The first fact about the dyed-in-the-wool, ancient, and honorable Down East institution called the shore dinner is that it is never eaten on the shore. All the makings of it come dripping and only a matter of minutes from the seashore; but you eat it at a table like civilized people, in the home, in your party clothes, with all the plates and platters and baskets the house can provide to dish up its various toothsome items seriatim and to receive all the many shells after you have eaten your merry way through them and gotten out all their meat. This dinner is all shellfish, no fish. It is not to be confused with the clambake, which is celebrated in the open, under the wind and sky and sun, with no dishes but your scorched hands, no knives, no forks, no spoons, with nothing but holy hunger to edge you on. That dinner is eaten on the haunches, in front of a pile of rockweed smoking on top of a fire of ship's timbers right on the shore. But the shore dinner is not on the shore.
This historic dinner is simple. It is clams, lobsters, clams, lobsters—that is all. In that order. Heathens, Hottentots, and outsiders may, and often do, bring in mussels, quahaugs, codfish steaks, and clam chowder, and the Lord knows what else. But your true son of the State of Maine sticks to the ancient ritual. Now and then he is corrupted and serves chowder as a soup to friends from the outside, but more often he sticks to the Medes and the Persians and runs the arpeggios of the old ritual. It is a ritual. One no more departs from it than one wears rubber boots to a lawn fete. Our whiskered ancestors left their footprints in the stone; we do but follow in those footmarks.
Steamed clams come first. These should be rushed while the azure of their tidal mud is still on them, while they arc still fountaining out diamonds from their thin, oval shells under the impression that it is the flooding tide and not their doom at hand, into a deep kettle with a cupful of their lost ocean under them, steamed in their own delectable juice for fifteen or twenty minutes. When they open up like so many dark butterflies, they are dished up in a vast crock or mixing bowl that will hold about a peck of them—the bowl is rushed to the table—urgency and haste are always close to the best interest of clams—the bowl is set in the exact center of the table, so that all will have fair play. Each shore-diner then seizes a double handful of the hot things and heaps them on his plate, seizes another and dumps that. Hot clam juice is served in tall glasses. This is chiefly to wash the grit out of the clams. People, famished people, do drink it sometimes; it is flavorful and nutritious, they say. But the drinker must beware of going below the last third of the glass, for if he does, he will drink grit.
Foreigners to Maine try to use forks and knives on steamed clams. It is like trying to eat macaroni on knitting needles. Like an Occidental trying to keep from starving with Oriental chopsticks. It can be done. But it is neither reasonable nor graceful. Your knives and forks are your teeth and ten fingers. Fingers only are served with steamed clams.
You lift off the top shell, holding the clam's snout and the clam down on the other shell with your left thumb. With your right hand you tear the pale ivory bivalve from his house and from his snout. If you are skilled, his shoulder straps come off on his cap. You seize the clam by his brunette head—only one in sixty clams is blond—dangle him in the hot clam water, dip him into the pannikin of hot melted butter, tip back your head, and down him. You don't have to do much of any chewing. He is all tenderness. Of course, you can get burned, on fingers, lips, and tongue. But your burns are healed instantly by the savoriness of the morsel. With hot tears scalding your eyes you go after more; keeping a jealous eye on your neighbors to make sure that they arc not heading you off from the next plateful. You toss the empty shells, as you go, into the large empty bowl strategically placed at the table's center beside the full one and equidistant from all competitors. For this course is competition, and may the nimblest-fingered win!
Restaurants serve steamed clams heaped around a well of clam water or with a dish of melted butter nested in the clams. But all such refinements delay one who is hoeing in, and they are purposely designed to slow the eater down in his consumption. At home, you stop for no filigrees but dig yourself deep into your hill of clams and come snorting out on the other side. You allow nothing to entangle your twinkling fingers when you are at work.
After your second or third plateful of clams, the lobster stew comes on. This is weighted down with chunks of red and white meat; it is more soup than stew, and a most substantial one. It is made from the meat of steamed lobsters not an hour away from freedom six-seven fathoms down in the sea. The shelled meat has been sautéed with vast slabs of new butter, milk and thick cream have been stirred cautiously into the mess as it simmers—about one-third weight of butter to the meal's bulk. When the whole is just on the crinkling edge of coming to a boil, you snatch the kettle off the fire and bowl it out to your guests. You use the largest sizes in bowls. The stew is as much solid meat as liquid, and the liquid is ambrosia pure and clear. You eat the stew with hardtack, the unleavened cracker which sailors used to break their eyeteeth on off the Horn, but it is civilized now, and it crumbles the minute you bite into its flat taste, an admirable foil to the sharpness of the lobster flavor. You crunch dill pickles in long slivers as you go—a spoonful of stew, a bite at the pickle, a spoonful of stew—left, right, left, right, up and down the center, and ladies' chain!
