Eating - Jason Epstein [28]
In a recipe that I contributed to the New York Times Magazine a few years ago, I described my surprise when I was preparing to grill a dozen or so lobsters, those companions of my childhood, in my Sag Harbor kitchen. This meant killing them first by plunging a stiff boning knife into the shell just behind the eyes, drawing the knife forward to split the head, and then reversing the blade to bisect the entire creature from head to tail. I had piled the lobsters on a counter next to the sink and, with no more consideration for their feelings than if I were opening an oyster or peeling a potato, reached for the first victim and split it in two. To my surprise, the other lobsters raised their claws in horror at what I had done and scuttled en masse backward. Some fell to the floor, others into the sink. I was faced with a dilemma, for it was plain that lobsters were not at all unfeeling like the potato, but kindred souls who dreaded violent death as much as you or I do.
I wish I could say that I snipped the rubber bands from the claws of the survivors, took them down to the bay, and let them go. Instead, I gathered them up and killed each one out of sight of the others. It was late. Guests were on their way, including my neighbor Craig Claiborne, the New York Times food writer, whom I had invited to try my new lobster recipe, and I had nothing else on hand except a shoulder of lamb, and no time to marinate and braise it. Moreover, to spare a lobster by eating a lamb was morally absurd. Though I offered this argument in my article, readers were offended and accused me of being as cold-blooded as the lobster itself. Nevertheless, my moral logic is correct—killing a lobster is no more brutal than eating a lamb killed by someone else. We are omnivorous: facing starvation, as our remote ancestors must have done much of the time, we will eat almost anything, including one another. In times of famine we still do. According to the anthropologist Marvin Harris, citing Cortés’s diarist, Bernal Diaz, the protein-starved Aztecs fattened their captives in cages and delivered them to priests to be butchered. Atop a pyramid, the priest removed the living heart while his assistants threw the arms and legs to the bottom, where they were boiled and served with moli sauce. Cortés himself witnessed an Aztec man eating a cooked baby for breakfast. Harris, who, like Freud, believes that our strongest taboos reflect our greatest temptations—we do not taboo putting our hand in the fire—conjectures that we taboo cannibalism not from high-mindedness but lest we be eaten ourselves. My friend Patrick O’Connell, the great chef/proprietor of the Inn at Little Washington, agrees. When I suggested some years ago that cooking for others is a gratuitous act of generosity, he said no: we feed others so that they won’t eat us.
There are other ways to cook a lobster besides cutting it open and grilling it, but, whatever method you choose, care must be taken not to toughen the meat by overcooking it, nor should it be undercooked. Some years ago, in Provincetown, where I was visiting my dear friends the late Norman Mailer and his splendid wife, Norris, we stopped at a lobster shack to pick up a couple of three-pound females. Norman had been a cook in the army and still liked to tinker in the kitchen, but on this occasion I was left alone to make our supper.
LOBSTER FRA DIAVOLO
I made a spicy marinara in a large porcelain cocotte by softening in olive oil some chopped onion, garlic, jalapeño, and celery, then adding a large can of San Marzano tomatoes together with some fresh midsummer tomatoes from the garden, a good handful of