How to eat lobster
21 - 25 July, Ian
On Thursday evening our friends Steve and Helen
and their children Ben and Esther arrived in Ellsworth, having flown from
Chicago to Boston and driven up in the day; they stayed at a motel and we spent
virtually all of the weekend with them. I lived in close quarters with Steve
and Helen in various forms of accom (hall, house, flat) for three years while we
were at university, all studying mathematics. After we graduated Steve and
Helen moved to Chicago where Steve did a PhD and worked on the university
faculty for a while and Helen, who always had dual nationality, qualified as an
actuary. Steve also gained his actuarial qualifications and now works as a
research actuary. In my line of work my experience has been that math(s) has
been used (in contrast to how I see Steve working) like another ingredient in
the snake oil: even as I write, someone somewhere is sprinkling mandrake roots
over a spreadsheet that implements equations of dark and dubious provenance. In
truth, this probably suits our temperaments: Steve is more academically
rigourous than me. We both, unusually,
enjoyed
our mathematics, doing as much of it as we could (in fact we both took extra
masters classes). When we graduated I was pleased enough to clear the hurdle to
a First with a 10% margin, while Steve, eschewing all the non-maths options that
I took ("a bit of philosophy, a bit of psychology, a bit of f*ckology", as
Johnny Rotten snarls - approximately - at the start of the Pistols' cover of
No
Fun) focused intensely on modules you could
score top marks in and led the year with an overall exam rate of 99 or 100%.
Helen also got a First. Over the years that I've known her, continuing to this day, alongside the rest of life's trials Helen has been engaged in an odyssey of religious discovery, and it's been interesting and enriching for me to discuss this with her, originally at university and then as we've met up over the years. I last saw Steve around Christmas time in London but it's been a couple of years since we met the family. Since then Ben, who is now 12, has matured noticeably and seems to have grown quieter while Esther, who is now 10, has also matured a lot and has grown noisier. I think it's a first/second child thing. They're both great children with a pile of interests. (Ben recently posted a web page that almost instantly attracted between 10 and 100 times more hits than our homepage has had in 4 months.)
We met on Thursday night at a restaurant in Ellsworth called Cleonice, which was just as good as the kayak lady who recommended it to us had claimed. I had a seafood paella that was everything that the same dish at the port of Casablanca had not been (fresh, moist, laden with an interesting variety of sea food). If you're ever thinking of going to Casablana, by the way, change your plans and go somewhere better instead (Fes, Marrakech...).
Over the weekend we re-ran some of the activities that Paula, Zoe, Heidi and I had done previously. We walked up and down Cadillac Mountain again, this time in perfect clear weather rather than under close cloud cover. I also notched up my second snake sighting this month: a bright green grass snake. I wish that I could photograph them but it isn't going to happen (even if I get a camera upgrade): the two that I've seen have been motionless until I get to them, when they've instantly slithered out of sight in a rapid wriggling S. We visited pristine Castine one day and Bar Harbour three or four times. We also played crazy golf a couple of times, which is really fun.
In Castine on Saturday then in Bar Harbour on Sunday we had contrasting lobster meals. At Castine we had a lobster roll from the store I mentioned previously. Lobster rolls are made in a two step process. The off-line start-of-day step is to crack open a load of lobsters and consolidate the meat into a tub, where it is bound with a little mayonnaise. The run-time step is to heap a load of this lobster meat into a brioche-style roll. Those in Castine really are delicious. They use only hard-shell lobsters. "Hard-shell" indicates that the lobsters have been living in their shells for a while when they're trapped, in contrast to the soft shell lobsters, which have only recently grown their shells. As you will know, lobsters periodically shed their shells as they grow out of them. Shell-less they crawl under a rock and hide for a month while a new shell grows. In order to give themselves growing room in their new shell they bloat themselves up with water while it grows. This, which is my point, is why the best lobster rolls are made with hard shell lobsters: the soft shell ones are watery, not meaty! This is the type of stuff they should teach you at school: don't know about you but my Biology O level required that I know the word ecdysis but didn't help me with a menu pick. Well, we sat and ate our lobster rolls on a low wall in the sun, looking out over the beautiful harbour and it was great.
We had our second lobster meal in a pretty restaurant in Bar Harbour, seated outdoors, again in the sun. The service at this place was dire in numerous ways too dreary to describe: the sort of service that when it's inflicted on you at home, which is almost as rare as it is here, makes you wish you were in the US (another reason for calling this New England, perhaps). The food, though, was fine. This time we had the whole lobster. Apart from a subtle incision along the tail, the lobster on the plate looked just like the lobster in the sea except that it had lost the blueness from the joints that the live ones have. When Paula was a vegetarian I used to find it strange, though admirable, that she would willingly crack upon an animal such as this using brutal hardware and pick out the insides with a fork, while not being prepared to eat, say, a sausage. Morally, I like the direct connection between the food product and the animal: it has a primitive honesty. Our lobster was good and came with steamers (a type of large clam), which were also tasty. They serve it with a pot of drawn butter in case you need to slap on some fat - personally I can do without it, more on grounds of taste than health.
