How to Cook a Moose (22 page)

They have excellent lobster salad at the Mail-Order Bride's: mounds of fresh, tender, perfectly cooked meat bound lightly with good mayonnaise, served on crunchy iceberg with thinly sliced ripe tomato, nothing else. We also got a big bag of sea salt and cracked pepper potato chips, a bottle of chilled rosé, and two bottles of water, mainly for Dingo.

And then we headed for Ferry Beach, forgetting in our excitement that they have a strict no-dogs rule in the summertime between nine and five. When we got there, the parking lot was full, so it was moot. We were out of luck. We drove a bit aimlessly around the back roads, wondering how to sneak onto a beach somewhere. No luck there, either.

“I know,” said Brendan. “The Inn by the Sea. They take dogs. We can use their beach.”

A minute later, there it was, the place where I'd taken Brendan for his thirtieth birthday on a weirdly hot March day in 2012; Dingo had come along too, and he got to dine with us in the lobby restaurant
alongside all the other dogs. From the dog menu (yes, they have a dog menu), we ordered the “Meat Roaf” for him. A big bowl of rice, ground beef, minced carrots, peas, and green beans was set down next to his smaller bowl of ice water. Dingo stared at the waiter as if he might be an angel from heaven, then stuck his nose into the bowl and didn't look up again until it was empty. And he stayed with us in our room, where the staff had provided him with a soft dog bed and treats.

Now we parked in their lot and walked Dingo down their wooden boardwalk to the beach, where we saw the no-dogs signs. So we set up camp at a picnic table in the shade by the beach and ate our lobster salad and potato chips and drank our wine. The air was sweet and fresh and cool; the sunlight filtered through the branches of the trees to dapple the ground.

After lunch, we walked Dingo back and left him in the car, under a tree in the shade, snoozing in the backseat with all the windows rolled down, a cool sea breeze keeping him comfortable. Then we came back to the beach, unrolled our towels, and lay in the sun in our bathing suits until we were baking hot. We walked into the green, clear, cold, lapping waves of the north Atlantic and paddled around. Back on our towels in the sun, we dozed, tingly and zinging and euphoric from lobster and wine and seawater. We awoke at the same time and smiled into each other's eyes.

“We live in Maine,” I announced, as I liked to do occasionally, enjoying the happy oddness of it. Neither of us had ever expected to live here, not by a long shot, and yet, now that we did, it felt inevitable.

“We live in Maine,” Brendan agreed.

Until I decided to make Lobster Thermidor, Brendan and I hadn't been truly baptized into Maine life, if only because we hadn't cooked a single lobster in our own kitchen. It was so much easier to order lobster in restaurants.

Not surprisingly, there was no Lobster Thermidor to be found on any current menus in Portland—it's too labor-intensive, rich, and anachronistic. But with my fiftieth birthday approaching, I was beginning to feel anachronistic as well. Scenes from my past were starting to float up into the present, and I started taking stock of my life, examining this half-century I had lived from the perspective of my newfound contentment with Brendan in Maine.

Certain echoing remnants of my old passion for New York started resounding in my inner ear. I was visited by a ghostly nostalgia for that city I'd loved so much and for so long—not a wish to go back, but an appreciation of that two-decade-long love I'd had for it, and for the food there. Not only the actual food, but also, and somehow even more resonantly, the literary, legendary, romantic food of the golden age of hotel bars and jazz clubs and Broadway pre-theater seatings that served fancy dishes whose names consisted of an expensive main ingredient followed by a glamorous sounding name: Beef Wellington, Oysters Rockefeller, Clams Casino, Steak Diane, and, most of all, Lobster Thermidor.

This decadent-sounding concoction of lobster in cream sauce conjured up old New York's hotel restaurants, the glamour and fizz of a long-ago, long-lost city I'd never known, except in books: cigarette holders, highballs, men's hats, swing bands, and proper literary feuds that ended in fisticuffs at the Algonquin, where it was, of course, on the menu.

Until recently, I had never eaten Lobster Thermidor, let alone cooked it. My romance with the idea of it was fueled solely by books, mostly novels, set in Manhattan in the early to mid-twentieth century.
As with most literarily spawned romances, I suspected that it was probably best left to the imagination, just like the most swoon-worthy literary romantic heroes: Who would want a real-life Heathcliff, so crazy and obsessive and terrifyingly brutal? Or a Mr. Darcy in the flesh—a condescending, aloof snob?

Likewise, I always harbored a suspicion that Lobster Thermidor, despite its wonderful name, would probably turn out to be a few overcooked chunks of subpar shellfish in a depressing, gummy sauce, nary a cigarette holder nor highball in sight.

The time had finally come for me to cook lobster (albeit in its most decadent form) and join the rest of Maine. And I wanted to connect it symbolically, to knit together past, present, and literary past pluperfect. Thus, I'd finally learn what Lobster Thermidor tasted like.

