Thanksgiving Lobster? Maybe This Year

With Thanksgiving coming on the heels of the most contentious election cycle in memory, it might be a good time to rethink the menu. Many of us aren’t feeling festive.  And on November 28th, some of us will be hosting relatives whose political views we not only don’t agree with but can’t even comprehend. If your guest list isn’t in the dozens, and you’re neither a staunch traditionalist nor a big fan of turkey, here’s an alternative idea that won’t take days to make and will surely bring smiles to your table: baked stuffed lobster.

In American cuisine, lobster is an outlier: a luxury food that couldn’t be any more messy, informal, and fun. Eating lobster, decorum flies out the window. Table manners don’t count. Connecting with our inner cave person, we use bare hands to twist tails from bodies, crack claws and knuckles, break swimmerets off to suck them between our teeth. We dig, scrape, and pry open fissures and cavities, determined not to miss even a morsel of sweet, briny meat (and for some, other treasures within). Along the way, we toss shell shards and refuse into communal bowls – in full view of our dining companions, who are doing the same thing. And if, in the process of twisting and cracking, errant liquid from one lobster’s claw shoots up into the face of another, that person will only laugh. Lobster, it seems, puts everyone in a good mood.

As a historical footnote, there’s no written record of what the Pilgrims and Wampanoags ate at that First Thanksgiving. Venison, for sure. Duck, goose, and swans – “likely.” But wild turkey comes up as only “possible,” and certainly not a featured player. Lobster falls into the same category: Likely. But unlike turkey, it offers a fascinating history that makes for excellent dinner table conversation – when words fail or it’s a good time to change the subject.

Ancestors of lobsters—some bigger than humans— were plodding along the ocean floor two hundred million years before dinosaurs roamed the earth. Shells found in middens, or prehistoric domestic dump sites, suggest that our own ancestors were eating their (smaller) descendants many thousands of years ago. More recently, three-thousand years art and writing from Ancient Greece and Rome confirm that along the Mediterranean, people have been eating—and enjoying—lobster for millennia.

In Third Century Rome, Emperor Maximum Thrax was reported to have eaten twenty at a single sitting. (Then again, he was described as standing eight feet tall.) A few centuries later, lobster was described in the recipe collection Apicius as “very good, albeit somewhat complicated, to eat.” 

Further north, legions of Roman soldiers were no doubt pleased to discover smoother shelled, larger-clawed Atlantic lobster along the coast of the British Isles. The first surviving written reference, however, comes, predictably, from British royal records. The Forme of Cury (The Way to Cook)— now housed at the British Library— is a c.1390 scroll of recipes compiled by chefs of Richard II for their counterparts at grand estates, The entry “For how to cook a lopster” instructs: “He schal be rostyd in his scalys [shell] in a ovyn other by the Feer under [at the bottom of] a panne and etyn wyth Veneger.” 

In Tudor England, lobster wasn’t considered a delicacy like venison, peacock, and swan. But it was good enough to serve Henry VIII at least once—as part a fast (meatless) meal he took with his first wife Katherine in 1526. In elevated circles, lobster was always served out of the shell. If Henry’s was prepared according to recipe found in the Tudor royal kitchens, the lobster meat was mixed with cream and baked inside a crust. Not a crust of the kind of fork-tender pastry we know today, but one hard and inedible shell—like a one-time-use precursor to Le Creuset. 

A 1666 entry by the English diarist Samuel Pepys suggests that even as a common food, lobster had its fans. In it, Pepys describes his dismay at discovering he’d accidentally left a couple of just-purchased lobsters in the coach he’d hired to drive him home, Alas, Pepys realized his mistake too late and went lobsterless for his evening meal. 

Across the Atlantic, too, indigenous peoples from North Carolina to Nova Scotia had long been eating lobster – cooking it on hot coals between piles of damp seaweed. While the lobsters baked over coals, the salt-water pockets in the seaweed continually released steam to keep the meat moist. 

