My New Year’s Lobster Ordeal

I generally only buy lobsters once a year, for the New Year’s holiday, and however much I love the taste, the ordeal of preparing them for the pot even once a year is enough. I am envious of those of you who probably don’t give such things a second thought.

For a native Louisianian who has eaten hundreds of our delicious spicy crayfish, you might wonder what’s the deal?  In Louisiana, I usually bought them steaming out of the pot, thrown in by another person doing the dirty job, preserving me from most of the guilt.

When the hard part becomes your responsibility, it is a different story, at least with me. I must admit I have gone through enough agonising thoughts, that I have dropped them from the menu all together.

Bringing in a new year is always a challenge of sorts in how to celebrate the big event to fit your own personal style. I am always inclined that it should be an elegant evening at home with wonderful culinary treats, special wines and champagnes of course and a festive meal on New Year’s day.

This year, I wanted my two festive meals to be all seafood, so it was decided to be scallops on New Year’s eve and a very elaborate classical French lobster dish the next day.  This year I was obsessed with making Homard a l’ Americaine , a misnomer for sure, because it has nothing to do with American flavours.

The razor edge catch was that the lobsters need to be cut into parts alive, which knowing in advance I could not do, I hoped my anesthetizing method would work as well as in the past. I therefore decided to pony up to my yearly lobster drama with stauncher courage.

Shopping for holidays foods in Paris is a virtual feast for the eyes, but is very rigorous because everything is done on foot.  To complicate matters, because I end up wanting to compare different seafood merchants prices and quality, I end up feeling like I have done a triathlon.

Obviously, I could make it a lot easier for myself if only I could contend to buy everything in one place, but no, I have not mastered that yet.  The Christmas and New Year’s feasts are always preceded by yearly foot races here and there and everywhere in between to buy all that is needed.

Chastising myself hasn’t worked yet, and I must forget all the pain I put myself through each year by waiting to do all the shopping at the last minute.  It’s tough to be an overly passionate cook, who wants everything to be the freshest possible.

The best scallops for the price were found in an outdoor marché a kilometer away, then I trekked back to get the oysters who left the coast the day before, rather than the others who were expedited  a few days earlier.

I ended up getting North American lobsters, because the blue lobsters from Brittany, priced up to 80 a kilo were definitely out of my budget!  French lobsters are more prized than their american cousins, who some say suffer from the long voyage they make to arrive on French tables.

True, they looked a little tired, and I don’t blame them after such a long trip from Maine waters, but they had decent tail flapping nevertheless.  If we have jet lag, then lobsters do too.

Every poissonnerie(fish market) in Paris jacks up prices of all sea foods at Christmas and New Years.  So if you want it fresh, you are going to pay outrageous prices!

By they time I got home, loaded to the gills with oysters, scallops and the two lobsters, I was already tired, which allowed me to have a great excuse to put off the dreaded part.  I am a master in procrastination, which worked well for me in this case.

After scouring the net several years ago for the most humane way to kill lobsters, the Australians recommended putting them to sleep in the freezer for a short period before proceeding, which I have found fairly successful, though it never takes away my guilt.

Putting them in the freezer for around 20 minutes does the trick of anesthetising them before boiling.  This time though, it took much more of my courage  than plunking them  in a pot of boiling water.

Professionals say they don’t have a problem with this, but however serious a cook I am, I do.  Saying a little blessing before the act didn’t help and I found myself wanting to back out.

Even though I was armed with  a very sharp chef’s knife, it was still an awful ordeal.  I was definitely relieved when it was over, and no, there are not going to be any photos of the procedure.

Making Lobster a l’ Americaine is very time consuming from start to finish, entailing a lot of steps, especially when I was already frazzled from the dispatching. Making the stock starts with slightly sauteing the pieces and then flaming the pieces with Armagnac or Cognac, over finely chopped vegetables and herbs.

After a few minutes of simmering, I  stopped, putting off the rest the following day, because I had the scallop dinner to do next. Allowing the lobster pieces to macerate in the stock would only improve the flavour.

Because we were gifted with surprise New Year’s eve tickets to the Peking circus currently in town, I certainly wasn’t going to do my lobster piece de resistance and leave early for the circus. Sea scallops with a rose beurre blanc sauce served with rosé Champagne is tons easier and made for an elegant early meal.

The circus was an untraditional way to welcome in the New Year’s, but it made for  a perfect relief and distraction from my lobster ordeal.

The next day came the intricate process of extracting the lobster meat.    Cracking a cooked lobster is a messy chore, but it takes on a different dimension of skill coaxing barely cooked lobster out of the many hard shelled carapaces.

Most of the shells are thrown back in to simmer with the stock, while setting aside the lobster meat.  I reserved  the smaller legs and a few or the remaining shells to make the lobster butter, an essential part of the dish.

Without it, you would not have Homard a l’Americaine, nor the incredible flavour. Crustacean shells, be it crayfish, shrimp, langoustines or lobster hold the majority of flavour as well as the colour and should not be thrown away, instead used for stock and crustacean butters.

Shells and hot melted butter are ground together in a robot mixer with sharp blades, which gives the strained butter the lovely pink colour exploding with lobster flavour.

After reducing the stock down and then briefly cooking the lobster, the sauce is finished off last with the lobster butter making the whole dish extremely exquisite, bursting with the pure essence of lobster and totally sumptuous.

I garnished the lobster with two sea scallops uncooked from New Year’s eve dinner and  with a triangle of my own puff pastry. Just magnificent and well worth all the trouble and work put in to create this gorgeous lobster experience.

Simple fresh oysters from Ile d’Oleron, a small island in the Atlantic just off the coast near Bordeaux was a perfect first course to prime the palate, without any competing flavours. A lovely aromatic white Graves, equally from the Bordeaux region went well with all.

I just realised that writing this all down, especially my residual guilt over “dispatching” those lobsters has been therapy for me.  So to all of you who were brave enough to follow through to the finish, thank you for reading!

It was helpful! Hugs