Have Blade Will Travel: The adventures of a traveling chef (10 page)

At about 1:00 PM, manager Ricci sauntered into the kitchen sporting a jubilant grin.  He called the chef over, and spoke to him in low snickering tones.  I watched in silence as the chef began chuckling as well.  Ricci turned to me.  “You know that galatine thing you made?” 

“You mean galantine?” I corrected him. “Yeah.  What about it?”

“Well, one of our customers asked me what it was.  I told him it was some kind of pâté.” 

“And?”

He started laughing again.  “Well then he asked me for a bottle of ketchup to put on the meatloaf.”  

A great collective chortle arose from the other members of the kitchen.  Everyone, including myself, enjoyed a good laugh at my expense.  There was a lot of relief and release in that laughter.  If the dish had succeeded sensationally, I would have become a threat.  But since it had been taken for meatloaf, the threat was over.  After all, anyone can make meatloaf.  I rightly guessed that this would be the last Galantine de Canard ever to grace the Sunday buffet table at East Bay Lodge, in Osterville on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  Still, the chef knew what I had accomplished.  And I had the memory of his comment to savor for a long time.

My attempts to add a classical and up-scale element to our weekly had caused an uneasy stir.  While the most obvious response was professional curiosity, I had sensed a subtle and very understandable undercurrent of envy, even fear.  Seasonal restaurants are not easy places to maintain tenure.  I was a footloose youngster, ready, willing and able to pick up and head to the next seasonal job whatever that might be.  But some of the other brigade members, like Paul and Wayne, were married with children, and needed to maintain full-time employment all year round.  What if this young C.I.A. graduate had started adding things to the menu that proved popular and older established guys couldn’t produce?  What then?  Would the ownership replace them with my younger blood? 

I would encounter this attitude often in my culinary travels.  My understanding of the fear, combined with the strengthening of my trusty duck-back consciousness allowed me to accept its inevitability and not let it stand in the way of my progress.

Chapter 5

Lobster Slaughter and a Buddhist Prayer

As the summer wore on, the restaurant’s business continued at a feverish pitch.  Malcolm and I still worked the back station, cranking out several hundred lobsters a night.  One night, I picked up a two-pounder, and noticed the underside of its tail was covered with eggs.  “Hey Mal,” I asked.  “Isn’t it illegal to haul in pregnant lobsters?”  He glanced at it, shrugged his shoulders, picked it up from the work table, and plunged it into the boiling water in the steam kettle.  I stood there, starring at the kettle, somewhere between stunned and horrified. 

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 17
^th
-century gourmand, statesman and philosopher, once wrote, “Tell me how a nation nourishes itself, and I will tell you how that nation lives.”  He was writing of food, of course, but there are modes of nourishment beyond that which serve to fuel our bodies.  Brillat-Savarin’s dictum – You are what you eat – might better have read You are what you eat, watch, hear and read.  A diet rich in gratuitously violent film, mindless situation comedies, doomsday radio editorials, sensationalist contemporary fiction, and lasciviously graphic portrayals of intimate sexual behavior is not the sort of fare that feeds the soul nor fosters empathy for other living creatures.  Our high-speed, throw-away, hyper-carnal culture keeps us focused on our most primitive sensations, fostering a separation from our inner selves.  We grow alienated from the part of ourselves that yearns for emotional expression and contact, for understanding, for a way out of the madness, and into our full humanity.  But how is that way found?

In my own case, it was my daily confrontation with the ordeal of the lobsters that awakened my innate empathy.  What I felt went far beyond “
Oh those poor lobsters.
”  Night after night, those innocent, tail-flapping crustaceans, struggling against their slaughter at my trembling hands, threw me into turmoil.  It was as if I were killing myself, a tiny cell at a time, with each lobster I tossed into the vat of boiling water.  There was something profoundly wrong with this picture, and I was stuck right in the middle of the canvas, torn between my desire to become a mature adult able to honor the blessings of this life – and my anxiety to perform well in a demanding kitchen environment and master my craft.  I had met the enemy, and he was me – a plain and simple youngster, eager to learn, and caught in a cosmic crack in my moral universe.