It wasn’t until the Pilgrims arrived that lobster began to acquire a bad rap. The Pilgrims recognized homarus americanus, for a close resemblance to its cousin across the pond. Letters and diaries from the Plymouth Plantation confirm the Pilgrims’ preference for cod, mackerel, and sturgeon. But lobster had one thing going for it that the others did not. It was abundant – so much so that after storms, lobster would wash up on shore in piles two feet high.

“Their plenty makes them little esteemed and seldom eaten,” wrote a visiting British historian named William Wood in a pamphlet designed to attract new settlers, also Pilgrims, to the Colonies; but like so much PR, Wood’s statement was only partially true. With lobster a ready source of protein right there for the taking – and often by hand at that – the Pilgrims incorporated it into their diet.

Still, the combination of antipathy and plenty, probably exacerbated by the stink of piles of rotting lobster, is the likely source of lobster and myths that continue to pass as fact: that lobster was fed only to prisoners, servants, and the poorest of the poor. That indentured servants insisted on clauses in work contracts limiting their weekly allotment of lobster; that an 18th century prisoner rebellion led to laws based on prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishment.

Not a shred of evidence can be found for any of these claims. No contracts. No laws “on the books.” Besides, why would any gaoler choose to boil lobsters when salt cod and brown bread would do? 

In any case, soon new waves of settlers would arrive from Netherlands, France, Germany, Sweden and Scotland — with no foreknowledge of and attitudes about lobster. By 1700, it was being sold on the streets of New York and Boston, to be tossed by housewives, cooks and tavern keepers into potages and chowders, and baked in pasties and pies. 

Over the next century, new technologies would enable lobstermen to transport their catch over longer distance. In the late 1700s, New England boatbuilders adapted the Dutch-designed well smack, a heavy flat-bottomed boat with tanks for circulating seawater. By the mid-1800s, a nascent railway system was carrying lobster in refrigerated cars as far west as Chicago and St Louis. 

The real game changer, however, was industrialization. In the second half of the 19th century, nearly two dozen lobster canneries dotting the coast of Maine were shipping tins of lobster meat, cheaper than baked beans, across the country and (according to Burnham & Morrill advertising) around the world. Lunch wagons and diners began to offer lobster as a bargain topping for salads. And on transcontinental railways, inexpensive lobster was being introduced as exotic fare to travelers who’d never tried it. 

But by the 1880s overproduction had gutted Maine’s lobster population. The Government responded by imposing strict regulations. By 1900, every Maine cannery had closed. But a new phenomenon – summer travel – was already spurring a meteoric rise in the crustacean’s reputation.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, improvements in transportation were making it possible for wealthy urbanites to look further for respite from the summer’s heat. Some, intrigued by seascapes by contemporary painters, began to travel up to Maine, with the wealthiest, including the Rockefellers, Pulitzers, and Astors, building summer estates they called cottages on Mount Desert Island. 

Here was a class of people that would never have laid eyes on tinned lobster – developing a taste for the real deal: lobster that was live and kicking just moments before they ate it. At the end of the summer, they’d return to their city homes with new cravings. Whether by coincidence or through tableside conversations, top city chefs — eager to please their wealthy clientele—began to experiment with fresh lobster, finding its taste and texture far superior to canned. 

At elegant restaurants like the Parker House in Boston, and New York City’s Waldorf Astoria, Plaza, Lord and Taylor, and Delmonico’s lobster was appearing on menus in bisques, fricassees, remoulades, and salads; as medallions, cutlets and a new invention called Lobster à la Newburg that was replicated in resorts on Coney Island. Women’s magazines would recommend lobster as delicious filling for “portable” (picnic) sandwiches. (Lobster rolls, anyone?) And in her quintessential 1896 cookbook, Fannie Farmer proclaimed the lobster among “the highest order of crustaceans.”

Still, not for another forty years would any cloth-napkin restaurant serve lobster in its shell, in labor-intensive, multi-ingredient dishes like Lobster a l’Armoricaine and Lobster Thermidor —perhaps trying too hard to legitimize the place of this once-lowly bottom feeder in haute cuisine.

