On Making Lobster Bisque

First tasted in a tiny French restaurant newly opened in a Loyalist city where the owner chef told us it was the spiky red shells that made this silken delight.  All bisques are judged against this one. He made exceptional dishes for fast food people. The restaurant is an insurance office now, the owner moved on to pass his gift to those more appreciative.

It takes a bucket of shells to make a bowl of bisque. That never used to be a problem. Getting rid of all the shells was the challenge. We forgot once and three days later the garage smelled like a dead whale- a putrefying wall of stench that seeped under your very skin, making your eyes water in repulsion. From then on it was my brother’s job to bag up the shells and takes them to the garbage bin at the end of the road. My mother’s theory was there was no town law against abandoning crustacean carcasses there. Still, she told him to wait until it was dark.

I don’t know where they went when Dad was alive. He’d come home from a week’s surveying for the placement of wharves and local fishermen would have filled his trunk with lobster.  He’d bring up the pot from the basement and soon the kitchen was filled with steam and friends cracking open shells and stubbies of beer around the table built by his father, who never ate lobster because that was poor people’s food.

The parties died with Dad.

That first summer it was almost possible to pretend that life was unchanged because Dad never came to the shore until the end of August. We had weeks of waves and sand dunes and searching for shells. The cousins, in a rented cottage, would show off their new skills, and challenge us to beat them at games we’d never heard of with rules that were announced after the infraction. I suspect I never won, because I don’t remember who did.  We were all fair skinned and freckled.  Nobody wore sunscreen, there was only baby oil and iodine for those in a hurry to tan.  I burned. You look like a lobster.  We’d pull the pealing skin off each other’s back.  

Other days our mother would pack us into the Wildcat with the towels and swimsuits and she’d visit with the friends she left behind when she married. They’d sit on the patio for hours sipping G&Ts.  Same water, different beaches.  We’d order lobster rolls at the clam shack on the way back to the house because Kool-aid and crackers is no kind of meal for a child, thank you very much.

What do they do with all the shells?  Nothing, they throw them away. Or take them to the dump.   Or bury them at the back of the garden.  There is no such word as compost in our vocabulary.  It’s as foreign as bisque.