Sometimes I wish I could eat with my hands all summer long. Once my mother spread newspaper out on a patch of our dusty back lawn and set the three of us down with some enormous slices of watermelon. “You can make your mess out here,” she said. We did, of course. Later we ran through the sprinkler, or skittered along the Slip’n’Slide, the sticky black seeds still dotting our scrawny-kid California-brown bodies.
These days the full-mess dining we enjoy around here most is the lobster boil. When I realized that live lobster could usually be had in the Payne Avenue Asian markets for $7-$8 per pound (versus $10-$12 in the supermarket), the expense of a lobster pot justified itself. Your standard 8-quart pasta pot is not big enough for a proper lobsterfest, which requires not only a certain mass of boiling water to take in the cold crustaceans without losing too much heat, but also an adequate diameter. At S.S. Kemp, the restaurant supply house, we suffered a kind of perceptual distortion among all the enormous pots, worrying that the one we were choosing would be too small, when in fact it barely fits in our sink, and is best filled on the stove, using the pasta pots, fire-brigade style.
Few celebrate the sacrifice of the lobsters without a tinge of solemnity. I glide them into the roiling pot directly, letting them down in their taut, cruciform fighting postures. Our friend Philip feels its cruel not to stab them in the head first. My mother assuages her feelings by putting some whiskey into the steaming water, choosing to believe what her father once told her, that liquor provides the critter a happy transition from fauna to food.
The social magic of the lobster dinner is in the innate conviviality of sitting with friends, all hunkered over, cracking and gnawing and snuffling. I like to serve mostly finger food with lobster, so last time we had artichokes, double-roasted potatoes, and a semolina loaf Philip brought straight from his oven. In the morning you’ll be surprised how dirty your champagne glasses are; it’s also hard to get the butter stains and lobster smell out of all your napkins. I always laugh to myself when I hear the bits of shell clattering through the vacuum cleaner hose.
For a bright, well stocked market that carries fresh seafood, try Tink Hall Food Market in Asia Plaza, 2999 Payne Ave., 216-696-1717. S. S. Kemp & Co. (1-800-SAY-KEMP) has a showroom at 4567 Willow Parkway, which is just off Grant Ave. north of Cuyahoga Heights.