LOBSTERS, SCALLOPS, CRABS, AND FISHES.
Every inch an American is the Homarus Americanus. There are not so many inches of him as there used to be, but that makes him none the less precious. The Pilgrim lobsters "five or six feet long," ascribed to New York Bay in the days of Olaus Magnus, are now classed as a myth, but four-foot lobsters (measured from the tip of the claws to the end of the tail) have been caught. Such a giant weighs about thirty-four pounds.
The American lobster was originally found only on the eastern coast of North America. These lobster grounds some seven thousand miles, including the curves of the shore, were the finest the world has ever seen. In Canada alone a hundred million lobsters have been captured in a year.
In one respect the lobster differs strangely from other creatures of sea and land. Like the eel, he is a scavenger of the deep, but while the eel is often offensive to the taste because of this feeding habit, the lobster is always sweet. "Nothing could be more offensive to the human nostril," writes Dr. Francis Hobart Herrick,[23] "than the netted balls of slack-salted, semi-decomposing herring, which are commonly used as bait on the coast and islands of Maine, but by the wonderful chemical processes which are continually going on in the laboratory of its body, the lobster is able to transmute such products of organic decay into the most delicate and palatable flesh."
Were it not for this alchemistic marvel the most plutocratic restaurants in the United States, especially those which cater to the persons who sup after the theater, would never have become known as Lobster Palaces. The lobster served in these places, plain boiled, broiled, à la Newburg, and in other ways, is one of those characteristic American foods which foreign epicures not only envy but enjoy, though they cannot have our crustaceans as fresh as we do.
It has been well said that "the story of the lobster in its progress from the fisherman's pots on the Maine coast to the grills and silver chafing-dishes on Broadway is the whole story in miniature of the high cost of living under an artificial economic condition." The lobsterman gets a little over ten cents a pound. "The wholesaler doubles the price, the retailer trebles it, and in the end the restaurant-keeper marks it up 1,000 per cent. above the first cost, charging patrons $1.50 a portion for what the lobsterman was paid a tenth of that sum."
To this extortion I, for one, refuse to submit. In the market you can buy a lobster for one quarter to one-third the price charged in most restaurants. You can make sure he is alive—never buy a dead lobster, though they say he is safe to eat if his tail is curled and springs back when pulled. To kill him by plunging him in boiling water may seem cruel, but is no more so than other ways, and is certainly infinitely less so than the usual way—which should be forbidden—of letting him perish slowly in a barrel, or on ice.
Canned lobster is a food a wise man avoids, though, to be sure, he runs perhaps no greater risk in eating it than in consuming many other things, tinned or untinned. Millions of dollars' worth of canned lobsters, crabs, and salmon are eaten every year.
A new American delicacy hails from Canada: lobster rarebit, a compound of certain parts of the lobster which had previously been thrown away as waste by the canners. The annual output of canned lobster by the Eastern Provinces of Canada now amounts to about ten million cans, worth about $3,000,000. Lobster rarebit, which is said to be a highly appetizing delicacy, easily digested and nourishing may, it is believed, in time equal the money value of canned lobsters. Consul Frank Deedmeyer, of Charlottetown, gave these details at the time when lobster rarebit was first introduced:
Canned lobster, as known to the trade, consists of the meat taken from the claws and the tail. The whole of the body proper is now rejected by the packers, and it has heretofore been used in the maritime Provinces of Canada as a fertilizer. In the rejected portion is found a crescent-shaped meaty layer to which the tail is attached and the liver. Lobster rarebit is a compound of this meaty layer, of the liver, and of the roe, to which some spice is added. The first named of the components used is the fattest part of the crustacean; the liver, glandular, is large and retains a high percentage of bile. The number of eggs found in a lobster is estimated from 5,000 to 40,000, according to size. The three ingredients are mixed in these proportions: Six-tenths meat, three-tenths liver, and one-tenth roe.