STONINGTON – The food writer Molly O’Neill was tugging meat out of a lobster claw the other night in the kitchen of the Community of Christ Church. Dick Bridges, a lobster fisherman from nearby Sunset, was standing next to her explaining his recipe for lobster chowder. Water, potatoes, onions, salt, pepper, basil and steamed lobster sauteed in butter. Plus two sticks of butter per four or five lobsters.

Ah, but fried lobster tail, a preparation in which the tail is removed from a lobster, shelled and fried in butter, is superior, Bridges said. A less well-known and rarely practiced method, the quick frying preserves flavor better than steaming or boiling. “It doesn’t get any better than that,” he said.

O’Neill asked Bridges what he remembered about lobster from his childhood years.

“They used them in the garden as fertilizer,” he said, just as Bobbi Billings walked by. “I hate lobster,” she said. “We lived off it when I was younger. It’s all we could afford.”

Recipes and stories such as ones told by Bridges and Billings were exactly what drew O’Neill, best known for her lively writing in the New York Times, to Deer Isle. After the April release of “Mostly True: A Memoir of Family, Food, and Baseball,” her book about growing up with five sports-loving brothers in Ohio, O’Neill is now working on a cookbook about community dinners and home cooks. Called “One Big Table,” the book will be a culmination of community recipes based on years of reporting on food. She is now traveling around the country cooking and eating – and writing down recipes and family memories – at town halls, church suppers and other community gatherings. Stonington was the first stop on her culinary map. During the weeklong stay, she also visited home cooks on Mount Desert Island and Brooksville.

“I’m trying to create a portrait of America at the table,” said O’Neill, who lives in New York state and travels by car with Tootsie, an affable bearded collie with bangs pulled up in a decorative hair clip. “After a decade of recipe gathering, I’ve started a systematic gathering – here in Stonington with fish. There’s a very high proportion of intergenerational cooking history here. What I’m finding is that the area is consistent with how the recipes of one generation give way to the recipes of another.”

For instance, cod was once salted to preserve it. With the development of refrigeration, another generation no longer needed to salt the fish but did so anyway because of nostalgia for the flavor. Then came the addition of pork to cod, then a politically driven generation that apologized for combining cod and pork. And now, said O’Neill’s hosts on the island, cod supplies are so diminished that arguing about recipes takes a backseat to passionate discussions about replenishing stocks so fish can be abundantly featured in any kind of dish again.

“Between depletion and regulation, the fisherman is really disadvantaged,” said Robin Alden, executive director of Penobscot East Resource Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fisheries from the Penobscot Bay islands to Jonesport. “We’ve lost the critters to catch and the permission to go after them.” She was talking about Maine’s historic groundfish such as haddock, pollock, hake, flounder and cod, that her group says have been compromised by over-fishing, technology, pollution, coastal development and regulation. “It’s all about fishermen taking responsibility for stewardship. We’re not a lobbying group. We’re a community group trying to figure out what to do for the future.”

Alden organized the dinner, inviting fishermen, cooks and others in the community to eat with O’Neill and to tell stories of fish and fishing in the past and the present. Members of the eight-person Stonington Fisheries Alliance, a community-based resource management group that typically meets around meals, were ready with opinions about federal regulatory actions, distribution of fishing permits, lobster as a single economic resource and the survival of not only fish but a traditional fishing community – all hot-button issues among these islanders.

“I used to drag scallops,” said David Heanssler, who lives in Sunshine. “So I’d fish for lobster until December and scallop until April, and then take a month or so off until shedder season. Now I stay lobstering until it gets poor for me. I fish until the end of January or the first of February. Last year, my wife and I went to Biloxi to help rebuild after Katrina. I had scalloped for 38 years.”

Such stories flowed easily from this collection of lifelong fishermen with ruddy complexions and leathery hands.

“We are so dependent on lobster right now,” said Alden. Her husband Ted Ames, the lobsterman and ecologist who won a 2005 MacArthur “genius” award for his work to restore cod, was also at the dinner. “If lobster goes down from its record highs – as it will no matter what – the fishermen in these communities no longer have options to shift to another fishery.”

The alliance is working with other regional groups to propose an amendment next year to the New England Fishery Management Council to be a pilot community-management program in eastern Maine. The goal is to rebuild groundfish in the area and open limited fishing to locals.

“I have always believed the answers, the voice of stewardship is in the fishing community, and that needs to be given to them and heard,” said Alden. “If the local level isn’t speaking for the fishery, it won’t survive. This is the chance.”

If there are fishermen who do not acknowledge the precariousness of relying on one fishery or are not interested in diversifying the selection, they were not among the 20 or so diners dipping butter-slathered biscuits in big bowls of chowder that night.

Four fishermen donated 50 pounds of lobster for the chowder, and many of them helped pick the meat. They worked side by side in the kitchen, cracking shells and tossing small fists of cooked lobster into a bowl. “Twenty years ago, you wouldn’t get a group of fishermen together like this,” said Bridges. “Why? They didn’t talk. They didn’t let anything out.” O’Neill stood by, sometimes picking meat, sometimes writing in her notebook. When she left the kitchen, it was to chat with other guests.

O’Neill listened intently as Lisa Turner, a fisherman’s daughter from Isle au Haut, listed the ingredients for her biscuits, which received applause at the end of the evening. In the tradition of chowder dinners, several people took small bags of biscuits home. Tootsie, the dog, scavenged one that bounced onto the floor from a mountainous pile on a table. With the recipe recorded, O’Neill asked Turner other questions, which she answered without missing a loop in the baby’s outfit she was knitting. Are the biscuits served with stew or chowder? (With any meal, said Turner.) Did you ever eat them for breakfast? (Toasted with peanut butter.) What dishes do you remember from childhood? (Corn cake.) How do you like to cook your turnips? (Boiled with a little sugar.) Do you like lobster? (Uh-huh.)

“It’s interesting that other people want to know the old way of life and your family’s way of cooking,” Turner said later. “When you ask about the way people eat, you learn where they come from and how they’ve had to make do. We didn’t have a store all the time on the island. You had to learn how to substitute and be organized with provisions and supplies. The lucky thing about living around here though was that my father could always go dig a mess of clams.”

After a dessert selection of homemade cakes and pies, including a custard one made by Bridges, dishes got washed and leftover chowder was packed in containers. Like O’Neill’s notebook, everyone was a little fuller. Come back again, the neighbors said to their new friend as they headed out into the night.

For Alden, the parting words also apply to the work she is doing. “Come back again” might be the call to the fish she, the fishermen and their families are making to historic marine life in the waters surrounding them. For O’Neill, the call is also about remembering another time when the food on the table reflected the rich diversity once in those waters.

“I love what they’re doing,” said O’Neill. “I’m looking for recipes, and they’re trying to make sure we have the ingredients to make them.”

Alicia Anstead can be reached at 990-8266 and aanstead@bangordailynews.net.