Wednesday, April 12, 2006
Secret life exposed
Larry Bly
Larry Bly runs an ad agency and does freelance writing in the Roanoke area.
Recent columns
The reason that we call this column "Foodstuff" is because it's not just about restaurant reviews. Sometimes I review food-related books.
The Secret Life of Lobsters has been on every best-seller list you can imagine, including that big newspaper in New York. Being cheap (and not being able to afford lobster very often) I waited until this book came out in paperback; long after its initial release.
To be frank -- even though I'm still Larry -- I learned a lot about the life of lobster, including a lot of things I never wanted to know, such as do lobsters make love in order to have little lobsters?. Well, sort of. They don't so much "make love" as to just generally catch the essence of one another by sort of brushing the other. That's enough of that.
Lobsters, aside from being horribly ugly and spider-like, are mean. They often attack and eat each other, or just kill each other for sport. Guess they're sort of bored, moping around doing not much all of the time. The most dangerous time for any lobster, male or female, occurs when they molt.
Yep, they have to come out of that rather irregular and very complicated shell. And it's no piece of cake. "He (the male lobster)...sequestered himself in his shelter to molt. Wiggling out of his spent exoskeleton, he plumped himself up to an even more impressive size. His new shell was so soft he could hardly stand. The next time the researchers checked the tank they couldn't find him. Bits of his old shell littered the shelter. Closer examination revealed remnants of body parts....The other lobsters sat in their crannies, stone-faced. They had, it appeared, exacted their revenge."
And we thought dealing with the Victory Stadium was tough!
Lobsters live in a rough neighborhood. The rougher, the better. The terrain of the seafloor is filled with rocks for smaller lobsters to hide. Older lobsters seem to prefer bigger boulders. No fancy condos for these delicious tidbits.
The history set forth in this book is interesting. For instance in the latter 1800's, the size of caught lobsters did not matter --- they were plentiful; and besides, the lobster meat was pulled from the shells and shipped, canned and sealed, for lack of proper refrigeration. Only later when we started admiring them for their full-bodied beauty (and when refrigeration came about) did people outside of the lobster community start enjoying them full-shell and often fresh out of the tank. This caused another problem which had to be addressed -- over fishing the population.
And in an attempt to not kill off the young and those capable of making more lobsters, the "notching" of their tails came into practice in an effort to identify the ones that came to be known as "keepers."
Well, I could go on telling you more about this, but frankly you're either interested enough at this point to read it or not.
It's interesting though that after getting us so intimately acquainted with the lazy laggards that the last chapter addresses "How To Boil." Ugh. What this teaches us is what I learned on the beef cattle farm when growing up: Don't name them if they'll become a part of the food chain.
But even this chapter offers something of interest. It concerns the little problem of how to prepare them for eating. As you know, the more squeamish among us don't wish to be around when the poor old lobsters, smiles on their faces, are thrown into the boiling water to cook. They're thrown in alive (or they are no good to eat unless frozen) and you have to hear them scratching and squealing until -- well you know, "....unless he or she is stoic enough to employ the method favored by Julia Child and many other gourmet chefs (she was still alive when the book was written)--- which is to plunge a knife into the lobster's head." Well OK now. Time to quit and go home.
The Secret Life of Lobsters
Trevor Corson
Harper/Perennial Press
http://www.harperperennial.com
