I had been imagining lugging the three lobsters home in a bucket, but the guy just stuck them in a paper bag. He said to keep them in the refrigerator. He said they’d be good until Thursday. Ick.
On the drive home, the back of my neck tingled and my ears stayed pricked for the sneaking crinkle of a lobster claw venturing out of a paper bag, but the lobsters just sat there. I guess suffocating will do that to a body.
Julia gets pretty terse in her description of homard thermidor. She always seems to go Delphic on me in my times of need. She doesn’t speak about the storage of lobsters, for one thing. Another book hinted that they should be lively and thrashing when they came out of the tank. Hey, mine didn’t thrash. It said if they were limp, they might die before you cooked them. It seemed to think that was a bad thing. I peeked into the paper bag in the refrigerator and was faced with black eyes on stalks, antennae boozily waving.
I had read up on all sorts of methods for humanely euthanasing lobsters: sticking them in the freezer; placing them in iced water, then bringing it to the boil (which is supposed to fool them into not realising they’re boiling alive); slicing their spinal cord with a knife beforehand. But all these struck me as palliatives, thought up more to save the boilers from emotional anguish than the boilees from physical. In the end, I dumped them out of the paper bag into a pot with some boiling water and vermouth and vegetables. And then freaked out.
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The pot wasn’t big enough. Though the lobsters didn’t shriek in horror the second I dropped them in, their momentary stillness only drew out the excruciating moment. It was like that instant when your car begins to skid out of control and, before your eyes, you see the burning wreck that is your destiny. Any second, the pain would awaken the creatures from their asphyxia-induced comas. I knew it, and I couldn’t get the goddamn lid on! It was too horrible. My heroic/homicidal husband, Eric, had to take things in hand. I’d have expected him to collapse, just like me.
People say lobsters make a terrible racket in the pot, trying — reasonably enough — to claw their way out of the water. I wouldn’t know. I spent the next 20 minutes watching a golf game on television with the volume turned up to Metallica-concert levels. When I ventured back into the kitchen, the lobsters were bright red and not making any racket at all. Julia says they are done when “the long head-feelers can be pulled from the sockets fairly easily”. That they could. Poor little beasties. I took them out of the pot and cooked down the liquid with the juices from some mushrooms I’d stewed. I strained the reduced juices through a sieve, presumably to get rid of any errant bits of head-feeler or whatever, then beat it into a light roux I’d made of butter and flour.
When Eric and I start our crime conglomerate, he can be in charge of death, I’ll take care of dismemberment. He had to leave the room when I read aloud that next I was to “split the lobsters in half lengthwise, keeping the shell halves intact”.
I pulled the rest of the meat out chunk by chunk, cracking open the claws, using tweezers to pull the strips of meat out of the legs. The sieved “green matter” got beaten into some egg yolks, cream, mustard and cayenne, poured into the lobster broth/roux sauce, and boiled. I sautéed the meat in butter, then poured in some cognac and let it boil down. Then I stirred in the stewed mushrooms and two-thirds of the sauce. I heaped the mixture into the four lobster half-shells, poured the rest of the sauce over, sprinkled with parmesan and dotted with butter, and ran them under the grill. They were, I must say, delicious.
The second murder went much as the first: steamed in water spiked with vermouth and some celery, carrot and onion. The rosy-red dead lobster was bisected in just the same way, its flesh removed, and again its shell was stuffed with its sautéed meat, this time smothered in cream sauce made with the cooking juices. I think I overcooked it a little.
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I confessed to Eric, as we sat down to our homard aux aromates, that cutting lobsters in half was beginning to prove eerily satisfying. “I just feel I’ve got a knack for this shit.”
Eric looked at me, and I could see him wondering where the finicky, soft-hearted young girl he had married had gone. “By the end of this, you’ll be comfortable filleting puppies.” Homard à l’américaine awaited.
I didn’t know why I was doing this, I really didn’t. I didn’t want to kill lobsters.