Thermidor
was the name of a French play about the overthrow of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror that took place in the late-summer month of Thermidor, the eleventh month in the French Republican calendar. For the play's 1894 opening at the Comédie-Française, a chef at Marie, a nearby theater-district restaurant, invented, in its honor, a dish of lobster meat in a sauce of cream, mustard, egg yolks, and cognac, sherry, or brandy, topped with melted Gruyère. Because Lobster Thermidor was complicated to make and involved expensive ingredients, it became known as a dish for special occasions.

For my own Thermidorian special occasion, I researched, sifted through methods, and finally found a 1940s
Gourmet
magazine recipe from a chef named Louis P. De Gouy that struck me as just right—simple, classic, and elegant, streamlined even, with a minimum of ingredients and a clearly laid out series of steps. I adjusted it a little, adding back in the traditional mustard and Gruyère, as well as
shallots, and a cup of lobster liquor (strained lobster-steaming water), to thin and flavor the sauce. I made an ingredients list, and then we were off to shop.

We bought a lobster pot down on Commercial Street at the kitchen supply store, then headed to Fishermen's Net, the seafood market on Forest Avenue, for our lobsters. We picked out a couple of live two-pounders, because we needed shells big enough to stuff. They were active and full of protestations, despite their banded claws, but we were undeterred.

Back at home, we washed our new, huge galvanized-steel pot with its stencil of—what else—a lobster on the side, and then we filled it with salted water. When it boiled, we, meaning Brendan, held each of the healthy, feisty pair while I removed the claw bands, then in they went headfirst. We clapped the cover on and left them to it. After ten minutes, we hauled them out and put them in a colander and sat at the counter contemplating them while we drank some wine and ate a dozen very fresh Damariscotta oysters, briny, plump, and small, with mignonette. The lobsters were bright red, enormous. Their limp claws and antennae dangled over the colander's edge. I pulled an endive apart and dressed the paired leaves with Humboldt Fog goat's milk cheese, chopped caper berries, and minced shallot, and we ate that, too.

And then the lobsters were cool. We put on some music—a decadent Italian crooner named Paolo Conte—and turned it up loud and poured more wine and got to work. We cracked the claws and snipped the tails and stripped the lobsters of their meat, and (in the case of the female of the pair) roe, set it aside, then washed the shells. (This all took a while, and was painstaking work, as always.) Then I made the sauce while Brendan made the custard. This also took a long time, but, unlike picking the meat from the shells, it seemed to go very
fast. We danced around each other at the stove, not speaking, concentrating hard.

In a double boiler, Brendan whisked two egg yolks with sherry and hot cream until it thickened. I softened mushrooms and shallots in butter, added the cup of lobster liquor with the strained roe and cooked it down, then added all of the lobster meat, plus more cream and sherry, a teaspoon of mustard powder, cayenne, salt to taste, and black pepper. It cooked into a glossy sauce, not too thick. At the end, we added the custard.

Since our former six-burner Vulcan stove, which came with the kitchen and has since been replaced, had no broiler, we had borrowed a blowtorch from our upstairs tenant, a welder. When everything was done, we packed the sauced lobster with a slotted spoon into the clean shells, which we'd arranged in a baking dish. We sprinkled on a layer of grated Gruyère, and then, with a nod to Julia Child—it was the week of her hundredth birthday, after all—we turned on the blowtorch until the cheese was bubbling and beginning to brown.

Afterwards, neither of us could recall ever having had more fun cooking in our lives.

With a second bottle of ice-cold Pouilly-Fuissé, we ate the creamy-lobstery-cheesy-spicy Thermidor on top of a mound of saffron Jasmati rice, with the rest of the sauce alongside in a pitcher to use as needed. (Because the recipe served four people, we had plenty left over for the next night.) It turned out to be a sexy, wonderful dish. The chunks of lobster were meltingly tender. The browned cheese (with a slight whiff of propane) added its nutty tanginess to the cream-and-mustard richness.

As I ate the Lobster Thermidor, I savored the dish's romantic name on my internal palate along with the actual, literal dish itself on my tongue. I felt a sudden swooping uplift as my old excitement about literary New York hotel bars returned, my joy at the idea of a
glamorous woman in pearls and gloves being helped out of a taxi by a doorman with an umbrella, ushered beneath an awning into a hotel lobby to join her smoking, highball-swilling, witty, opinionated literary friends . . .

When my plate was empty, there I was, in Portland, Maine, exactly where I wanted to be. Rather than feeling nostalgia, either for my own New York or for the imagined, lost one, I experienced a simple happiness at my ability to re-create any of it, whenever I wanted, in food.

After a plain, light salad of butter lettuce with shallot vinaigrette, we ate cold slices of cantaloupe, and then two chocolate truffles. There were no cigarette holders or literary fisticuffs to be seen, and our kitchen bore no resemblance to the old Algonquin (or even the new one), but it was a feast to remember, a Thermidorian triumph, and proof that reality can trump fantasy, every now and then.

Lobster Thermidor (adapted from Louis P. De Gouy,
Gourmet
magazine, 1941)

2 (2 lb.) live lobsters

1/2 stick (1/4 cup) unsalted butter

1/4 lb. mushrooms, trimmed and thinly sliced

2 large or 4 small shallots, minced

1/2 tsp paprika

1/8 tsp salt

1/4 tsp black pepper

1 tsp mustard powder