When I was growing up, I wouldn’t touch lobster. Not that it was on offer all that often Chez Rogers. But once a year, come a summer Friday afternoon, there would be lobsters scrabbling around the bathtub, awaiting their fate. Which was my mother tossing them, one by one, into a vat of boiling water.
On Friday nights, my grandmother and Uncle Charlie came to dinner. And sometimes my aunt, uncle and (older) cousins came out from Newton. I suppose they all ate lobsters. My sister Kath, who was a lot more sophisticated an eater than I was as a kid, probably had one. But me? Nope. On lobster night, I opted for a tuna salad sandwich or something else that was meatless-for-Friday.
I don’t remember when I figured out that lobster was actually pretty damned delicious.
I do know that by the time I was waitressing at the Union Oyster House (summer of 1970), I was – along with every other waitress – grabbing little pieces of lobster sauté from plates that were sitting there under the heat lights, waiting to be picked up and delivered to the patron who’d ordered them. Those plates went out so depleted, I’m sure that folks must have complained about the meager portions. But there’s really nothing like a piece of fresh lobster drowning in drawn butter.
Most people didn’t order the lobster sauté, however. If they wanted a lobster, they ordered it BO (boiled) or BR (broiled and involving bread crumbs). Mostly BO.
At least half of those who ordered lobster BO didn’t have a clue how to eat it, so I became quite an expert at demonstrating how to open up a lobster and get at the meat: twirl the tail and thrust the meat through; crack the claws; twirl off the legs and tell people to suck the meat out; ignore the tomalley…or not. (We usually spotted and removed the tomalley – the slimy green stuff; lobster liver? - but sometimes it snuck through. I seem to remember that they used the tomalley in the bar, serving it on crackers. I seem to remember Louis, the head bartender, being pissed off if we didn’t deliver enough tomalley to him.)
Anyway, I could open up a lobster and extract the meat blindfolded. And, to me, there’s really no other way to eat lobster, other than BO with drawn butter. That is, other than on a lobster roll (best on a hot dog roll), which is how I’m more likely to have lobster these days. Which I do a couple of times a year, generally when I’m on the Cape.
I’ve cooked lobsters at home a couple of times, but the garbage is pretty messy and smelly
Even when they know how, most people don’t want to bother with having to open their own lobster. My husband was one of them. He loved lobster, but he’d either order Lazy Man’s Lobster or I’d take care of the lobster for him. And I guess as I drift more and more into the lobster roll camp, I’m another one of those who’d just as soon not go through all the contortions required to eat a lobster BO.
But I would never order a lobster roll in a place like, say, McDonald’s. When I get a lobster roll it’s always at a place that’s using fresh lobster.
However many restaurants, especially in non-lobster parts of the country, use processed lobster. and 6 million pounds of it comes from Shucks Maine Lobster.
The shucking at Shucks is backbreaking, ill-paid, smelly work, done largely by (surprise, surprise) immigrants
Workers pick meat from the claws, legs, and tails of the lobster. The meat will be rapidly frozen withes nitrogen, which extends its shelf live, and the tails are composted. (Source: Boston Globe).
But before the shucking commences, those little critters need to be dead. Thus:
The first order of business is feeding the lobsters into a large cylinder that Hathaway calls the “Big Mother Shucker.” The 16-foot-tall, 80,000-pound machine uses a relatively new technology in the industry called high-pressure processing…
The advantages include slaughtering the lobsters in about six seconds. [Owner Johnny] Hathaway says it is “the only humane way to kill lobsters.”
No more giant vats (or big soup pots on my mother’s stove) of boiling water, BO-ing those little guys. And good thing that lobsters aren’t particularly sentient – that’s true, isn’t it? – because I don’t imagine that the Big Mother Shucker is all that much more humane than tossing a lobster into the insta-death pot.
More important for the business, the machine helps shuck the raw meat from the shell.
Leaving less for the workers to shuck, which is a good thing. Because lobster processing in Maine is a big and booming and business, and there’s not a ton of folks who want to do this sort of work. (In addition to immigrants, the other major source of labor is “recently released prisoners.”)
Just how dreadful this work is?
At Shucks, after the lobsters are killed, the teams of men and women work in cool, windowless rooms, where they spend hours hunched over metal tables, using butcher knives to hack through mounds of lobster parts. Others oversee machines that extract the meat by compressing smaller parts of the lobster.
Yep. Sounds pretty dreadful.
Meanwhile, if demand for lobster is high and business is booming, there’s a problem looming.
Water in the Gulf of Maine is warming up, and that’s not good news for lobsters that enjoy living in the Gulf of Maine and/or those who enjoy harvesting and/or eating lobster from the Gulf of Maine.
Anyway, I’m already looking forward to my first Cape lobster roll of the summer. Maybe this year, I’ll go retro and go for a lobster BO, too. Yum in advance!
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