The Omnivore's Dilemma - Michael Pollan [201]
I also had to abandon my overly ambitious plans for a seafood appetizer: grilled abalone. Abalone is a large mollusk that grows on the undersides of underwater rocks along the Pacific coast. Since the abalone population is languishing in California, it can no longer be hunted or sold commercially, but individuals crazy enough to do so may still harvest a strictly limited number: three per day. When, a few days after I’d bagged my pig, a friend who lives on Point Reyes invited me to forage abalone with him the following week—during a once in a blue moon low tide occurring, as you’ve no doubt guessed, at 5:30 in the morning—I figured I had nailed down my appetizer. So I set my alarm and managed to straggle down to the designated beach at dawn, not quite believing I would have to get into the ocean.
Alas, after surviving the experience of finding an abalone, I learned that it must be eaten absolutely fresh, since freezing abalone utterly ruins its texture. Which is ironic, or something, because looking for abalone, at least on the Northern California coast, involves utterly and completely freezing yourself.
Abalone are gathered during unusually low tides by wading and diving among and beneath underwater boulders and feeling around blindly for their upside-down football-size shells with hands too numb to feel anything—except, that is, the barbed spines of sea urchins, which happen to occupy many of the same underwater crevices as abalone. And if you’re lucky enough to avoid getting stuck by sea urchin spines, your probing fingers are liable to settle on the undulating slime of a sea anemone, recoiling abruptly therefrom in terror and disgust. All of this takes place beneath the bemused gaze of sea lions, the presence of whom I was informed is most welcome, since it indicates an absence of man-eating sharks. I might not have frozen myself quite so stiffly had I been wearing a wet suit that actually fit, but the only one available—my friend’s grandfather’s—was two sizes too small. This had the effect of cutting off circulation to my extremities at the very moment when they needed circulation more than they ever had before. I was out of the water for an hour before I regained enough sensation in my fingers to zip up my fly.
Gathering abalone was the most arduous foraging I did for my meal, and quite possibly the stupidest. I learned later that more Californians are killed gathering abalone each year—by getting dashed on the rocks, being attacked by sharks, or succumbing to hypothermia—than die in hunting accidents. Even if you’re better at it than I was (my two hours in the water produced a single keeper), there’s no question that you burn more calories looking for abalone than you can possibly collect, making this a perfectly absurd human enterprise. And yet one taste of fresh abalone supplies a fairly convincing explanation for the persistence of this folly.
We ate mine right on the beach, cleaning and pounding the big muscle on a rock, then slicing it and pounding it some more. We built a fire from some driftwood, and then cooked the abalone slices in a pan with butter, onions, and eggs. We ate our breakfast sitting on driftwood logs, watching the tide come in with the day, still fresh. The setting and the abalone, which has some of the chewiness of squid combined with the richer, sweeter flavor of a sea scallop, made this one of life’s most memorable breakfasts, almost (though in honesty probably not quite) worth the trouble that went into procuring it. When I got home I made abalone another way, brushing thin, well-pounded