Lobster by Elisabeth Townsend

Author:Elisabeth Townsend
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

5

Killing and Cooking (Humanely)

The quintessential nightmare of attempting to cook lobster at home is portrayed in Annie Hall, a 1977 Academy Award-winning American film: Annie’s romantic dinner is wrecked when the live lobsters fall to the floor and one escapes, hiding behind the refrigerator. Her boyfriend, played by director and co-writer Woody Allen, wisecracks, ‘Maybe if I put a little dish of butter sauce here with a nutcracker, it will run out the other side.’ Clearly, cooking live lobster is not for the squeamish. But avoiding the same disaster in your own kitchen is pretty easy. The biggest quandary now is how to cook this crustacean humanely at home. Now there’s the chill, kill and grill (or boil) approach; and the stun gun.

Around the world, people buy their lobsters live and there are almost as many ways to kill a lobster as there are to cook it. To see one man’s approach visit ‘How to Kill a Lobster’, Trevor Corson’s lobster blog, where he demonstrates how to slay a lobster with a knife in both pictures and narrative. He advises first chilling the lobster in the freezer for about fifteen minutes before humanely dispatching it, but forewarns that this is a delicate manoeuvre that can cause injury to the chef. With the body upside down, you split the body or carapace all the way up through the head with a sharp knife. Don’t worry if the hind legs and tail still flutter – it is dead. Then cook it right away. A former lobster fisherman, it’s obvious that Corson is concerned about the stress both to the lobster and the chef. But that’s just one lobsterman’s opinion.

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