The size of lobsters in restaurants, at least here in Maine, is constrained by the laws regarding what the trappers can keep. Too small and they have to throw them back to maintain the breeding stock; too large and they throw them back, presumably out of respect for the age. The largest lobster caught, I'm told, was 53 pounds, which is probably heavier than Heidi. They don't know how old lobsters are because they can only age the shells, which don't serve to age the animal. One of the Rangers here speculated that they could get to a couple of hundred years - but no one knows.
Of these two forms of lobster meal I don't know which I prefer. It seems like an epitome of a US-European choice. The US preference must be for the convenience and value of the roll: you do get more meat per dollar (which is strange considering that there's added labour in preparing the roll) and it's easier to eat. The European choice must be for the actual creature displayed artistically on an oval white plate, with the taste augmented by the exercise of skill in extracting the meat. Both steamed whole lobster and the rolls seem far preferable to me than the other preparations, which lose the delicate flavour of the animal. In my opinion you'd have to have eaten a lot of it before you overwhelmed it as creamy orange lobster thermidor, for example.
But then I prefer crab.
Apart from touring around we spent much of the last few days here at the cabin. The weather was perfect for our friends' trip and the kids spent a lot of time canoeing and swimming in the lake. Here's a grainy snap of Zoe and Ben:
When we leave Maine it will be the lake that I miss most. The canoes are so relaxing.
When our friends left the sun temporarily left with them and yesterday we had another deluge. Paula and I had our hair cut in a salon in the Bangor Mall. Paula had a nice time and was suitably pampered, while my experience was a little shocking. The last time I'd had a hair cut was when I'd had a cut and shave in Fes, which went just as I'd hoped (probably because, out of fear of how it may end up, I'd carefully practised all of the required vocab to specify what I wanted). My man in the medina had evidently never done a non-local before and took his time to do it well. Yesterday I just breezed in and asked for a wash and cut. The whole thing took little more than ten minutes and I ended up with a cut that would get me in the military. I think it comes down to the rural aesthetic - far distant from the massage chairs, cappuccino and MTV of Tony and Guy - according to which a hair cut for a man is a utilitarian transaction that has nothing to do with pleasure or style. I asked Heidi and Zoe separately to rate the cut from 1 ("put a bag over your head and don't stand near me") to 10 ("must always return to the same stylist, optimistically hoping that she'll manage to attain the same degree of perfection"): kindly, they agreed on a 5.
I also found time, in the couple of hours between the end of my cut and the end of Paula's, to tidy up our mail addresses. ianandpaula@mac.com remains primarily an address that I use, though Paula does check up on emails that have interest to her, and Paula's email remains dearpaula@yahoo.co.uk, and I've now set this up for off-line use, too. Now, though, I've aliased my account to provide Heidi with dearheidi@mac.com and Zoe with zoegreen@mac.com, so please use these if you mail the girls. (I also made myself the alias dearsir@mac.com for all the non-personal stuff you need an email address for.) I'm phasing out ianandpaula@yahoo.co.uk since it only seems to gather junk these days. And I've now upgraded my mac o/s to Tiger, which is the sort of excellent software that all of us working in IT would like to be associated with.
Helen also got a First. Over the years that I've known her, continuing to this day, alongside the rest of life's trials Helen has been engaged in an odyssey of religious discovery, and it's been interesting and enriching for me to discuss this with her, originally at university and then as we've met up over the years. I last saw Steve around Christmas time in London but it's been a couple of years since we met the family. Since then Ben, who is now 12, has matured noticeably and seems to have grown quieter while Esther, who is now 10, has also matured a lot and has grown noisier. I think it's a first/second child thing. They're both great children with a pile of interests. (Ben recently posted a web page that almost instantly attracted between 10 and 100 times more hits than our homepage has had in 4 months.)
We met on Thursday night at a restaurant in Ellsworth called Cleonice, which was just as good as the kayak lady who recommended it to us had claimed. I had a seafood paella that was everything that the same dish at the port of Casablanca had not been (fresh, moist, laden with an interesting variety of sea food). If you're ever thinking of going to Casablana, by the way, change your plans and go somewhere better instead (Fes, Marrakech...).
Over the weekend we re-ran some of the activities that Paula, Zoe, Heidi and I had done previously. We walked up and down Cadillac Mountain again, this time in perfect clear weather rather than under close cloud cover. I also notched up my second snake sighting this month: a bright green grass snake. I wish that I could photograph them but it isn't going to happen (even if I get a camera upgrade): the two that I've seen have been motionless until I get to them, when they've instantly slithered out of sight in a rapid wriggling S. We visited pristine Castine one day and Bar Harbour three or four times. We also played crazy golf a couple of times, which is really fun.