As the days clicked by, my sensitivity for other living things, especially those smaller and more vulnerable than my fellow Homo sapiens, intensified.  I was stuck in a seafood slaughter house on Old Cape Cod, required to sacrifice the lives of as many as two-hundred harmless crustaceans every night.  How magnificently designed they were, these ancient creatures, their external exoskeletons a marvel of structural genius.  Had any one of them ever committed any offense against any of my tribe, so much as one vindictive thought or one single malicious act?  No, never.  The only reason for their execution was that they were there, in the wrong place at the wrong time – possessed of a flesh that humans savored.  And somehow I had become their unwilling executioner. 

If my work that summer had not including killing shellfish, I might never had been forced to address the issue.  After all, I was far removed from the places where cattle fell to an ax in the name of Roast Prime Rib of Beef, where pigs were fattened with corn and slop for their Center-Cut Broiled Pork Chops (or Mock-Veal Parmigiana), or where rows upon rows of chickens were fed into a huge mechanical apparatus designed to break their necks, gut their innards and pluck their feathers for that fine Grilled Breast of Farm Fresh Chicken à la Rochambeau.  I was as insensitive as anyone else who grew up in sub-urban America, half-believing that steaks, chops, and poultry originated at the supermarket and that animal flesh was unrelated to creatures who had once lived and breathed and wandered freely about. 

Now, suddenly, that attitude of denial was no longer possible.  I looked around the kitchen and saw myself surrounded by the mangled body parts of once-living things.  I wondered if green peppers cried when pulled from the vine, or whether they felt the slice of a cook’s knife while being cut into eighths for Tenderloin of Beef Brochettes.  If not for those live crustaceans, I might have remained oblivious to the fact that we must kill in order to eat, and never so much as blinked at what I was doing.

I realized I could walk out of the kitchen at that moment, pack my things and move on to the next job.  That would save me from killing lobsters but it would not help the lobsters, since someone else would take my place.  Besides, I’d still be dealing with dead critters in the next kitchen.  Alternatively, I could return to school and seek training in another discipline, something technical as graphic design, or as high-minded as theology.  But as long as I ate even the tiniest amount of flesh, I’d still be part of the problem.  My personal slaughter of lobsters was but a microcosm of the vast slaughter of innocent creatures in the name of gastronomy that went on every moment all over the world.  Whatever personal choice I made, East Bay Lodge would still be turning hogs into Veal Parmigiana, cattle into Châteaubriand and Steak aux Poivre, cod into Broiled Scrod, sheep into Grilled Lamb Chops, shrimp into Baked-stuffed Scampi.  And this was only one restaurant in one small village at the sou th-eastern end of Cape Cod, one medium-sized restaurant in a business that in this country alone grosses nearly fifty-billion-dollars per annum.

I had met the enemy all right, and I had to do something, whatever that something might be.  It was more than a search for exoneration, more than a way to assuage my feelings of guilt.  I needed, somehow, to accept my personal role and responsibility in the greater picture of things.  As a first step, I headed to the local library, and find out why this wonderful yet defenseless crustacean had ended up in this dreadful predicament – in my trembling, blood-stained hands.

The term lobster is a melding of the Latin locasta, meaning “locust,” and the Anglo-Saxon
loppe
, meaning “spider.”  It is an invertebrate anthropoid, from the Latin
invertebratus
, meaning without an inner skeleton and spinal column.  Lobsters are in fact, a specimen of inside-out anatomy, and a marvel of design.  Although they lack sense organs as we know them, lobsters have a nervous system centered in their belly that uses two tiny brains – one above, and one below its throat.  Their eyes contain nearly ten thousand tiny “facets,” yet appear myopic to the point of virtual blindness in the presence of light.  Recent experiments indicate that their multiple eyes may be sensitive to light on a scale beyond our comprehension, and that their vision may be as acute as a hawk’s.  The creature’s nocturnal habits lend credence to this theory.  A lobster also has as many as 100,000 sensory hairs covering their appendages, hairs so sensitive that a lobster will react to a trail left in the water by a finger which has barely grazed a piece of meat.  In other words, a lobster is a highly sensitive creature who perceives the world very differently from the way we do, but surely no less acutely.

