There's a French saying, chacun à son goût, meaning “each to his own taste,” and I've long observed that one of the tastes pretty generally favored by gourmets, both American and European, is lobster. Before World War I, New Yorkers nicknamed their smart restaurants, those where the very, very gay parties were given, lobster palaces. Today they are called night clubs, and another generation rolls up to them in taxis, instead of hansom cabs. But the sobriquet, lobster palace, would suit them just as well, because today's habitués, scanning the menus, find the same Newbergs, thermidors, and other lobster specialties listed and continue to order them nightly. Mais oui, the background may change but le goût for something good stays with us.
I must admit that in my childhood food memories, which have remained vivid because I came from a food-loving French family, there are no dark green lobsters on the kitchen table, no bright red ones being lifted from a kettle. The shellfish delicacy we ate at parties was écrevisses, bright pink crayfish caught in local streams. It was simply a matter of availability. We lived in an inland section of France, and in those days the cost of transporting anything as perishable as a lobster the many kilometers that lay between us and the coast of Normandy or Brittany would have been too great for our modest incomes. So I met my first lobster when I went to work in Paris.
I was at the Hotel Bristol first and went from there on to the Ritz. Both hotels catered to the élite of Europe, many of whom came to Paris as much for the fine food they knew would be awaiting them as for business or diplomatic affairs or le plaisir. For me that was la bonne chance—my good luck—because I was rounding out my culinary experience by learning how to prepare unfamiliar foods in ways that were those of the baute cuisine. César Ritz, whose name and fame had already become a byword for the finest in fine living, made only one requirement of the kitchens. But that one requirement was perfection. Time, energy, or money to achieve it didn't matter—and there were few, if any, short cuts to perfection which he permitted. The making of lobster bisque was an example.
You can make a good lobster bisque by cooking the crushed shells in stock and using the strained liquor to dilute and flavor the cream base of this shellfish potage. Many a tasty dish of it has been made that way. But that would have been rankest heresy to Monsieur Ritz, while Olivier, his distinguished maître d'hôtel, the never-to-be-forgotten maitre of the Paris Ritz, would have bowed his head in shame at seeing it served. Mais non, our bisque was done the hard but right way, following the rules of perfection laid down by la cuisine classique. The lobsters were started off stewing gently for a few minutes, nestled in a mirepoix bordelaise (chopped carrots, onions, butter, and seasonings). Then they were splashed with brandy and ignited, an established flavor trick in French kitchens, and the cooking finished in stock and wine. But this was only the beginning. The shells, after the meat was taken out, had to be ground almost to a powder in an enormous mortar with a pestle that took plenty of strength to raise and work. You don't even see these devices in modern hotel kitchens, but at that time every fine restaurant was equipped with a huge marble stand that stood as high as a high work table, in which was a bowl, chiseled out of the marble, which held at least three gallons. A pestle about five feet long and fashioned of very hard wood widened out to a smooth round base some ten to twelve inches in diameter and swung from a metal support in the ceiling. Into this mortar the lobster carcasses were thrown. Boiled rice was added, since rice starch was the only thickening considered suitable for a bisque. You grabbed the pestle with both hands, raising, dropping, and swinging it in the big bowl of the mortar. Time and muscles were the essentials—and plenty of the latter, I might emphasize. The first strokes smashed the shells into small bits and crushed the rice to a pulp. The succeeding ones ground the mixture finer and finer until it looked like a ground cereal, except that this was a reddish color, like a blush-pink oatmeal. This was the flavoring, the thickening, and the coloring that went into the other ingredients of the bisque. Then after it was cooked there was the tedious straining to be done. Great kettlesful of the mixture had to be squeezed four times through muslin to remove any trace of ground shell or other fibrous particles. By that time your aching arms told you that no apologies would be needed for its flavor, its texture, or its beautiful pink color, even if the potager—the head soup chef—had not made the final critical tasting and given it his blessing.
After cooking lobsters in every imaginable way for years and years, I finally got to know the fish itself through spending my vacations in Maine, where lobsters are a local industry. Chatting on sunny docks with bronzed, weather-beaten fishermen who must make a daily round of their buoys to haul up the big, clumsy lobster pots in the face of blistering suns, drenching rains, and harsh, salty winds, or whatever nature sends, has made me see this delicacy with new eyes, so that now lobster, strange and unfamiliar to me when I started my career in Paris, is a food that I know more about than almost any other I work with.
Pinterest
