Day 43: Silence of the Lobster

"We're going to get really medieval on lobster," our chef-instructor said.

And after a brief primer on how lobsters are essentially large insects, we did. No mercy.

The claws came off first. By hand, bent backwards and ripped apart like a wishbone. Then three knife cuts inside the first tail segment and off it went. The tail muscles flexed into a tight ball, as if the thing had a mind of its own and was pissed about the forced separation.

Knife tip straight down into the hard shell of the body, like a medieval knight vanquishing a fallen foe, then chopped through one end. Then again, through the front, and now the body was in half, spilling liquidy stuff – pasty fat, seawater? – before the legs got lopped off. Then I peeled the leg stumps back to expose and remove the gills.

The tail continued to writhe on my cutting board, a muscle memory protest. And it would keep on protesting, even after I skewered it (to keep it from curling) and up until in went into a hot saute pan.

Recollecting this feels a little cruel, but this is what happens to food that we eat. Too often we (consumers, that is) are way removed from the source of our food, so this was a good reminder of what being at the top of the foodchain entails. And shellfish are easy, by comparison. I've never slaughtered a chicken just prior to cooking it, for example.

Does it make lobster bisque taste better when you've fabricated (that's the nifty kitchen term) the lobster yourself? Yes. Yes it does.

Food in Fiction: Moby Dick

"A warm savory steam from the kitchen served to belie the apparently cheerless prospect before us. But when that smoking chowder came in, the mystery was delightfully explained. Oh, sweet friends! hearken to me. It was made of small juicy clams, scarcely bigger than hazel nuts, mixed with pounded ship biscuit, and salted pork cut up into little flakes; the whole enriched with butter, and plentifully seasoned with pepper and salt. Our appetites being sharpened by the frosty voyage, and in particular, Queequeg seeing his favourite fishing food before him, and the chowder being surpassingly excellent, we despatched it with great expedition."

Moby Dick, or, The Whale
Written by Herman Melville
First published in 1851

Day 38: Vichywhat? Vichywho?

Our chef-instructor demonstrated three soups yesterday, one of which provides a great example of how naming conventions, especially in the food world and especially when the French language is involved, can bring a hefty amount of mystique.

Exhibit P: Potato-leek soup. Or potage parmentier in French, apparently named for potato advocate Antoine-Augustin Parmentier (Google translate tells me potato in French is la pomme de terre). I presume the knife cut, which we practice on potatoes in class, is named for him, too.

Garnish the soup with julienned vegetables and it becomes potage julienne d'arblay, named for English novelist and French officer's wife Frances Burney D'Arblay. Because in those days they didn't have megacorporations to purchase naming rights like Whole Foods' potage julienne presented by AT&T.

Serve it cold and it more or less becomes vichyssoisse, named of course for the town of Vichy, one-time capital of German-occupied France during World War II. And yet, Julia Child, in her Mastering the Art of French Cooking, refers to vichyssoise as an American invention. I'll take her word for it.