Oysters

It was just after noon when Eric Cantler docked the Diana at the Maryland Watermen's Cooperative in Annapolis. On the bottom of his workboat glistened a dark, wet heap of oysters -- early returns on the first day of Maryland's 1991-92 oyster season.Cantler, who has been oystering since he got out of school 20-some years ago, said yesterday that there seem to be a few more oysters on the Chesapeake Bay bottom this fall than there were last year."It's better," he said, as he and his son-in-law, Robert Sullivan, prepared to shovel their day's harvest into a bushel-sized metal bucket for transfer to wheelbarrows on the dock.

If the demise of the Chesapeake Bay weighs heavily upon your conscience, if you remember wistfully when the bay and its tributaries teemed with oysters, Michelle Cummins says she has the answer.Grow your own.By growing your own oysters -- under your pier, off your boat, wherever -- you not only help increase the number of oysters in the bay, but because the shellfish are natural filters, you also help improve the water, Cummins says.The petite, 24-year-old Pasadena resident is gambling that growing your own oysters is an idea whose time has come.

Maryland's watermen are looking to Virginia's experiments with Asian oysters to help revive their own flagging shellfish industry, and making environmentalists and Maryland officials a little nervous, fearing the effects of another foreign species in the bay. Scientists from the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences began testing the oysters, which have been genetically altered so they can't reproduce, in open bay waters a year ago. Now, the Maryland watermen...

This month another oyster season has opened across the Chesapeake, and yet another record-low harvest is almost certain.Maryland officials, meanwhile, continue struggling to find politically acceptable ways to conserve what remains. It is already too late for this winter.If you wonder how far the downward spiral can proceed before everyone agrees it is time to give the oysters a break, consider what happened last month in Virginia -- but brace yourself.It is hard to imagine a more dire situation than the one that faced the seven members of the Virginia Marine Resources Commission (VMRC)

Take 10,000 tons of concrete - in fist-sized and car-sized chunks - slather it with a layer of old shells and garnish with 500,000 baby oysters. What do you have? A recipe for Chesapeake Bay success, environmentalists and anglers hope. For the first time, a Maryland group building artificial reefs has seeded one of its largest projects with oysters in an attempt to find a new way to coax the bay's most important resident back home. And in another first, Dominion, the Virginia-based energy company, has paid $250,000 for the naming rights.

RECENTLY, I FOUND myself in a wood-paneled room in Washington in distinguished company.The setting was the Cabinet Room in the Old Ebbitt Grill, a restaurant around the corner from the White House. There weren't any Cabinet members present, but there was a Supreme Court judge, Antonin Scalia, and a well-known scribe, R. W. Apple Jr. of the New York Times.There was also a handful of members of the eating press, editors of publications such as Bon Appetit, Food Arts and Sante. But, in my view, the stars of the evening were the raw oysters and the 20 wines being served.

Two leading environmental groups voiced their support yesterday for trying to revive the Chesapeake Bay's native oyster rather than introducing Asian oysters into the estuary. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Nature Conservancy said they believe that native oyster restoration still holds promise - both ecologically and for the seafood industry - and does not pose the risks associated with putting Asian oysters into the bay. "Given the available information, the combination of native oyster aquaculture and enhanced native restoration clearly provides the best potential for progress with the least amount of risk," said foundation President William C. Baker.

OLYMPIA, Wash. -- Oysters from the beds of Puget Sound have been an exalted Northwest delicacy since the 1850s, when San Francisco gourmets paid $20 a plate to eat them. The best-known ones are Olympic oysters, critters too small to be enjoyed on the half-shell, customarily served already shucked in a big glass bowl so that you can gobble up dozens at a time.One of the most famous ways to eat "Olys" is in an omelet called a Hangtown fry. Served up and down the West Coast, and even in some fancier kitchens in other parts of the country, a Hangtown fry enfolds a couple of handfuls of oysters that have been quickly fried to crusty succulence, and is usually garnished with a few strips of crisp bacon.

As soon as weather forecasters mention "frost on the pumpkin," I crave oysters. By happy coincidence, the arrival of cool weather usually coincides with cooks convening in St. Mary's County, devising new ways to prepare Maryland's favorite mollusk. On a recent weekend, cooks at the National Oyster Cook-Off shared the stage of the St. Mary's County Fairgrounds with contestants in the National Oyster Shucking Championship. William "Chopper" Young Jr. of Wellfleet, Mass., won the shucking contest, opening 24 oysters in an adjusted time of 2 minutes, 49 seconds, or 7 seconds per oyster.

When the waters are cold, when the snow falls, when skies turn oyster gray - that is when it is time to enjoy oysters. These conditions aligned recently, creating prime bivalve-eating opportunities. On a brisk, biting-cold Saturday afternoon, I hustled over to Lexington Market and warmed my innards with a creamy bowl of oyster stew at Faidley's Seafood. I bought two pints of shucked Chesapeake Bay oysters and carried them home. It was so cold, the jars did not have to be packed in ice; they stayed plenty chilly in the car trunk.