Rock Lobster

The B-52's









I have always loved lobster. There are stories of me, high chair age being taken out to dinner, ordering a Maine lobster boiled and not only finishing the whole thing off, but barely needing help getting into it. I don’t doubt this. I would have been perfectly happy living off the crustaceans. My ideal world being the daughter of a lobsterman.



When I was about 10, my mother and I took a trip to Nova Scotia for a Lobster Festival. I had a blast. My memory and my mother confirmed, I ate lobster for three meals a day for about a week. I remember two things about this trip from so long ago. First, a poor person dressed up in a lobster suit. I wanted the suit. Second was that we ate several meals at what amounted to church suppers. This is memorable to me only because it was THE LAST kind of venue my mother would have felt comfortable doing. I often wondered if we ended up there because it was the only game in town. Many years later when I asked, she laughed and said I was right. It was the church supper or nothing.


It’s been only recently that I’ve been brave enough to cook them at home. It’s surprisingly simple. I credit M. with that. It wasn’t that I had hesitation about tossing these live creatures into a pot. After all they are the sea’s cockroaches. It was that I wasn’t sure how long to cook them.


It’s funny. Lobsters are one of the few things I ate that I have no reservations about knowing what they are, where they come from and that I am clearly eating them.


M’s favorite lobster story though took place when we were back in school and just dating. We’d gone to a local restaurant for some significant occasion, now long forgotten. But the restaurant had a twin lobster special. My eyes lit up and M. insisted I should go for it. I did.


The lobsters arrived, propped up against each other like a dancing couple. Just shy of Daryl Hannah in Splash, I set to work and breaking them down, no meat let in shell. As the meal is going on, M. is growing more and more amused. After a while, I insisted on knowing what was tickling him.


Unbeknownst to me, at the table behind us was a family with two children. A boy, about 8 was facing me. M. said when my dinner arrived his eyes grew big, but as I proceeded to dissect the critter leaving it a mass of shells, his expressions grew more animate.


I felt terrible for weeks. But it has not quelled my desire for a lobster at any chance I can get.