Life Is Meals_ A Food Lover's Book of Days - James Salter [67]
In England, there has been a long tradition of adder soup, and adder diets were fashionable in France until the 18th century. They were thought to be healthful and to enhance beauty. Mme de Sévigné, famous in French literature for letters to her daughter, urged her daughter to go on a month-long adder diet annually.
We had a large house near Chinon one summer, and the gardener warned us to watch out for vipers on the extensive grounds. There were many, he said, but they could be frightened away if they heard you coming. The best thing to do, he said, was to wear a bell around your ankle. That seemed a little too prudent. We were also afraid he was trying to make fools of us, ignorant foreigners. We went without the bells, and no one was bitten.
GLASSWARE
Glass in 18th-century England was a sign of wealth, and windows were taxed so heavily that people bricked them up. In the case of table glasses, the result was more positive. Glasses were taxed by weight, so there was every incentive to produce the lightest possible designs, often with delicate stems.
For economic reasons, Ireland was exempt from the tax. There the leaded glass invented by Englishman George Ravenscroft in about 1675 flourished in coastal towns like Waterford and Cork, where fuel, in the form of coal, was available and cheap. Using Ravenscroft’s techniques, George and William Penrose founded the Waterford Glass House in 1783, which prospered for over sixty-five years before falling beneath the weight of a tax law that extended to Ireland, along with the potato famine that forced many skilled workers to leave. Waterford Glass—crystal—wasn’t revived for another one hundred years.
LOBSTER
The lobster begins life as one of ten thousand to twenty thousand fertilized eggs that the female slowly releases into the sea. She has carried them for nine months or more. The eggs hatch into larvae about one-third of an inch long, and these swim in the water for several weeks within a few feet of the surface, where they are helpless prey to seabirds and fish. Those that survive become good swimmers and descend in the water, searching for a suitable place on the bottom to hide.
For several years, the young lobsters live thus, in small tunnels, crevices, or concealed beneath seaweed, rarely venturing forth. They molt—shed their shell and form a new one—many times as they grow, and as adults continue to do so about once a year, lying on their sides and flexing their bodies to work out of the old shell, which they then eat to help make the replacement.
Lobsters grow more quickly in warm water than in cold. In the icy North Atlantic, it may take six or seven years before a lobster weighs one pound and reaches market size. Males grow faster than females and have larger claws; the females have larger tails (abdomens, actually).
The grown lobster is a marvelous, formidable creature, dark blue or greenish in color. It is nocturnal, solitary, and territorial. The males, like many mammals and birds, will fight to establish dominance, and females seek out the largest, strongest males.
Mating occurs just after the female has molted, and the act is surprisingly gentle, the male turning the female’s unprotected body over with great care. European and American lobsters are virtually the same species, though the American type grows slightly larger. The various species from tropical waters, lacking claws, are not true lobsters, though they are commonly called that. Codfish and flounder will eat small lobsters, but their one great enemy is humans.
The only lobsters you are likely to see are the unlucky ones, caught and destined to be eaten.
In selecting lobsters:
• Look for the liveliest ones, those that thrash their tails and move their claws.
• Among those that are about the same size, the heaviest will have more meat.
• Be sure the shell is hard—the hardest shells come from the coldest