Suzy Says

Love/hate for Friday, July 5, 2002:
Messy luxury food

I couldn’t come up with a good title for this one. Basically, it’s about those foods which are lot of mess and work for not that much food, such as lobsters, crab, and artichokes. Although I am not, as a rule, pro-mess, I am always pro-luxury, and perhaps that aspect cancels out the mess factor for me. But I do love the afore-mentioned shellfish and artichokes. Not to mention corn on the cob.

When I was a child, we spent our summers in Maine, where lobster was cheaper than hamburger, which is the way it should be. So I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know how to eat a lobster. The fact is, there is no elegant way to eat lobster, unless you’ve had it already Newburged or similar. You have to attack it with your bare hands in Henry VIII style, though unlike Henry, with the assistance of nutcracker or other instruments of destruction. Then it’s just dipping it in melted butter or lemon and it’s minutes of greasy, messy fun.

Crabs are possibly even more work than lobster, for almost certainly less reward, unless they are soft-shelled and then you can just eat the whole thing. I have to admit that the low crab reward does make it worthwhile to go somewhere like Swan Oyster Depot and get the insides without the outsides. That reminds me: one of the luxury foods I have never acquired a taste for is oysters. Too slimy. Too icky, no matter what you put on them. Also never developed a liking for caviar. It’s like fish-flavored Jell-O in my opinion.

It seems that most shellfish is a certain amount of work, but it’s fun work. Who doesn’t love fishing the mussels out of their shells and dipping them in marini&egravere sauce, especially when sitting at a bistro in Paris? Then you can mop up the remaining sauce with your remaining baguette.

In one of those e-mails that circumnavigate the globe more times than any explorer past or present would have dreamed possible, the arcane art of knowing how to eat an artichoke is listed as being a peculiarly Californian skill (my most arcane and least useful skill developed from years of living in San Francisco: a close to unerring ability to discern which sex a person is, no matter how s/he is dressed). Returning to the artichoke, however, I knew how to eat one long before moving here. Do you non-Californians know how to eat one if confronted by it in all its thistly glory? They are definitely worth the trouble in my opinion, but I don’t think John has ever eaten one.

One messy food we can both agree on, though: corn on the cob, especially eaten at an equally messy barbecue. While not luxurious in cost or rarity, it is in nostalgia value and simple pleasure. And that is priceless.