IT’S HARD to believe now, but lobster used to be a poor man’s food. So despised was it, once, that servants had clauses written into their contracts limiting the number of days employers could require them to eat it. In colonial America, it was considered inhumane even for prisons to feed it to inmates more than once a week.
Since then, lobsters have done some serious social climbing. And I was reflecting on their achievement when, last weekend, I caught one of my own for the first time. As we looked each other in the optical sensors, it struck me that my lobster was a metaphor for the entire species. He had just come up in the world dramatically, after all. But he didn’t seem very happy about it.
Actually, the lobster wasn’t mine, in any real sense. He was in one of a dozen pots kept off Greenore by my old friend and neighbour Jim Marks, whose boat we were bobbing around in at the time. My sole contribution had been to haul the pot up from the sea bottom. And the only skill involved was trying not to fall over the side while doing it.
Still, not having caught so much as a goldfish in my life prior to then, the lobster-hauling did seem vaguely heroic, even Hemingwayesque. For several minutes afterwards, I felt like a hardened sea-angler. Then the feeling in my stomach that I had been trying to ignore since we left Greenore returned with a vengeance.
Inland, it was a calm day. Out where Carlingford Lough meets the Irish Sea, it was choppier that a butcher’s knife. Even finding the pot markers among the heaving waves was a challenge. By the time we’d lifted them all, I was nearly as green around the gills as the useless European crabs that were most of the pots’ main contents.
It was a big relief when we put in for a while at Cranfield, over on the Co Down side of the water. It took only half an hour there for my stomach to settle again. But any temptation to congratulate myself was tempered by the spectacle of the other crew members, Conor (15) and Sean (11): who were both completely unperturbed by the swell and, to prove it, had already eaten my lunch.
THE ORIGINAL PLAN, once the pots were lifted, was to head further out to sea and fish for mackerel. But with the wind strengthening, we changed tack. Instead, on the way back, we stopped in the channel, where the bigger ships enter the lough, and dropped a line. If there were any mackerel inshore, we’d get them here.
In fact, rather than gain mackerel we lost the line: probably caught “in a wreck”, Jim thought. And sure enough, thanks to the many hazardous rocks in the area, there are plenty of submerged ships. So common were wrecks here once, and so lucrative to locals ashore, it’s said that the children of Cranfield used to go to bed on windy nights praying: “God bless Mammy and Daddy, and send a big ship ashore in the morning”.
But of course, some shipwrecks did nobody any good. One of the worst was in 1916 when a steamer left Greenore for Holyhead and, minutes later, collided with an inbound collier. Both sank and, of more than 90 crew and passengers, only one survived.
The dangerously narrow channel was probably the main factor, although an inquiry also blamed lack of co-ordination between the emergency services. Warning signals from the lighthouse were inaudible on land, so that the Greenore lifeboat didn’t launch and it was hours before coastguards in Greencastle heard of the disaster.
Things have much improved since. One of the reasons we visited Cranfield on Saturday was a day-long festival revolving around marine safety. There were lifeboat and helicopter rescue demonstrations, with involvement from both sides of the Border.
And to appease the piratical local children, the organisers had also wisely laid on bouncy castles.
ANYWAY, despite the conditions, we made it back to Greenore safely, with four lobsters and a bucketful of the more edible crabs. There only remained now the challenge of preparing our catch for the table, which in its own way was not for the faint-hearted.
This, incidentally, is key to the lobster’s latter-day rise. Part of the stigma formerly attaching to it was that it used to be dead before cooking and was then often preserved for shipping over long distances, by which time it was often best avoided.
Now, of course, the norm is to boil lobster alive: an event that typically happens close to where it’s eaten. It has thereby become one of the freshest of all foods, and at least before being smothered in sauces, one of the healthiest too.
I won’t go into the question of whether lobsters feel pain, as we understand it, if only because David Foster Wallace did so at length some years ago in a famous essay called Consider the Lobster. I have read that essay and, 10,000 words later, was no closer the answer, which seems to lie somewhere between science and philosophy.
But in common with Wallace, I think there is at least something to be said for the fact that, unlike the results of factory farming, which are packaged in such a way that you don’t have to think about where they came from, you do usually have to confront the fate of the lobster, if only when choosing him from a restaurant tank.
In this sense, I confronted my lobster first in a boat, and then later in a kitchen, just before he went into the saucepan. In between, I held him – if not lovingly, then very carefully – behind the pincers. Then I saw him go from black-and-blue, pre-cooking, to the colour of an Irish suntan. After which, with all due solemnity and some guilt, I had him for Sunday lunch. And not that it will be any consolation to the lobster, but he was very good indeed.
fmcnally@irishtimes.com