In Castine on Saturday then in Bar Harbour on Sunday we had contrasting lobster meals. At Castine we had a lobster roll from the store I mentioned previously. Lobster rolls are made in a two step process. The off-line start-of-day step is to crack open a load of lobsters and consolidate the meat into a tub, where it is bound with a little mayonnaise. The run-time step is to heap a load of this lobster meat into a brioche-style roll. Those in Castine really are delicious. They use only hard-shell lobsters. "Hard-shell" indicates that the lobsters have been living in their shells for a while when they're trapped, in contrast to the soft shell lobsters, which have only recently grown their shells. As you will know, lobsters periodically shed their shells as they grow out of them. Shell-less they crawl under a rock and hide for a month while a new shell grows. In order to give themselves growing room in their new shell they bloat themselves up with water while it grows. This, which is my point, is why the best lobster rolls are made with hard shell lobsters: the soft shell ones are watery, not meaty! This is the type of stuff they should teach you at school: don't know about you but my Biology O level required that I know the word ecdysis but didn't help me with a menu pick. Well, we sat and ate our lobster rolls on a low wall in the sun, looking out over the beautiful harbour and it was great.
We had our second lobster meal in a pretty restaurant in Bar Harbour, seated outdoors, again in the sun. The service at this place was dire in numerous ways too dreary to describe: the sort of service that when it's inflicted on you at home, which is almost as rare as it is here, makes you wish you were in the US (another reason for calling this New England, perhaps). The food, though, was fine. This time we had the whole lobster. Apart from a subtle incision along the tail, the lobster on the plate looked just like the lobster in the sea except that it had lost the blueness from the joints that the live ones have. When Paula was a vegetarian I used to find it strange, though admirable, that she would willingly crack upon an animal such as this using brutal hardware and pick out the insides with a fork, while not being prepared to eat, say, a sausage. Morally, I like the direct connection between the food product and the animal: it has a primitive honesty. Our lobster was good and came with steamers (a type of large clam), which were also tasty. They serve it with a pot of drawn butter in case you need to slap on some fat - personally I can do without it, more on grounds of taste than health.
The size of lobsters in restaurants, at least here in Maine, is constrained by the laws regarding what the trappers can keep. Too small and they have to throw them back to maintain the breeding stock; too large and they throw them back, presumably out of respect for the age. The largest lobster caught, I'm told, was 53 pounds, which is probably heavier than Heidi. They don't know how old lobsters are because they can only age the shells, which don't serve to age the animal. One of the Rangers here speculated that they could get to a couple of hundred years - but no one knows.
Of these two forms of lobster meal I don't know which I prefer. It seems like an epitome of a US-European choice. The US preference must be for the convenience and value of the roll: you do get more meat per dollar (which is strange considering that there's added labour in preparing the roll) and it's easier to eat. The European choice must be for the actual creature displayed artistically on an oval white plate, with the taste augmented by the exercise of skill in extracting the meat. Both steamed whole lobster and the rolls seem far preferable to me than the other preparations, which lose the delicate flavour of the animal. In my opinion you'd have to have eaten a lot of it before you overwhelmed it as creamy orange lobster thermidor, for example.
But then I prefer crab.
Apart from touring around we spent much of the last few days here at the cabin. The weather was perfect for our friends' trip and the kids spent a lot of time canoeing and swimming in the lake. Here's a grainy snap of Zoe and Ben:
When we leave Maine it will be the lake that I miss most. The canoes are so relaxing.
When our friends left the sun temporarily left with them and yesterday we had another deluge. Paula and I had our hair cut in a salon in the Bangor Mall. Paula had a nice time and was suitably pampered, while my experience was a little shocking. The last time I'd had a hair cut was when I'd had a cut and shave in Fes, which went just as I'd hoped (probably because, out of fear of how it may end up, I'd carefully practised all of the required vocab to specify what I wanted). My man in the medina had evidently never done a non-local before and took his time to do it well. Yesterday I just breezed in and asked for a wash and cut. The whole thing took little more than ten minutes and I ended up with a cut that would get me in the military. I think it comes down to the rural aesthetic - far distant from the massage chairs, cappuccino and MTV of Tony and Guy - according to which a hair cut for a man is a utilitarian transaction that has nothing to do with pleasure or style. I asked Heidi and Zoe separately to rate the cut from 1 ("put a bag over your head and don't stand near me") to 10 ("must always return to the same stylist, optimistically hoping that she'll manage to attain the same degree of perfection"): kindly, they agreed on a 5.
I also found time, in the couple of hours between the end of my cut and the end of Paula's, to tidy up our mail addresses. ianandpaula@mac.com remains primarily an address that I use, though Paula does check up on emails that have interest to her, and Paula's email remains dearpaula@yahoo.co.uk, and I've now set this up for off-line use, too. Now, though, I've aliased my account to provide Heidi with dearheidi@mac.com and Zoe with zoegreen@mac.com, so please use these if you mail the girls. (I also made myself the alias dearsir@mac.com for all the non-personal stuff you need an email address for.) I'm phasing out ianandpaula@yahoo.co.uk since it only seems to gather junk these days. And I've now upgraded my mac o/s to Tiger, which is the sort of excellent software that all of us working in IT would like to be associated with.
Posted: Tue - July 26, 2005 at 10:12 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM