Consider the Lobster

David Foster Wallace, a schoolmate of mine at Amherst College, was hands-down one of the most brilliant writers of my generation. He also completely fucked up my capacity to make lobster consomme . . . or anything with lobster in it for that matter.

I grew up in a kosher home. But summers, we would rent a cottage at Tybee Island (Savannah Beach) for a month, and there, we were suddenly and wonderfully unconstrained by the confines of a kosher kitchen. We would on occasion go down to the docks at Lazaretto Creek, buy a bushel of fresh blue crabs off one of the boats, bring the crabs home, and cook them up. I never gave it a second thought, placing live crabs in boiling water. Hell, I was only focused on the result, not the process. And I loved crabs (still do).

And years later, Wallace comes along and writes this iconic essay for Gourmet magazine ostensibly covering the annual Maine Lobster Festival but actually penning a jeremiad against boiling live lobsters. Read it for yourself. It’s a magnificent piece of writing..

I recently decided that his broadside wouldn’t affect me too much, and so I went out and bought 4 750 gram lobsters, fresh off the catch, mortgaging my house in order to do so. I was bound and determined to make lobster consomme, which is a very involved process. And I can honestly say that our soul food kitchen produced an incredible result. Damn it’s good. Or it would be good, if I could only get past the trauma of cooking those lobsters. Which I can’t. Scratch that off our menu.