How to Cook a Moose (20 page)

Literary Lobster and Clam Condoms

Naturally, as new residents of Portland, we were constantly struck by the fact that this town was teeming with lobsters: pulled-in-for-the-winter stacks of lobster pots reeking in the late autumn air along Casco Bay, lobsters on license plates, lobster-shaped beer openers and lobster refrigerator magnets and stuffed lobsters in gift shops, guys sweltering in fuzzy red lobster suits down on Commercial Street all through tourist season, plush antennae bobbing. In fact, due to its ubiquity in Maine life, the lobster, rather than the moose, could easily be the state animal.

Before the settlers came, according to the Gulf of Maine Research Institute's website, lobsters were so common and plentiful that the Native Americans waded along the shore and caught them barehanded and fertilized their fields with them. They also used lobster meat as bait on their fishhooks to attract “better” catch.

Despite the abundance of lobster, though, it seems the Wabanaki didn't actually eat them. As the website of the Acadia National Park
Service informs us, “Archaeological evidence shows that Wabanaki families on Mount Desert Island one thousand years ago hunted and harvested a variety of land and sea animals. People ate seals, porpoises, white-tailed deer, moose, beaver, and many varieties of birds. They fished for sculpin and flounder at high tide on mudflats and gathered sea urchins, clams, and blue mussels, which were steamed open to reveal the delicate meat. However, Wabanaki people avoided one particular Maine ‘delicacy'—lobster. Only one lobster claw has been discovered in twenty years of excavating Maine coastal sites.”

Europeans, however, had been eating lobster since Greek and Roman times; the British, who prized them, brought this knowledge of lobsters' edibility with them to the New World, although the colonists quickly came to disparage them, maybe because they were so huge and plentiful. In colonial times, lobsters were harvested from tidal pools.

According to James M. Acheson in
The Lobster Gangs of Maine
, “The English settlers who came to the Popham Colony off the mouth of the Kennebec River in 1607 reported that they gaffed fifty lobsters for food within an hour. Captain John Smith of Virginia, who visited Monhegan and Midcoast Maine in the early 1600s, enthusiastically described the plenitude of lobsters that could be taken in any bay. The lobsters were said to be of enormous size, some measuring up to five feet long.”

Likely because of this surfeit and ease of catching, as well as their weird insectlike appearance and the brutish preparation and awkwardly messy consumption (there really is no graceful or refined way to eat a whole boiled lobster), lobsters were considered “poverty food” and fed to children and prisoners, as well as the indentured servants who'd exchanged their passage to America for seven years of service to their sponsors.

(Apocryphal stories have it that the servants evidently considered lobster roughly on par with bread and water; according to their
contracts, they weren't supposed to be forced to eat it more than three times a week, and when some employers failed to abide by this, their servants rebelled. This story is also, interchangeably, told about prisoners. Although no one can pinpoint the exact source, and its veracity is dubious, it does make an instructive point.)

In 1622, Governor William Bradford of the Plymouth Plantation apologized to a new arrival of settlers that the only dish he “could presente their friends with was a lobster . . . without bread or anything else but a cupp of fair water.”

Nonetheless, by the nineteenth century, lobsters had regained their former European culinary prestige here in the New World. According to
America's Founding Food: The Story of New England Cooking
, by Keith Stavely and Kathleen Fitzgerald, lobsters in New England were cooked “in sauces for other fish, or as accompaniments to roasts . . . When not potting lobsters, baking them in pies or using them in sauces, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century New England cooks were apt to stew or fricassee them . . . Boiled lobsters were served cold with dressing, not hot and ‘in the rough,' as we are most likely to encounter them today.”

Until the early 1800s, lobsters were caught by hand along the shoreline in shallow water and eaten locally. Large-scale lobster trapping, using boats equipped with seawater tanks in their holds, called smacks, didn't come into existence in Maine until the mid-nineteenth century, when demand for lobsters in Boston and New York turned north after the Cape Cod stocks had been overfished out of existence.

Shortly afterwards, to meet the growing demand in other places too far to reach by boat, since live lobsters don't travel well and their meat doesn't preserve well, canneries sprang up in Maine; the first was in Eastport in 1843. An enormous amount of lobster meat was canned and shipped around the world in those days . The canneries also canned and shipped fish, corn, shellfish, and clams. By 1880, there
were twenty-three lobster canneries operating on the Maine coast. Canned lobster meat quickly became so popular that by the second half of the nineteenth century, its value outstripped that of fresh.

At first, there were so many lobsters in the Gulf of Maine that anything smaller than five pounds was considered piddling. But the fishermen and canneries became so enthusiastic about the profitability of this new commercial enterprise, they colluded in stripping the Gulf of its bounty as fast as they could, so a mere twenty years later, they were happily canning lobsters as small as half a pound, called “snappers.” The lobsters were so overfished by this point, the whole fishing-and-canning operation moved north again, to Nova Scotia.

In 1872, in response to the sudden dearth of this once-plentiful resource, the lobster industry in Maine was regulated to prohibit the catch of females bearing eggs and any lobster smaller than ten and a half inches long overall. The fishery was closed seasonally, between August 1 and October 15. Suddenly, canning's profits fell off steeply, and by 1895, lobster canning had ceased in Maine altogether, and the canneries had either closed or moved on to other products.

On our daily walks along the Eastern Prom, toward the end of the paved path, we often notice the appetizing scent of baked beans wafting over the bay from the B&M factory at the edge of the water, toward Yarmouth. (This smell of molasses and vinegar is unfortunately often superseded by the smells from the sewage-treatment plant at the end of the Prom, but on some days when the winds are favorable, it triumphs.) I had assumed that the Burnham & Morrill Company had always been in the bean business, but in fact, originally, they were lobster canners who shipped lobster meat around the world. When the lobster industry became regulated, they were forced to switch to beans to stay in business.