A second cousin to the spider, the lobster also possesses the amazing ability to regenerate any part of its body.  Although our bodies can heal wounds, repair internal tissue, and grow fingernails and hair, we cannot replace a limb or even a finger.  But a lobster that loses a claw or leg in a fight, or to escape an enemy, will simply grow another.  And during this regeneration, the growth of the rest of his body slows, to expedite the speed of replacement.

In 1622, at the recently-founded Plymouth Plantation, Governor William Bradford was mortified to realize that he had nothing to offer a newly arrived group of sixty-seven colonists except lobster “without bread or anything els but a cupp of fair water.”  Early Plymouth colonists, in fact, could scarcely bring themselves to eat the frightening-looking crustaceans that were piled up in mounds on the beaches following a storm.

It wasn’t until 1840 that commercial fishing for the 100-million-year-old
Homarus Americanus
began.  It soon became a delicacy of robber barons and businessmen on expense accounts.  But the surging demand severely depleted the natural supply.  From an all-time high of 130-million pounds taken in 1885, the lobster catch dropped to a low of 33-million in 1918.  Conservation laws and commercial regulation brought the annual harvest back to between 70-and-80-million pounds; and in the 1980’s lobster sales averaged 40 million pounds per annum.  Interestingly, most of our “Maine” lobster actually comes from Québec, Newfoundland, and Canada’s Maritime Provinces. 

Man has become the lobster’s greatest enemy, not only by harvesting it for food, but also by polluting its spawning waters off the shores of Canada and the Northeastern United States.  Even without human predators, however, the odds against a larval lobster surviving to the age of one year are about a million-to-one.  Though a female lobster mates every two years and produces thousands of eggs, 99% die within a few weeks.  The one-third-inch-long lobsterlings are preyed upon by many varieties of sea life, including their own species.  They must deal with swift currents too strong for them to resist, and a score of diseases, among them a deadly blood ailment known as “red tail.”

The infant lobster who survives the first round of environmental dangers soon outgrows its external skeleton and begins to molt.  As it lies on its side, the membrane which joins its body and tail splits across the back, in one clean line.  The lobster then works its entire body through this split in anywhere from five-to-twenty minutes.  Denuded and vulnerable, it then crawls into a protective burrow where it stays until its jelly-like new shell calcifies.  This process takes several weeks, and when the growing young lobster emerges, it is 50% heavier and 7-to-20% longer than when it began.  During its first year of life, a lobster will molt anywhere from seven-to-ten times, to keep up with its growth.  If it manages to survive that year, the odds against its continued survival have been reduced from a million-to-one, to ten-thousand-to-one. 

The official record for the largest lobster ever captured is a forty-two-pound, seven-ounce monster caught off the Massachusetts coast in 1934.  Measuring three-feet in length, its mounted shell is on display at the Boston Museum of Science.  A forty-seven pounder was reputedly caught off the Virginia Capes in 1935, and Maine lobstermen report seeing some as large as one-hundred pounds.  But it is generally agreed that anything larger than two-and-a-half pounds tends to be too tough for use as food, and anything in excess of twenty pounds is too large for the average lobster trap.

This was all fascinating information, but it did little to solve my dilemma or soothe my conscience.  A Canadian biologist claimed that a lobster lacks the physiological equipment to suffer.  Easy for him to say, I concluded, given the fact that two out of three lobsters sold in the United States is harvested from Canadian waters and that Canadian canners use baby lobsters well below the minimum size specified in Maine’s conservation law.  The Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has recommended anesthetizing live crustaceans in a mixture of one-pound of salt dissolved in two-quarts of cold water, after which they can be boiled without visible signs of discomfort.  This seemed to me the ultimate oxymoron – an organization dedicated to preventing animal cruelty recommending a technique of cooking a live crustacean. 

Dr. Robert Bayer, of the University of Maine, who studied lobster for more than 15 years says, “They don’t really have a brain [but] a decentralized nervous system like a large insect.”  That they twitch when tossed into boiling water is probably an “involuntary response.”  On the other hand, Dr. Jelle Atema, a professor with the Boston University Marine Program at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, studied them for two decades and came to a very different conclusion.  Though he has found no effective way to measure the lobster’s capacity for pain, he considered them “remarkable, sophisticated creatures,” who live in groupings of twenty-to-thirty individuals, which Atema called “villages,” and who, when wounded, emit a chemical that serves as a warning signal to the other inhabitants of its “village.”