Today, such dishes have all but disappeared from menus because lobster lovers tend to be purists. Some scoff at anything more complicated than boiling. And surely, there’s little more delicious than a boiled late-summer lobster in its soft, two-sizes too-big shell. But without compromising taste or texture, a properly prepared baked stuffed lobster can be a lot more festive and even fun. Few restaurants offer it. But with a neat trick that draws on the wisdom of indigenous pitmasters, they’re easy to prepare at home. 

You’ll recall that Native peoples added moisture to the dry heat of hot rocks – by covering their lobster with damp seaweed and, yes, a wet blanket. We don’t cook lobster over sandpits on top of hot rocks.  Neither do we have access to piles of damp seaweed.  If you rely on dry oven heat only for baked stuffed lobsters, the 25 to 40 minutes required to go from raw to safely cooked is likely to render the tail meat dry, the claw meat rubbery, and swimmerets too dry and brittle to have fun with.

The best way to make “baked stuffed” lobster is to pre-boil your lobsters first.  

Pre-boiled lobsters—cooled, then split and stuffed—can sit on your counter on a baking tray for at least an hour before guests arrive. (They’re cooked!) When it’s time to eat, slide the tray onto an upper (but not top) rack of a very hot oven, where it will take less than five minutes to crisp the top of the stuffing and raise the temperature of the meat. Another plus of this method: you don’t have to split the lobsters live. (Before boiling, however, you’ll want to dispatch the lobsters humanely. For information on how to do that, click here.) 

The following recipe for baked stuffed lobster is inspired by (not taken from) the Daily Double on the menu of the original El Quijote (R,I.P.) on 23rd Street.  As for Ritz crackers: they’re perfect, so don’t laugh. Well, not until you’re sitting around the table cracking claws, filling pregnant pauses with lobster facts and factoids – and outright lies – while actually enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends. 

Baked Stuffed Lobsters for 4 (can be doubled or tripled)

4 1 1/2-pound lobsters, live and kicking

4 T kosher salt, for the pot

1 stack of buttery crackers, like Ritz 

1 handful of cheesy crackers, like Ritz Bits 

A few drops Worcestershire sauce

6 T unsalted butter, separated

1 teaspoon kosher salt

1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. 
2. Fill a large pot halfway with water, add salt, and set over a high flame to come to a boil. 
3. Pulse the crackers into not-too-fine, crumbs. 
4. In a small bowl, mix the crumbs with a few drops of Worcestershire sauce and 2 T melted butter. Set aside. 
5. Dispatch the lobsters humanely. Lower them headfirst into the boiling water. When the lobster returns to a boil, set your timer for cook for 10 minutes or the low end of the recommended time. If you use a lid, leave room for steam to escape or you’ll have a serious mess on your hands 
6. Using tongs or two large serving spoons, lift the lobsters from the pot and place them on a rimmed baking sheet. Let cool. 
7. With the lobsters onto their backs, use the point of a heavy knife to slit each lengthwise down the middle from head to tail fan (the flexible shells at the tip). Carefully pry the two sides apart.  
8. Inside the body cavity, scoop out the tomalley (the “green” stuff – it’s delicious) and red roe (if you’re lucky). Blend into the cracker crumb mixture 
9. Gently fill each cavity – body and tail- with stuffing. Place a weight – a metal lobster cracker or a metal wrench (wrapped in aluminum foil) on the tip of each tail to prevent it from re-curling up.
10. When you’re almost ready to eat, place baking sheet with lobsters on an upper, but not top, rack of the oven. Bake about 2-3 minutes, checking frequently to make sure the stuffing doesn’t burn. .Serve with individual ramekins of clarified melted butter. 

*The Maine Lobster Collective recommends 11-12 minutes for boiling a 1.5 lobster. Since yours will go back into a hot oven, 10 minutes boiling should be sufficient.

Top photo: Bigstock