This strict, universally observed regulation of the wild lobster stock did save the fishing end of things, and the lobster industry has
boomed to an all-new high in recent years, thanks to warming waters in the Gulf of Maine, whose once-teeming, plentiful fish—cod, pollock, hake, and haddock, and the fishing canneries they supported—have been just about wiped out. The absence of fish means no predators for the lobsters, which has also helped their numbers increase. Now, lobster is pretty much the only game left. It's the single sustaining catch of the state's economy, representing 80 percent of the value of Maine's fisheries. This lobster monoculture supports not only the fishermen, but also the boatbuilders, mechanics, bait sellers, and, of course, the tourist industry.

And so, in a strange twist of global-warming luck, increased temperatures have led to an all-time high in the lobster population. After a decades-long average of 20 million pounds per year of lobsters, 2013 saw a staggeringly huge total catch of 125 million pounds. However, despite this bonanza, according to
A Cruising Guide to the Maine Coast
, “The lobsterman himself hasn't changed much. Still fiercely independent, he goes out when he wants and wrests a living from the sea in winter and summer. He takes great pride in his boat, his self-reliance, and his ability to feed his family. He complains about the price of lobsters at the co-op, and the cost of fuel. He worries about overfishing and declining lobster stocks, and too many part-timers getting lobster licenses. He sees seals as lobster thieves. He gets angry about mussel-draggers and scallopers spoiling good lobster grounds. He doesn't much like all the regulations and the ‘Gummint Fishcrats,' as Captain Perc Sane calls them. But he hopes it will work out all right, and keeps on doing what he's best at—pulling lobsters from the bottom.”

Unfortunately, it probably won't work out all right. For now, the temperatures in the Gulf of Maine are in a “sweet spot” for lobsters, but as the heat increases—and it is increasing now, warming faster than any other body of water on earth—the thriving Maine lobster population will most likely collapse. Further south, in Long Island
Sound, as well as Connecticut and Rhode Island, the lobster industries collapsed in 1999, when their waters reached all-time high temperatures, compromising the lobsters' immune systems and causing them to die off, massively, of shell disease, a bacterial infection. Fifteen years later, those lobster stocks further south have not recovered, and it's likely they never will.

In an article called “The Lobster Bubble” published in August 2013 on
ThinkProgress.com
, Joanna M. Foster wrote, “If this leads to a crash in the Maine lobster industry, experts agree it would almost inevitably lead to irreversible gentrification of Maine's coast. While the going has been good, lobstermen have invested in bigger boats and more equipment to take advantage of the record lobster numbers. Much of this gear is owned by the bank. It's a bit like the housing bubble, and if the lobsters go, lobstermen won't be able to make their payments and the bank will have a glut of lobster boats.”

Foster continues: “The irony of the situation in Maine is that the lobster fishery is one of the best-managed fisheries in the country. Because the communities are so dependent on the resource, and by law all lobstermen are owner/operators in Maine, everyone out on the water abides by laws prohibiting the capture of egg-bearing females, large breeding lobsters, and small juveniles. If not for climate change, the lobster fishery could be extremely sustainable, a shining success story of a well-managed fishery.”

Oh, well. Damn it. Climate change sucks.

Farming lobsters, unfortunately, is tricky, due to lobsters' complex life cycles: They require expensive live feed in the larval stage, and they're cannibalistic when they get older, which is problematic on a whole other level. Meanwhile, other fishermen, many of them the sons and daughters of lobstermen, are looking into aquaculture of oysters and mussels. In 2009, a lobster fisherman named Adam Campbell, along with his sons, started an oyster farm on the island of North
Haven, in order to supplement the income from his lobster catch, and eventually, replace it. By 2013, oysters represented 60 percent of his income.

Foster quotes Campbell, saying, with the classic die-hard Maine attitude: “It takes about four years to get anything from a new oyster farm. When I was getting started, I was out on the lobster boat all day, and in the bay with a headlamp all night, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes. I know that growing oysters will never earn me the kind of status that bringing in a boatload of lobsters will around here, but I know that lobstering won't be this good forever, and this island is my home, where I met my wife and raised my kids. I'm not going to be pushed out.”

Fragile and provisional though their existence may be, for the time being, lobsters are still abundant around here. The lobster roll is easily the most popular dish in the state: chunks of tender, sweet lobster meat lightly tossed with mayonnaise, a bit of chopped celery, parsley, lemon juice, salt, and pepper, piled on a toasted, buttered soft roll and served with coleslaw on a wax-paper boat plate. Every local market has a bubbling, algae-smeared lobster tank filled with squirming, armor-plated little warrior-like sci-fi insects, claws banded to keep them from killing and eating one another, antennae waving with anthropomorphized indignation and panic.

Lobster is easy to cook at home: Toss the live, writhing, banded fighters into a huge pot of boiling salt water and clap the lid on for ten or fifteen minutes, depending on the size; some people claim they don't suffer as much if they're hypnotized beforehand by stroking their backs until they stand on their heads, but I'm more inclined to
believe those who swear by sticking them in the refrigerator beforehand to numb them, just long enough so they're still alive.

Haul them out of the boiling water when they're bright red, let them cool a little, and have at them with picks and nutcrackers, fingers and forks, dipping everything into melted butter and sucking out each leg and joint, and the head. The roe, a bright red-orange, dense, spongelike mass called coral, is slightly fishy-tasting, sweet, and delicious; the weird green stuff, called tomalley, which is the liver and digestive system, is prized by some, but not by me, although I love the rest of the beast.