My final victim was another Chinatown denizen. He was spryer than his predecessors, flailing around in his bag for the entire subway ride.
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I put him in the freezer for a while when I got home to try to numb him, maybe make it go a little easier. After half an hour or so, while Eric retreated to the living room and cranked up the volume on the television, I took the lobster out of the freezer and laid him on the cutting board.
Split the lobsters in two lengthwise. Remove stomach sacks (in the head) and intestinal tubes. Reserve coral and green matter. Remove claws and joints and crack them. Separate tail from chests.
“Well, gosh, Julia, you make it sound easy.”
The poor guy just sat there, waving his claws and antennae, while I stood over him, my largest knife poised at the juncture of chest and tail. I took a deep breath.
It’s like shooting an old dying dog in the back of the skull — you’ve got to be strong, for the animal’s sake.
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Go ahead. You can do it.
“All right, all right. One. Two. Three.”
I pressed down, making an incision in the shell where Julia said I could quickly sever the spinal cord. The thing began to flail.
“He doesn’t seem to think this is particularly painless, Julia.”
Chop it in two. Quickly. Start at the head.
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I quickly placed the tip of my knife between its eyes and, muttering, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” plunged. Oh God. Oh God.
Clear blood leaked off the edges of the cutting board onto the floor as the lobster continued to flail, despite the fact that its head was now chopped neatly in two. The muscles in its chest gripped the blade, so the hilt of the knife trembled in my hand. I sawed away at the thing, managing to get about halfway through before I had to leave the room to clear my head. However, I think, perhaps, I might have been approaching a zen-like serenity when it comes to crustacean murder — because when I re-entered the kitchen to the sight of the giant thing, pinned to the cutting board with a huge knife and still squirming, instead of being horrified by man’s inhumanity to lobster, I giggled.
After that, things got easier. I had the thing cut into four pieces, plus detached claws. I cleaned out the intestines and green matter. The pieces of the thing kept twitching, even after I threw them into hot oil. My victim was fricasseed with carrots, onion, shallots and garlic, doused with cognac, set on fire, then baked in the oven with vermouth, tomato, parsley and tarragon and served on top of the rice. I arranged the rice into a ring on the plate, as Julia asked. I’ve committed brutal murder for the woman, so why not make a rice ring? I piled the lobster in the middle and ladled the sauce over.
“Dinner’s served.”
Extracted from Julie & Julia, by Julie Powell, published by Penguin Fig Tree on Feb 23 (£14.99). Available from the Sunday Times Books First for £13.49 (inc free p&p), call 0870 165 8585
HOMARD AUX AROMATES
Serves 6
For the lobster
700ml dry white wine (or 425ml dry white vermouth)
425ml water
1 large onion, thinly sliced
1 medium carrot, thinly sliced
1 celery stalk, thinly sliced
6 parsley sprigs
1 bay leaf
¼ tsp thyme
6 peppercorns
1 tbsp fresh or dried tarragon
3 live lobsters, 900g each
For the sauce
20g flour, blended to a paste with 20g butter, softened
About 285ml cream
3-4 tbsp fresh chopped herbs (parsley, chervil and tarragon — or parsley only)
Simmer the wine, water, vegetables, herbs and seasonings in a large, stainless-steel or enamel saucepan, with a tight-fitting lid, for 15 minutes. Bring to the boil and add the live lobsters. Cover and boil for about 20 minutes. The lobsters are done when they are bright red and the long head-feelers can be pulled from the sockets fairly easily.
Remove the lobsters, but leave the vegetables in the pan. Rapidly boil down the cooking liquid until it has reduced to 400ml. Take the pan off the heat and beat in the flour and butter paste. Return to the heat and bring to the boil for 15 seconds. Reduce to simmering point and stir in the cream by tablespoons, until the sauce is the consistency of light cream soup. Correct the seasoning to taste and stir in the herbs.
Split the lobsters in two, removing the stomach sacks (in the heads) and intestinal tubes. Arrange in a serving dish, pour over the sauce and serve.