Lobster Tale

“Now, people ask me, what rituals can we have today? My answer is, what are you doing? What is important in your life? What is important, they say, is having dinner with their friends. That is a ritual.” – Joseph Campbell

It’s a given that at least once every summer Dad will make Lobster Dinner.  This has been going on, with some regularity, for decades.  If he doesn’t make it at home, we go out to get it.

In the early days, when we spent our weekend days in Maine’s coastal towns, we discovered Barnacle Billy’s.  This was, and could still be, the kind of place where you pushed your way forward through the crowd and then hollered your order up to the cook behind the counter.  Meantime, someone in our party would troll the weatherbeaten restaurant for an equally weatherbeaten wooden table.  The lobsters came out of the kitchen hot and red with limp claws draped over paperboard bowls, accompanied by sides of corn, piles of steamed clams, and small pools of melted butter.

Last summer, Lobster Dinner took a new twist.  Dad acquired a recipe from a friend who apparently has created quite a following of his own with it. 

Preparing lobster in this manner is a multi-step process: first, you pour a large martini and drink it to get up the nerve to cook the poor buggers by plunging their writhing bodies into a boiling cauldron of water.  (I never look.  It’s murder.)  After they're cooked, you pin their bodies, belly up, to a cutting surface while you use a strong knife to score each down the length of its body.  (Don’t worry, it’s already dead.)

Once scored, you generously brush melted butter with garlic in and all around the lobsters' nooks and crannies.  If there were a recipe to the buttery sauce, I would give it to you.  But after several requests, it was revealed that there is none.  It's more of a style than a recipe.  

Grill the lobsters.  Not too much. Serve with bowls of melted unsalted butter, grilled corn, carrots and potatoes in broth, steamers, and cole slaw.  Beer, white wine.