There should by rights be seconds and thirds of the stew, and even fourths. You cat and say nothing. Some conversation may be used at some other stage of this feast, but never in this one. Holy silence is the rule. You all eat fast and do not philosophize; you do not even think, but be. You eat till the ladle scrapes dry on the kettle's bottom.
Sauternes makes a perfect chaperone to lobster stew. This is the one outside thing your State of Mainer allows to enter this dinner. All the rest is flavor that has grown right at the front doorstep in the tide, and belongs.
There are, of course, records of nine and ten bowls of lobster stew consumed at a sitting. I know one college dean who got outside of twelve. But he went into special training for the dinner and ate not one crumb of hardtack beside. So his record was not allowed. Three bowls of lobster stew, though, make about the norm, the ideal. More than that, and you begin to fringe luxury and gluttony. Three will serve nicely for the artist of life, especially when the three bowls are of the imperial-pint capacity as a lot of older Maine bowls are. You have to save some space for delights still to come.
Plates replace bowls now. New clams come. But you would hardly know them by sight. For they are muffled up in magic and have gone through the transfiguration of hot fat. The clams are free of their shells now and overcoated in brown like crullers. They have been shelled raw, drained, chopped and separated a bit, mixed up in a thick batter of egg yolks and flour and butter, and they have been dropped by the tablespoon into a spider seething with red-hot fat. These lucky clams have exploded internally and risen to unheard-of heights of resiliency and taste. They cause the heart to flutter when the teeth crunch into their crispiness. The batter is shot through with the flavor of sublimated clam. I don't know why egg yolks and flour make clams taste more like clams than they do when bare, but such is the truth.
And now, behold, the lobster returns, majestically. He is whole, unflawed to the tips of his proud whiskers. He comes in his shell. He is as pink as the British fox-hunting man. And he stands artfully on his long Roman nose between his big claws ruddily akimbo, and bis tail is looped high in pride. This is the flower of the feast, the red rose of perfection.
As was the law with the steamed clams, your two bare hands arc your knives and forks now. Only the inadept, the inartistic, and the outsider bring in nutcrackers, tongs, hammers, and, for all I know, bulldozers to get their lobster open. By skillful pressures here and there at the right bulges, by neat disjointings, the veteran shore-dinner savant enters into ecstasy. He cajoles out and extracts his lobster's meat in five graceful minutes. The process cannot be described; it has to be learned by long and loving practice. Once learned, like the ability to swim, it never forsakes one.
The sheller breaks the tail from the back, clasps the tail in the altitude of prayer between his palms until it cracks; then he reverses his motion, bends the flanges of the shell the other way, outward, and a cylinder of meat emerges, whole and tinted its soft red color. The sheller tears off the outer strip and removes the dark vein of the colon, shreds the meat apart, brushes it into melted butter each bite, and swallows it down. Taxes and tribulations vanish, and he glows in utter peace.
The sheller does the same with the big claws, disjoints them into their proper segments, pressing two ways on their bulges, works the shells back and forth. A good man can get all the meat segments unbroken out of the thorny shells. Then he takes the body, lifts off the back shell, runs his finger inside it, and gets out all the precious emerald tomalley, leaving only the hard stomach with its “lady.” There is nowhere on earth a flavor or texture to hold a candle to this green essence of lobster, the tomalley. Men have been known to desert their wives and little children to come by it.
The compartments of pure white meat in the thorax of the lobster repay your working each one like a gold mine and getting all the small but fine pieces of meat out with the fingers. The taste repays the worker for his pains. Lastly, there arc the narrow, small legs, eight of them, on each side. You run these, section by section, between your teeth and work out all the thin meats.
Milk is the standard drink to go with the “plain lobster” course. Its innocent soothness and smoothness make perfect foils to the piquancy of the incredible taste of the sharp lobster.
By now the day is well down. (Most shore dinners arc noon affairs, as all Maine country dinners used to be.) There is little room left for anything but reminiscence and philosophy, serenity, and plain old-fashioned sugar cookies. Any more elaborate dessert would be a sacrilege to what has gone before. You want gentleness. Only the plainest white and faintly flavored cookies will do, with just the suspicion of a dust of plain sugar over them, blond and not brunette in their baking. You may take more milk with your cookies. Some State of Mainers have become so corrupted by the outside that they take coffee with the cookies. But not the dyed-in-the-wool older ones. They still prefer their plain sugar cookies without the exotic from Brazil.
It is, as I say, not a dinner where conversation is a chief or even a side dish. Politics and state matters, even poetry, must take a back seat. People are too busy with both hands to use their heads. They are too busy to use their eyes on anything save the precious piece of meat they are working out of its shelly hiding place. And one can barely see his friends, in any case, at this feast's end. For the twin mountain peaks of clamshells and lobster shells have raised a high barrier between him and them. But what glances can be sent around such mountains, such Andes of bliss, such monuments of red and gray shell, arc glances of purest good will.