the best anywhere was more than one kind of liar.” I don’t know if I’m willing to go that far for any mollusk, but I do believe in supporting the efforts of local farmers, especially when they produce a product as fit and as fine as Glidden Point oysters.

Jill Strauss can be reached at straussj@adelphia.net.