Jane Grigson's Fish Book - Jane Grigson [103]
Thus (un) Common European lobster, and the North American lobster, are northern creatures. They like cool water and are not to be found south of the Bay of Biscay or of the coast of Maine. The crawfish or spiny or rock lobster, the lobster without the huge front claws, can live anywhere as far as temperature is concerned. This is the langouste and aragosta of Mediterranean restaurants. And it is as well to be aware of the difference, if you use Italian, Greek or Provençal cookery books, because you may be left wondering what to do with the claws of a common lobster and the fairly large supply of delicious meat in them. The answer is to remove the meat and use it to make up the tail meat, which is less copious in the lobster. I’m talking, of course, about recipes of the Thermidor type, where meat and sauce are served up in the shell.
Crawfish and lobster recipes are interchangeable, and frozen crawfish tails are now readily available. The flavour cannot be compared in quality with the lobster’s, partly because it is not so good to start with, but also because of the freezing. I have eaten ‘Caribbean crawfish with mayonnaise’ – a standard item on one cross-Channel ferry – which was tasteless to the point of nullity; an iced chewy fibre I would not have recognized had I eaten it blindfolded. Crawfish are caught around Great Britain, too, and I imagine one would be luckier with these.
Like most expensive foods, the lobster and crawfish are simple to cook. If they are bought cooked, you need only remove the shell and serve them with mayonnaise – or split them in half, crack the claws of the lobster, and serve them as they are. The meat can also be removed and reheated in one of the delicious lobster sauces – Newburg, Américaine, Mornay and so on. The creamy part in the head of the lobster, and the coral, if there is any, should be beaten into hot or cold sauces; the tail meat is usually cut across into slices; the claw meat diced.
HOW TO BOIL A LOBSTER
The best lobsters weigh ¾–1 kg (1½–2 lb). Larger than this they become cheaper, but are not so good. I once bought a 1½–2 kg 3–4 lb) lobster, and it was very poor. It is best to buy two or three smaller lobsters, for four or six people. Mrs O’Farrell’s advice is to grip the creature across the carapace, which should ‘be firm and unyielding, and if there is any inward movement of the fingers it should be discarded, as this indicates a recent shell-change and resulting loss of meat. A hen lobster has a wider body and smaller claws than the cock, but there is no difference at all from the culinary point of view.’
The ideal cooking liquid is its natural element, seawater, plus enough salt to make an egg float in it. Be guided by this when using tapwater – 175 g (6 oz) salt to 1¾ litres (3 pt) water is about right. Put the lobster into the cold water, and bring it up to simmering point: weight the lid to stop the lobster jumping out. This method is recommended by the RSPCA as being painless – the lobster gets dopier as the temperature rises, and expires quietly at 26 °C (80 °F). When simmering point is reached, allow 15 minutes for the first 500 g (1 lb) and 10 minutes for each 500 g (1 lb) after that. Remove the lobster, put it on a dish and allow it to cool in the larder.
Restaurants usually stick to the old method of plunging the lobster into boiling salted water. And many people insist that the flavour of lobster cooked this way is better. Michael Field has this to say in All Manner of Food: ‘Lobsters are at their best only if they breathe their last either in the dish in which they are cooked or