Here's the Catch

"On the way home," Glen said, "the light came on."

That winter, during the shrimp harvest, the group tried a limited distribution through the Unitarian church in nearby Rockland, which made its parking lot available for deliveries to people who had signed up for shrimp. With that initial attempt, the Island Institute came on board to help. Laura Kramar, a senior fellow at the institute, contributed marketing expertise as the group developed the brand and expanded its market. Through the church, local food cooperatives and other organizations, subscribers soon signed up for the groundfish distribution last summer.

Those subscribers get access to the freshest seafood imaginable -- the only thing fresher would be catching it yourself -- at an affordable price. It's also (magic words) locally sourced, with a small carbon footprint. The fish doesn't travel to your kitchen from Hawaii or Chile or New Zealand, and it looks, smells and tastes all the better for it. And it's a good deal cheaper than what you can buy at seafood counters in supermarkets, where, even in Maine, fresh wild fish starts at about $7 a pound.

Last summer, I paid $360 for a share in Port Clyde Fresh Catch that entitled me to 10 to 12 pounds of fish, usually whole gutted cod, haddock or hake, sometimes supplemented with smaller fish such as flounder, delivered to me every Sunday for 12 weeks in the church parking lot. It worked out to $2.50 to $3 a pound. And yes, I still had to scale it myself and cut it into steaks or fillets, a messy but not unpleasant job that taught me a lot about fish anatomy. (It also taught me a lot about how much fish is inevitably wasted in processing, a waste that in my view could be put to good use developing high-quality feed for salmon aquaculture, among other things.)

Ten to 12 pounds a week is a lot of fish. I made fish stews throughout the summer, starting off with that hearty Maine standby fish chowder but also, drawing on my enthusiasm for the Mediterranean kitchen, bold combinations of Maine fish with tomatoes, saffron, chili peppers and cumin. I baked haddock steaks with Moroccan salt-preserved lemons and black olives, and I grilled chunks of cod, first marinating them in olive oil, lemon juice and a big handful of fresh chopped herbs from the garden. And I froze plenty of fish, including the heads and frames, or skeletons, of all these sea creatures, enough to keep going with even more soups and stews this winter.

I knew that come February, when the days are their dreariest, I'd make a soupe de poisson like the ones they serve in the old town of Nice, combining my fish frames with shrimp heads and shells to make a rich broth, seasoning it with tomato, garlic, fennel and saffron, then straining it and pushing all the fishy juices through a fine mesh and thickening the puree with a dollop of creme fraiche or the garlicky, spicy mayonnaise called rouille.

By the end of the summer, 200 enthusiastic members were in line for the weekly distributions. "The response was phenomenal," Kim Libby told me. As soon as the winter shrimp harvest was announced, most of us signed up again, sending checks for $105 or $210, which provided five to 10 super-fresh pounds a week for 12 weeks. That's about $1.75 a pound, the same price I might pay when buying from the ubiquitous shrimp trucks along the roads in Maine at this time of year; but with Port Clyde Fresh Catch, there's no question about quality.

I started the season with a pre-Christmas shrimp risotto, using the heads and shells of the handsome little critters to make the broth, then stirring the tender shrimp into the rice at the very end of cooking, after I'd taken the risotto off the heat. Just that residual heat of the rice was enough to firm up those babies and turn them a pinker shade of pink, contrasting nicely with the golden tan of the rice and with the deep green of chopped chives from a pot on the south-facing kitchen window.

Do I get tired of a few pounds of shrimp every week? No, not when they're as delicious and satisfyingly fresh as these are. That freshness means I can mimic a dish I was served by friends in Sicily, a refreshing salad of sweet raw shrimp -- or rather, just barely "cooked," as in a seviche, by a bath in citrus juice or vinegar -- tossed with fresh, slightly bitter arugula and fennel. With a stir-fry, I do the same as with the risotto, sauteing the rest of the ingredients, then stirring in the peeled shrimp off the burner, so they cook in the residual heat of the dish.

Gary and Glen Libby, and the other members of Port Clyde Fresh Catch, are determined to make this work, not just to provide a living for themselves but also to protect a resource that has sustained generations of Maine fishermen and their communities. Perhaps the most heartening outgrowth of their efforts is the sense that the fisheries regulators are starting to pay attention to the opinions and ideas of the experts: in other words, the fishermen themselves. And those fishermen experts are finally taking control of their own future.

Nancy Harmon Jenkins is a food writer and cookbook author who divides her time between Cortona, Italy, and the coast of Maine. Her most recent book is "The New Mediterranean Diet Cookbook" (Bantam, 2008).