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dried oregano, and a generous pinch of sea salt and fresh-ground black pepper, and left it to cook down with a little red-wine vinegar to taste. While the sauce was thickening, I cut the lobster tails laterally into two-inch sections, and in a separate pan seared the exposed meat in olive oil over a high flame until the aroma of the scorched shells filled the Mailers’ seaside kitchen. I then twisted the claws from the bodies and boiled them for ten minutes or so, cracked them with the back of a heavy knife, and dropped them, along with the tail pieces, into the warm marinara. After a minute I turned off the stove, leaving the lobster to finish cooking in the marinara but taking care to serve the dish before the lobster sat too long in the sauce and became ropy and dry. You will know when the lobster is done if it slips nicely from the shell with a few pokes of a fork. If it’s underdone, it will stick to the shell. If it’s overdone, it will slip from the shell without your help. You may cut into a piece to make sure it’s opaque, resilient, but tender all the way through. With a shower of fresh Italian parsley from the garden, chopped not too fine, and a sprinkling of hot pepper flakes to taste, this is what old-fashioned Italian restaurants call “fra diavolo.”

We ate the lobster over linguine with a bottle of Chablis beneath a perfect sky on the Mailers’ deck, facing the long curve of the town as it wraps itself around the bay.

SWORDFISH WITH MARINARA

The same marinara with an extra half-jalapeño, chopped;some pitted black olives;a small handful of capers, rinsed;a glass of dry white wine;fresh-ground black pepper; enough sea salt to bring up the flavor; and a generous handful of chopped Italian parsley to sprinkle atop the finished dish does wonders for swordfish. While the marinara is thickening, pat dry about eight ounces of very fresh swordfish per person, and in a hot steel pan filmed with a little olive oil brown the fish on both sides quickly, just enough to cook it through. Then serve the fish immediately, napped generously with the spicy marinara, sprinkled with the coarsely chopped flat-leaf parsley. Be careful not to overcook the fish, which should be tender but firm. If the swordfish is left to linger in the sauce too long, the fish will become dry and the sauce watery.

CHICKEN UNDER A BRICK

When I reminded Norris recently of this lunch, she remembered another time, when we bought some young chickens—pound-and-a-half pullets, as poussins or game hens were called then, and what my late friend Sal lacono called teenagers—butterflied them by removing the spines, fitting the tips of the legs through slits in the skin, folding the wings back to expose the breast, and pounding the birds flat with the side of a cleaver. This made a considerable racket in Norris’s spotless kitchen, which must have alarmed her, since she remembers the scene vividly while I had forgotten it. The idea was to cook these chickens lightly oiled in a dry pan under a brick or similar heavy weight, so that if all goes well the chickens will emerge from the process looking like lacquered road kill, a chicken pancake with the curve of the legs and thighs a mere tracery against the crisp skin of the flattened breasts. This is a famous Italian dish—pollo al mattone, or chicken under a brick—with an intense chicken flavor, since nothing is lost in the cooking, especially the chicken’s own aromatic fat. Norris remembers that when I had placed the lightly oiled chickens in a hot steel pan and fitted two foil-wrapped bricks over them, so that the entire surface of the birds touched the pan to brown evenly, I said that I needed a nap and asked her to reduce the flame and turn the birds over every five minutes, so that they would cook through without burning on either side. This request, which I had also forgotten, must have alarmed her even more than my pounding the chicken, since she recalled the moment with a shudder. When I make this dish now, I use a veal pounder rather than a cleaver, and a heavy pot half full of water instead of a brick,