Essays

Beach Food

Steve and the lobster and I were standing, sweating, in the little beach house kitchen in Delaware. On the counter the lobster arched its back and raised a knowing claw in our direction.

I thought we should kill it with a sharp knife slid into the back of the shell, where the head and sectioned carapace meet, then cut it up and cook it.

"I heard that's more humane," I said. I also thought, for some obscure reason, it might make the meat taste better. I should give this fresh lobster the most delicious death I could. Yet I hoped I might con Steve into being the killer. In the past I had persuaded him to cook and dismember a lobster for paella without any of the requisite tools. It turned out those tools were both well-designed and necessary. A hammer and pliers from the garage were just not the same.

At least here we had the claw crackers, the little silver picks. No respectable beach house, not even this tiny, outdated and slightly musty one, could do without them.

"There's no way I'm stabbing the lobster," Steve said. I lost my nerve too and opened the pot of steaming water.

It was the last night of our honeymoon and we were making seafood soup. (I'd done this back in Wisconsin but it was never what it should be with Midwestern seafood.) We boiled the lobster, cut apart the scarlet carapace and kept it for stock. The rosy-speckled meat we cut into discs. I looked vainly for roe, hoping I could mash it with butter and swirl it into the soup at the end. We added more garlic, the lobster, the shrimp, the crab, and the tomatoes. At the end we threw in tarragon. We cooked together, Steve peeling the shrimp and slicing the garlic into sticky rounds. I chopped and skinned tomatoes and steamed the corn.

When we finally sat down, it was dark, the day losing its heat. We lit candles, opened fresh beers. For an appetizer I had poured the clams in a pot with garlic and shallot and butter, decanted a small river of wine and steamed them open in it. We cooked so many we had to eat them from a mixing bowl.

But the soup—the soup was scarlet, flecked with green leaves and ivory lobster, the yellow ruffled edges of the clams peeking above the surface amid the shreds of crab. It tasted splendid—heavy on the garlic and the red chilies, the briny scent of the seafood, the browned crumb of the bread we'd toasted to go with it. It wasn't delicate, except for the texture of the fish. It's not a soup to get elegant with—no purees, no cream or tiny spoons. It was messy, heady, spicy, speckled with olive oil and herbs.

It was not a dish for someone with a newly diagnosed, unpredictable seafood allergy. A week earlier, I'd discovered—via swelling, itching, and a trip to the ER as my throat began to close—that I was one of those people. I was telling myself the culprit was only a specific type of cheap frozen crab Rangoon. So far on this trip I had eaten shellfish but no crab Rangoon, and nothing had happened. I hoped to continue my streak of luck with the soup, but I suspected the allergy was not as limited as I wanted it to be.

As we began to eat, Steve watched me for signs of a reaction. I was watching him too. It was true I should have been more cautious with seafood, but neither should he have been drinking the beers we'd just cracked or the gin and tonics we'd sipped beforehand. I had just begun to suspect that as well.