“There’s 10 pounds of fish,” remembered Mary Reilly, an owner of Enzo, a rustic Italian restaurant in Newburyport, but then a home cook. “There were weeks I was tempted to chuck it in the trash, ” she said. “But these bright little eyes were staring at me.”

Like advice to the lovelorn, many community-supported fisheries offer online recipes and how-to videos. On the anxiety front, perhaps none matched Mr. Libby’s when he faced 1,500 pounds of gray sole with no idea how to fillet it. “We thought we’d go hire some fish cutters,” he said. “But there weren’t any.” (He has since trained a team).

Growth has been dependent on all sorts of factors, including geography. While Port Clyde, isolated on an peninsula about 45 miles northeast of Portland, has cut back on some of its deliveries because of distance, business is booming out of the commercial fishing port of Gloucester on Cape Ann, 45 minutes from Boston. The group, begun by the Gloucester Fishermen’s Wives Association, formed many years ago, buys from some 30 boats using hooks, gill-nets, trawls and traps, and collaborates with a local wholesale distributor and processor.

Though sustainability is part of the business model, how that plays out on the water is more complicated. Some fishermen are businessmen first, and environmentalists second or third. Writing on “The Pescavore’s Dilemma” in the magazine Edible Boston, Roz Cummins, a Cape Ann member, lamented the prevalence of cod in the group’s first year of distribution.

And not every fisherman uses sustainable fishing methods. Niaz Dorry, coordinating director of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance, argues that the issue isn’t the type of gear so much as the scale. “What really matters is who is behind the wheel and where they put their gear,” she said.

In Gloucester, the setting for “The Perfect Storm,” by Sebastian Junger, many houses have widow’s walks. Underlying two cookbooks the fishermen’s wives have produced are stories like those of Angela Sanfilippo, the group’s president, whose husband, John, was rescued at sea in 2005 after his boat, the Giovanna, was engulfed in flames.

Sharing recipes “has always been the dream of the wife,” Mrs. Sanfilippo said. Since the 1970s, the fishermen’s wives, many Sicilian, have routinely offered cooking demonstrations at church suppers and the like. The wives have always cooked and eaten a variety of species, including squid and hake, because “the husbands would bring them home,” she said.