Eating - Jason Epstein [17]
LOBSTER ROLLS
I had already poached and chilled the two-pound lobster and removed the meat from the tail and claws, which I cut into roughly half-inch cubes. I mixed it with Hellmann’s mayonnaise for the authentic Maine-coast lobster-shack taste, and two stalks of celery chopped not too fine so as to lose its crunch and sweetness but not so large as to distract from the lobster meat. Then I covered the bowl and left it in the refrigerator to chill.
After I had served the warm bass salad and removed the yellow plates with the blue fleur-de-lis that my son, Jacob, and his wife, Susie, had sent from California, I melted two tablespoons or so of butter in an iron skillet large enough to hold four top-sliced hot-dog rolls. When the butter stopped bubbling, I added the rolls and cooked them until they had browned slightly—barely a minute on each side—being careful not to let them burn in the hot butter. Then, holding each hot roll in a kitchen towel with one hand and a pair of tongs in the other, I piled the chilled salad into the hot rolls almost to overflowing, sprinkling the tops with a pinch of paprika. Lobster rolls have lately become popular in New York restaurants, but they are not always successful. Too often the meat is cut or even ground into small dice or shreds, resulting in a watery, flavorless salad served at room temperature or, in one egregious case, served warm, whereas the classic preparation calls for substantial, slightly chilled chunks, too large to leak and become watery, contrasting with the warm roll, whose toasted sweetness combines wonderfully with the different sweetness of the chilled lobster in its Hellmann’s dressing.
FIVE
A BACKWARD GLANCE
Long Island, whose clean waters supplied our lunch, stretches some 130 miles at exactly ninety degrees from New York City, ending in a split tail, its flukes known locally as the North and South Forks. Walt Whitman, who was born on the Island, compared it to a whale, its blunt head pressed up against Manhattan to the west and its forked tail marking the entrance to Long Island Sound. If you look at a map, you will see at once what he meant. Of the two forks, the South has always been the more prosperous, and with the coming of the railroad from New York in the 1890s, the more fashionable as well. The prosperity is the result of the retreating glacier at the end of the last ice age, some ten or twelve thousand years ago, when the melting ice exposed the rich compost amassed as the glacier, like a giant push broom, scraped its way south from what is now New England to the sea. The terminal moraine, a ridge which marks the southernmost reach of the glacier, runs down the spine of the South Fork from east to west. The outwash plain of rich topsoil sloping down from the moraine to the sea—even today, after nearly four centuries of aggressive cultivation—produces miracles summer after summer. You can stand on the beach and see the thick layer of black soil where it has been eroded by the sea, sandwiched between its top layer of grass and bottom layer of white sand.
The rich soil and the even richer whale fishery, oyster beds, and waters teeming with finfish, lobster, and crab, to say nothing of waterfowl, must have seemed like paradise to the Kentish settlers of the South Fork in the seventeenth century. The bounty shipped by these settlers to the Indies from the port of Sag Harbor, where I live in an old Federal house surrounded by trimmed boxwood and old perennial gardens, made them rich. They named their villages after the English places from which they had come: Riverhead, Wainscott, Southampton, Maidstone (which the Americans changed to East Hampton after the Revolution; amid Sag Harbor’s old houses this can still seem like a recent event). Some descendants of these early settlers still live and farm here. But it was the railroad speculators, promising their hapless investors that Montauk, the fishing village at the tip of the South Fork, would become the western terminus of transatlantic sea routes, who brought the train to eastern