Buttered Rubber
I’ve never been much of a seafood fan. I have found myself in plenty of situations over the years where it was impossible to avoid eating seafood. Obviously, there is seafood and there is fishy seafood. I’ve enjoyed plenty of shrimp cocktail, fish & chips, Haddock fish sticks, Fillet-o-Fish sandwiches, crab cakes and even an occasional light, white broiled sole or swordfish or other flaky fish. What I steadfastly avoid is oily fish, sushi, salmon (my wife’s go-to dinner-out order) and, strangely enough, lobster.
I lived for three years in Maine between the ages of 12 and 14, so formative years. I learned lots of wonderful things during those three years living in Vacationland, as they say on the Maine license plates. I learned about golf, tennis, canoeing, skiing and even duck hunting. Many of those stayed with me as positive additions and others, like duck hunting, fell by the wayside. I learned how to whistle loudly, how to live away from home (I started prep school there) and lots about commerce (mostly retail on a golf course) and gambling (the perils of locker room Acey-Deucy). What I did not learn was how to love lobster and steamers.
People go crazy over lobsters and steamers, so there must be something to them. For those three years I lived in Maine, it seemed that every time my family went out to dinner, the top item on the food chain (apologies for the mixed metaphor) was lobster, followed closely by steamers, or steamed clams.
Let me spend a moment on steamers. Steamers are hard shell clams, known as quahogs. I owned a home in the Hamptons for fifteen years in a town called Quiogue, often mistaken for the next-door town of Quogue. If you look at a map of the Hamptons you will see a big, round land mass jutting out into Quantuck Bay. It looks like a clam, so maybe that is why the local Indians called it Quogue. But since they were not likely in possession of aerial photographs, they probably called it Quogue because they could harvest quantities of quahogs from the Bay. Sometime later someone saw that the smaller landmass to the west, jutting into Quantuck Bay looked like a small clam, so the Indian name for small clam led to Quiogue. Anyway, these clams range from the smaller ones, called littlenecks, then medium-sized ones topnecks, and finally, the larger one’s cherrystones. Bigger than that are just called gobstoppers.
These clams are steamed alive with a bunch of stuff like seaweed and corn, which I suppose seems like fun to the outdoor cooking crowd. People who would otherwise protest cruelty to animals have no problem boiling these poor little shellfish, screaming in their quiet little way, to the end. But then, at the moment of truth, the eating stage, there is a bowl of drawn butter to ease that nasty, gooey glob (with the occasional crunch of sand or worse) down one’s throat. OK, butter tastes good, so I understand the attraction. I have one question: how hungry was the first guy who decided to swallow a raw or steamed clam before he decided to drown it in butter?
But back to the lobster. You need to go to the bottom of the ocean, preferably at night, to find a lobster. These nocturnal creatures look nasty and mean, but they move so slowly that most people don’t get too scared of them (Woody Allen and Diane Keaton notwithstanding). Tape their claws shut and the worst they can do it tickle you with their antennae. Lobsters are also cooked alive, but it’s so much worse than with clams. You can’t see the clam fight back, but the lobster is trying its best to climb out of the boiling pot so you can watch its very death struggle while you wait for your dinner.
Lobster size is a good thing versus clams that get tougher as they get big. Bigger lobsters live at deeper depths since they thrive in colder water. My bank once financed a company with the idea to deep-sea harvesting big lobsters. Everything went well until it was discovered that the deeper and colder you go in the ocean, the lobsters do, indeed, get bigger, but they also get less mobile and walk into the baited traps less. The company investigated its problem by sending down a remote camera and saw all the big lobsters napping near the traps, but not walking in. Oops.
It’s therefore a job harvesting lobsters, but they are viewed as quite a delicacy and command quite a nice price per pound. When you go into a restaurant, even on the New England coast, you find that the most expensive item on the menu is usually a big old lobster that you pick from a live tank (one more barbaric aspect of the process of eating lobster). They will bring you a plastic bib in case you didn’t understand the barbaric ritual and weapons of destruction like nutcrackers and picks to get at every last bit of flesh in the nooks and crannies of the exoskeleton.
I succeeded in getting through sixty-five years of life (three in Maine, as I said) without ever ordering a lobster. My rationalization was that as inoffensive as the flesh of lobster tastes (it’s not at all fishy) and as much as I like drawn butter, it never seemed worth it to me. Well, this week I broke my streak and ordered a lobster at a fish restaurant for no particular reason. My negotiation with the waiter ended with me getting a de-shelled 1.25-pound lobster with coleslaw and French fries. What came was a small metal dish with bits of pink lobster floating in buttery water. It was only slightly larger than the annoying coleslaw metal mini-cup, so it certainly didn’t look like $25-worth of food.
When I fished out a small piece to lobster to start, I realized that the watery butter was not as lovely as a cup of drawn butter that would have coated the lobster meat otherwise. I popped it in my mouth and proceeded to chew the lobster. After a dozen chews, I realized that this was a lot like chewing a rubber band, I wasn’t getting far. I finally got it down and thought to cut smaller pieces for my next go. After a few bites I realized it was not getting any better. I was eating buttered rubber with a nice pink color.
My lobster experience requires me to paraphrase Woody Allen. Lobster is a perfectly OK buttered rubber meal but at least the portions are small. I think I will wait another sixty-five years before I order it again.