Lobster by Richard J. King

Author:Richard J. King
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

One of Freeman McKown’s popular clambakes in West Boothbay Harbor, Maine, in which lobster was always the centrepiece. McKown ran these events from about 1890 to 1930.

In the 2005 film Brooklyn Lobster, Christmastime is a crucial money-making season for this lobster supplier – so they fly a ‘Santa Claws’ to advertise.

Sexual connotations have regularly been stirred in with the lobster’s status as expensive, decadent fare. Each year the Maine Lobster Festival crowns a pretty young local woman as the Maine Sea Goddess. She sits centre stage in a throne with a large green claw over each shoulder. Allegedly Alexander the Great so craved lobsters that the members of his court needed this food, either whole or as a sauce, to ‘allay his periodical paroxysms of passion’.34 In 1620 Dr Tobias Venner, in his Via Recta ad Vitam Longam, believed lobster to be an aphrodisiac. He advised that it ‘giveth much good and firme nourishment’ but one should be careful because lobster ‘maketh a great propensitie unto venereall embracements’.35 Venner’s views might have just been due to the food’s expense and rarity – as might be true today.36

This association of lobster with lust and sexual activity seems to have carried on through the centuries. John Smith wrote in ‘A Rhapsody upon a Lobster’ (1713):

The Lusty Food helps Female Neighbours,

Promotes their Husband’s, and their Labours;

And in return much Work supplies

For that Bright Midwife of the Skies.

Lobster with Cavear in fit Places,

Gives won’drous Help in barren Cases;

It warms the chiller Veins, and proves

A kind Incentive to our Loves;

It is a Philter, and High Diet,

That lets no Lady sleep in Quiet.37

A few years later poet John Gay composed ‘To a Young Lady’, in which the narrator sends a gift of an aphrodisiac (a lamprey) to a maid he is courting. An aunt explains to the young woman that the man is trying to seduce her. In explaining these types of foods, she says: ‘If I eat lobster, ’tis so warming,/That every man I see looks charming’. The narrator ends:

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