Perhaps no food conveys a sense of place like the oyster. To tip back a Cape May Salt or Forty North Rose Cove and sip its brine is to kiss its native waterway on the lips, in a paraphrase of French poet Léon-Paul Fargue. It is to commune with season and location, a humble creature transformed by salt and time into something far more grand. It is to taste the point where river gives way to sea, the best of […]

Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters

The Barnegat Bay is a muse who holds her secrets close, reserved for the initiated. Even locals can miss the stories submerged within her depths. Case in point: A few years ago, Long Beach Island resident Corinne Ruff was walking the shoreline and got to wondering. Where had all of the oysters gone? A century back, she learned, a thriving industry lined pockets, filled plates and supported a vast reef system and healthy Barnegat Bay. As on the Delaware, overharvesting […]

Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters

As the sun comes up at Money Island Marina, where the Nantuxent Creek and Delaware Bay come together, ship captains and their crews head out onto the water. Aptly named, Money Island is the epicenter for oystering on Jersey’s west coast, where most of its open-harvest catch is landed. By all accounts, that trade is brisk. Peering over the dock from his rustic baymen’s shop, Marina manager Bruce Muenker will tell you that a lot of profit is generated at […]

Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters

Well before the average 26-year-old has even thought about hitting snooze, Bridgitte Maxwell is up and heading out onto the bay with her Dad, John, and her “Poppop,” Donald, on the Captain Curtis Maxwell, a dredge named for her paternal great-grandfather. You want to see the definition of hustle? Spend time with a rising oysterwoman. This is good, old-fashioned work. Read between the lines of his wry, salty demeanor—one honed over years on the water, and delivered via a constant […]

Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters

The next time you dive into a plate of Eastern oysters—the species known as Crassostrea virginica, native to the Eastern Seaboard and Gulf Coast—tip your half-shell to Rutgers before you recycle it. Were it not for the late Harold H. Haskin, university researcher and namesake of the Haskin Shellfish Research Laboratory at the Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences, that raw bar that just moved into town might not be there. Roll back the clock, and the turn-of-the-19th-century docks […]

Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters

“Everyone knows about the Chesapeake Bay, and the romanticism of the Chesapeake. But there is definitely a disconnect between people on land and on water, especially along the Delaware Bay.” Rachel Dolhanczyk would know. As curator for the Delaware Bay Museum at the Bayshore Center in Bivalve, she spends her days sharing the stories that reveal the region’s rich history. The word “rich” is key: Though it may surprise a bayside road-tripper today, many millionaires were christened along these waters a […]

Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters

When fifth-generation bayman Dale Parsons Jr. thinks about the reef he’s building in Little Egg Harbor Bay, he thinks about his 3-year-old daughter. What kind of environment will he leave for her? What will the family business look like, should she take it on? Certainly, the Parsons family, whose work on these waters dates to 1909, has seen its share of changes. “All of Barnegat Bay was productive at one time,” Parsons says. “You could take a shell and put […]

Categories: food & drink, on the water • Tags: farming, oysters