Connections: Shellfish Follies

My Uncle Herman, the baby among my mother’s siblings who is well into his 90s now, took me to Lindy’s, the midtown Manhattan restaurant, when I was about 13 for a lobster.

I remember feeling paralyzed as I wondered what I was supposed to do with it and his telling me to just imitate the way diners at other tables were attacking theirs. The only seafood my parents indulged in when I was growing up had come from Jewish delis — smoked whitefish, for example. 

Fifteen years later, when I came to East Hampton, I was initiated into the joys of myriad shellfish. A quick learner, I would show off my newfound knowledge when others “from away” timidly asked whether, for example, local clams were okay. “Of course!” I would tell them, smugly.

At the time, I couldn’t imagine that some day the answer might be “no,” that our pristine harbors would, at least on occasion, have to be closed to shellfishing, particularly after heavy rains, or that the crabs I had fun going after at Georgica Pond would some day be off-limits. If anyone, local baymen included, understood what the inevitable effects of population growth here would be they weren’t saying. I learned to love all the shellfish available here, as well as the remarkable variety of fish from local waters. 

All this has changed. The future health of our waterways is in doubt. 

This week, Georgica and Wainscott Ponds were once again found to be loaded with cyanobacteria, a toxic blue-green algae. To their credit, the East Hampton Town Trustees continue to pay for a study of the waterways in their jurisdiction by a Stony Brook University scientist, and the Nature Conservancy has sponsored an educational film about nitrogen as the basic culprit. 

  So it was when I ordered oysters at a local restaurant recently, I thought I was taking a chance. Honest-to-goodness native oysters, the delicious ones from Shinnecock Bay, for example, aren’t usually on menus here. It turned out that the oysters I ordered had been farmed somewhere in Peconic Bay, which, for me at least, made their quality suspect. Nevertheless, there was nothing wrong with them — except for a lack of saltiness and scant flavor.

Don’t get me wrong, farmed oysters are better than none, and those called Montauk Pearls, which come from a local company which grows them in Lake Montauk, are excellent. But making do with something that is reminiscent of what used to be is tinged with sadness.

As for lobsters, I  like them as much as anyone else and still consider them a treat. But I know their numbers are declining in Long Island waters and that someday the better part of valor might be to simply remember what they were like.