I Considered the Lobster And You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

Chim.

There is no such thing as cooking selflessly. When you are cooking, especially for someone you care about, you are partaking in a selfish, masturbatory act; not only do you insist on “spoiling” them by doing all the work yourself (you wouldn’t have it any other way), but you also need them to validate how good everything you made is or provide honest feedback if it’s not – aka, perform emotional labor regardless. I hate this about myself, yet I continue to do this. Why? Because I love it. I’ve been cooking for 12+ years, some of those years also professionally, and I’ve perfected everything from chili to steak. I used to come home from a shift as a line cook and make enchiladas from scratch, sometimes with my own tortillas. I would buy ingredients that inspired me, such as garlic chives, and let them sit in the fridge until they rotted because I either forgot about them or didn’t actually have time to make anything with them. It doesn’t seem like I have a lot of time these days to do much at all, and meals have become more of a necessity than an outlet for self-expression. However, Chris’ birthday was coming up and he happened to be out of town. I had also never cooked a lobster.

I went to Montery Fish Market in Berkeley, the closest white-person fish market I could go to. I told the… fishmonger? that I’d be “interested in purchasing one small lobster.” He grabbed one out of a tank with the least delicate of touches, plopping it down on a scale and then grabbing another one to plop down right beside it. He placed the larger of the two back in, and suddenly there was a live lobster in a paper bag in my hand. The bag also had ice in it, so I was able to leave it in the car while I did some shopping at the produce market next door – got a bag of early girls and some cute purple snow peas. I drove home to Oakland as fast as I could and immediately took out our largest pot. J. Kenji didn’t have a recipe in his cookbook, so I followed one from the Gourmet Cookbook, the big yellow one from 2003. Every trend that you might think is current can be found here and its been Old Faithful to me over the years; apparently all one needs to do is boil a big pot of salty water and plop it in there for exactlty 7 minuites, no matter the size. So I set a timer. I grabbed the lobster with our metal tongs. It violently clawed and curled its tail , looking like a facehugger grasping for life. And then I dropped it in the pot and covered it.

Nothing like a good sipping gin on the rocks with fresh tarragon to quell the nerves.

7 minutes later, it was dead. I poked it a few times to make sure. Now that I got the hardest thing out of the way, I could actually start making the meal I had built around it. I heated up vegetables for soup, stuffed squash blossoms with avocado, made Claire Saffits’ blondie batter that later became a cookie batter, made Diego’s pasta dough, all the while the lobster stared at me with its cold dead eyes. Finally, I cracked it with the tools at my disposal, rinsing off as much of its insides as I could. I saw albumen and realized I overcooked it. The meat inside its big, meaty claws was a fraction of what it seemed to promise. I took a small bite of its chewy tail. I tasted a hint of tomalley, even though it wasn’t there. It wasn’t as sweet as I hoped. And it was fishy, kind of wrong...

What was I expecting? I cooked it covered on a rolling boil. I cooked it for seven minutes even though it was barely over a pound. From all the cooking media I’ve consumed over the years, I knew that I could have sedated it in the freezer and then cracked a knife through its skull, killing it instantly and protecting its meat from a rush of flavor-altering chemicals. But instead I opted to boil it alive. I did all this because that’s what the book told me to do, but I really did it because I was scared to kill a living thing. Dropping something in a pot of boiling water seemed like the way easiest way to do so, not only with the least amount of hassle, but with the least amount of time spent killing the thing itself.

Indeed, if I was a wife in charge of cooking meals for her home (as a gay, I get to be both husband and wife) I would probably not have the time to deal with the lobster more than I technically had to and my breadwinning husband, who maybe don’t cook too good, would be happy regardless. Where do you think I got my knowledge of the Yellow Gourmet Cookbook? My mom had it in our house alongside all the rest of her Gourmet magazines that she maybe only cooked like five things out of over the years. But they were there, in case of emergency, in case she needed to impress herself and her family but was all out of ideas. Because most meals aren’t made solely for enjoyment. Most meals are about consuming the most nutritious thing as quickly as possible prepared in the fastest amount of time. Lobster was kind of like that back in the day for poor folk as legend goes, before chefs figured it out it tasted best after just being cooked alive instead of harvested dead from the shore. Perhaps recipes stem from the context in which we create them. Are there really a million ways to cook a chicken, or are there just a million recipes depending on what our needs and desires are in any given moment in time? If we are so lucky to be able to cook lobster during these times when we’re broke and/or just soo busy, we must not be more selfish than we have to. I’m sorry, Dear Lobster, that I did you wrong by killing you lazily to placate my guilt. Next time, I’ll put my whole pussy into it. Thank you for giving me this opportunity to reflect and heal. Even though you were overcooked, you were still basically delicious and your liquor was invaluable for my potato-cauliflower bisque. I cooked your thin legs in butter and olive oil that I then strained and drizzled on top. And I saved most of your shells for a future stock that I WON’T boil, but rather simmer over gentle heat.

Overcooked lobster with homemade papardelle and early girl sauce

Avocado-stuffed squash blossoms with purple snow pea pesto (the peas became pesto because they were so bitter, should have known)

Brown-butter cookie with no-churn tarragon ice cream (this was bomb)