I always envied Dick Van Dyke when I was younger. He actually got paid to kiss Mary Tyler Moore on television every week. (I’d have done it for free, but she didn’t know that.) She comes to mind each year when the weather turns warmer, and it all has to do with Maine’s favorite seafood delicacy.
Now, with tourist season ending, Mainers are starting to get our outdoors back. Once again, all the lobsters are ours. But, not everyone is enthusiastic about the notion of boiling live lobsters for a feast, though. With the clockwork regularity of the annual Red Sox heartbreak, each summer is greeted by a scolding in the media by the aforementioned actress and animal-rights activist over our cruel practice of tossing live lobsters into boiling water. For that matter, have you ever notice – I can’t write that line without feeling like a Downeast Andy Rooney – that when it comes time to toss the critters into the pot, everybody evacuates the kitchen for someplace where they can’t year the screaming and thrashing of their death-throes? Come to think of it, I find it disturbing myself.
You say you don’t like that part of the ritual either? Well, before you sit down with your plastic bib on and write a letter to the editor of this paper accusing me of something subversive, let me say that it is not necessary to boil those luscious morsels alive if it upsets Aunt Martha and the kiddies. You see, while lobsters are actually purchased alive because they spoil so quickly once they are dead, there is actually no culinary or other reason not to kill them in a more humane way just before cooking them!
While researching a book that I wrote on carving meats and seafood many years ago, I came across a technique for dispatching lobsters that is widely practiced in European kitchens and realized it was the same one used in my parents’ restaurant. Simply place the live lobster on your carving board and hold a large French knife vertically, with its tip at the point where the head joins the carapace. Strike downward smartly on the handle of the knife with the palm of your hand and the knife will sever the spinal cord, killing the lobster instantly. Then toss it in the pot. Given the primitive nervous system of the animal, this technique effects an immediate and virtually painless shutdown. Many of my backyard barbecue guests, most of whom can’t get enough of whole lobster, lobster salads and lobster rolls, have embraced this method of lobstercide once I showed them that it doesn’t change the flavor and eliminates both the cruelty and the need to stick your fingers in your ears.
My dear, would you pass the melted butter?
Bob Jorgensen is an author and essayist who lives in Bath. He has written several cookbooks, comes from a restaurant family and fancies himself something of an amateur gourmet chef.