The Art of Eating In - Cathy Erway [108]
The next day, Tuesday, I got an e-mail from Matt. Earlier, he had reported that Lauren had agreed to come to SOS, but since a friend of hers was in town from France, she’d have to bring him along, too. The four of us were just fine with this—a mystery man, why not? And from France, no less! Plus, it would even out the girl-to-guy ratio and bring our group of diners to ten.
Matt’s message began, “NOOOOOOOOO! p.s. I told you she liked you better than me” (signed, “Dash Probington”).
I scrolled down to see the forwarded e-mail below. In a previous message, Matt had offered to cover Lauren’s $35 dinner price, and she’d followed by saying, “Oh, that’s really sweet but I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly accept it. Plus, my girlfriend would be really jealous if she found that a nice man such as yourself were treating me to dinner.”
I cackled aloud. Perfect—Lauren was not only in a relationship, but also a lesbian. We really should have considered things like sexual orientation before starting our date seeking. I forwarded the message on to Karol and Jordan and giggled to myself the rest of the day.
The Saturday of the dinner, I spent the entire day cooking. I’d already braised the beef cheeks for six hours the night before and done some other prep work, too. I’d gotten the beef cheeks from a small butcher in the West Village, one of the only places that had them through special preorder. The cheeks were enormous in size, big juicy slabs of tough, red meat. I was shocked at first, not quite sure what to do with them. But I went with the normal route of braising stew meat, and cut them into larger-than-normal chunks. I patted them with a little flour and salt and pepper, and browned them in my Dutch oven. Then, once I had added red wine, a couple of carrots, onions, and celery, I brought the pot to a boil and stuck it inside the oven, covered, to braise the rest of the night.
The lobster was a lot trickier to cook. I picked up two live lobsters that morning from a seafood market in Chinatown. It felt ludicrous to tote live lobsters in a double-wrapped plastic bag on the subway home. I’d cooked live lobsters and other crustaceans before, on family vacations by the shore. I wasn’t looking forward to killing the things myself, of course. But, I figured, this was the reality of cooking and eating animals, and somebody had to end their lives at some point. That whole week I’d scrounged the Internet for tips on the most humane way to kill lobsters. I found a lot of theories, and the one I most consistently saw (aside from slicing the head in half deftly with a sharp knife) was to stick the lobsters in the freezer for fifteen minutes before boiling them. This would put the animal into a state of “shock” and was thought to sort of anesthetize the creature before the otherwise agonizing boil. This seemed simple enough to me. Keeping the lobsters in all their baggage, I stuffed them into my freezer the moment I got home and slammed its door shut.
Really, no one knows what the least painful death for lobsters is, except for lobsters. Studies have shown it’s impossible to determine, or we just don’t have advanced enough science to figure out what goes through the lobster’s limited brain. There are some who say that they might not even be capable of feeling pain at all. All we know, and all that the theories are based on, is intuition—from chefs, fishmongers, years of tradition, and experience with the animals. It’s true that chefs have a special connection with animals they must kill before cooking. There’s an intimate knowledge of the animal’s reactions, and almost every chef seems to consider the comfort level of the animal when he or she puts it down.
I filled my largest stockpot with water and brought it to a boil. Fifteen minutes after they had been in the freezer, I took the lobsters out. Now, you have probably gathered by now that I’m not really a girly-girl about such things. But when I held the first lobster above the water with tongs (true to the advice