Lobster: A Global History / Elisabeth Townsend

Lobster is rather creepy when you think of it. Looks like a giant insect... a scorpion in fact. It just tastes so darn good that people are willing to put up with its off-putting looks, its dangerous claws (Atlantic lobsters, that is), and the struggle it takes first to cook it (if you are so daring) and then prise the meat from its shell.

This book chronicles the history of lobster and how it earned a revered place on our table. Lobster are pictured in ancient Roman mosaics and seemed enjoy a place in their feasts, but like many things that the Romans promoted and perfected, lobster fell into obscurity until the 1800s. In Colonial times it was considered a poor man’s replacement for meat and saw the early coastal setters through lean times. “Coastal” is a key word here, since lobster’s popularity only really took off in modern times when refrigeration and transportation made it possible to get it to restaurant tables more than a stone’s throw from the ocean. Lobsters can live from 50-100 years and as recently as 1977 a specimen was caught in Nova Scotia nearly four-feet long and weighing over 44 pounds (though such behemoths were more common before the mid-1800s). There is also an extensive section in this book on humane ways of dispatching lobsters (popping them in the freezer to anesthetize them first seems to be an important part of it). Does anyone give a second thought to putting a poor mussel in a skillet?

Lobster: A Global History was recently reviewed in the New York Times and served admirably as background reading for a short trip we’re taking to Acadia National Park in Maine. We’re hoping that lobster will form a significant memory of the trip.

This book is part of The Edible Series, a series which includes volumes on such diverse culinary subject as cheese, curry, pizza, whiskey, etc.

Comments

And the Mountains Echoed / Khaled Hosseini

The latest book by the author of The Kite Runner reads like a collection of short stories, but they are all interconnected. The link between stories isn’t always immediately apparent and there are some diversions that take the reader far from Kabul, and sometimes confusingly so (the detour to Greece was interesting, but a bit disconnected from the rest of the storyline, I thought). There were some great narratives—one in particular that I think was worth the whole of the book— a story about Afghani-American cousins, Idris and Timur, who return to Kabul to attempt to regain an ancestral home, abandoned after the Soviet invasion. While Timur goes out and carouses and flaunts his American wealth, Idris spends most of his time showing charity to a young girl in hospital, a victim of an unspeakable act of violence which leaves her in need of surgery in a western nation. Idris, himself a doctor, promises to arrange the needed medical intervention, but when he returns to the US, the...

Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Wide Sargasso Sea / Jean Rhys

The mysterious figure of Bertha Mason provides much of the tension in Jane Eyre , but what does the reader really know about her? Rochester provides some details of her past, but is his account reliable? Caribbean author Jean Rhys attempted to tell the story of Rochester's insane (and perhaps misunderstood) wife in her 1966 novel Wide Sargasso Sea . It's a sort of prequel to Jane Eyre . I'm afraid Rochester doesn't come out looking good, though we always knew he had a bit of a wild side with his continental dalliances. Anyway, there's a lot of interesting backstory about Bertha's origins in Jamaica, her real name, the tragic circumstances of her upbringing, and how she was established at Thornfield Hall. Gosh, if Jane had only known all these details about Rochester, she might have taken St. John up on his offer of marriage. All in all, Wide Sargasso Sea is pretty credible, but I missed Charlotte Bronte's flowery language, and of course th...

Peachy Reads

Search This Blog