STEVE AND THE LOBSTER AND I WERE STANDING, SWEATING, IN the little beach house kitchen in Delaware. On the counter the lobster arched its back and raised a knowing claw in our direction.
I thought we should kill it with a sharp knife slid into the back of the shell, where the head and sectioned carapace meet, then cut it up and cook it.
“I heard that’s more humane,” I said. I also thought, for some obscure reason, it might make the meat taste better. I should give this fresh lobster the most delicious death I could. Yet I hoped I might con Steve into being the killer. In the past I had persuaded him to cook and dismember a lobster for paella without any of the requisite tools. It turned out those tools were both well-designed and necessary. A hammer and pliers from the garage were just not the same.
At least here we had the claw crackers, the little silver picks. No respectable beach house, not even this tiny, outdated, and slightly musty one, could do without them.
“There’s no way I’m stabbing the lobster,” Steve said. I lost my nerve, too, and opened the pot of steaming water.
It was the last night of our honeymoon and we were making seafood soup. (I’d done this back in Wisconsin but it was never what it should be with Midwestern seafood.) We boiled the lobster, cut apart the scarlet carapace, and kept it for stock. The rosy-speckled meat we cut into disks. I looked in vain for roe, hoping I could mash it with butter and swirl it into the soup at the end. We added more garlic, the lobster, the shrimp, the crab, the clams, and the tomatoes. At the end we threw in tarragon. We cooked together, Steve peeling the shrimp and slicing the garlic into sticky rounds. I chopped and skinned tomatoes and steamed the corn.
When we finally sat down, it was dark, the day losing its heat. We lit candles, opened fresh beers. For an appetizer I had poured the clams in a pot with garlic and shallot and butter, decanted a small river of wine, and steamed them open in it. We cooked so many we had to eat them from a mixing bowl.
But the soup—the soup was scarlet, flecked with green leaves and ivory lobster, the yellow ruffled edges of the clams peeking above the surface amid the shreds of crab. It tasted splendid: heavy on the garlic and the red chilies, the briny scent of the seafood, the browned crumb of the bread we’d toasted to go with it. It wasn’t delicate, except for the texture of the fish. It’s not a soup to get elegant with—no purées, no cream or tiny spoons. It was messy, heady, spicy, speckled with olive oil and herbs.
It was not a dish for someone with a newly diagnosed, unpredictable seafood allergy. A week earlier, I’d discovered—via swelling, itching, and a trip to the ER as my throat began to close—that I was one of those people. I was telling myself the culprit was only a specific type of cheap frozen crab Rangoon. So far on this trip I had eaten shellfish but no crab Rangoon, and nothing had happened. I hoped to continue my streak of luck with the soup, but I suspected the allergy was not as limited as I wanted it to be.
As we began to eat, Steve watched me for signs of a reaction. I was watching him, too. It was true I should have been more cautious with seafood, but neither should he have been drinking the beers we’d just cracked or the gin and tonics we’d sipped beforehand. I had just begun to suspect that as well.
For six years we never considered marriage. Then in 2000 we got engaged, married, and moved to the East Coast all in three months. In June, I had proposed and Steve had agreed. Then he got food poisoning. This happened two days after we got engaged, at a barbecue where we began the rounds of announcements and watched a friend poke raw chicken breast and undercooked bratwurst around a tepid grill. Really it was obvious that someone would be sick. I announced the engagement to my family by myself while Steve stayed home, moaning on the bathroom floor and croaking weak but affable thanks when my parents phoned him.
Then, in August, the day after we got married, that crab Rangoon swelled my throat slowly closed. We joked that these were omens. We could do that out of confidence, even hubris: we mocked the way our milestones were attended by vomiting and emergency rooms, and then forgot about it.
We also forgot to plan a honeymoon, but luckily someone we knew owned a little bungalow on the Delaware shore. It was a hairsbreadth from dilapidated and the wiring was going. We ate our meals on mismatched china at an old wood table on the back porch, which was lined with tough green indoor-outdoor carpeting. The last visitors had left a charred candle in a discolored bone holder, which we lit every evening. Our gin and tonics tasted of citronella, the scent of our sunscreen hovering over the glass.
Other people’s kitchens tend to be a nightmare of dull knives, treacherous glass cutting boards, and hostile, diminutive saucepans. This one was in better shape: the knife was fairly dull but not a cheap serrated one, there was a wooden cutting board, and most importantly there were two deep mixing bowls and a huge stockpot. This was fortunate, because we intended nothing less than a shellfish extravaganza.
We regarded the ocean less as a place to swim than as a vast buffet. Our first night in town, smelling the salt and kelp in the air, we stopped at a bar and ordered blue crabs dredged in fiery reddish-orange seasoning, dumping a pile of them onto a newspaper-covered picnic table. It was my favorite kind of seafood: a meal you ate with your hands, till your fingers and mouth burned. We drank a pitcher of cold, pale beer from plastic cups. Steve was peaceful, happy. He didn’t drink too much, and I was beginning to relax again. As we ate we planned the week’s meals—all shellfish.
I made the pretense of caution, pausing as I started each meal to gauge any reactions. I was supposed to carry a couple of EpiPens, but kept forgetting. Who really carried medicine everywhere they went; who worried that way? I had never believed that all these things really applied to me. And we kept getting away with it: meal after meal I ate seafood without consequence, night after night Steve drank wine or beer like a normal person. Though Steve would stop me as we left the beach house to be sure I had my EpiPens and question whether we should order blue crab by the pound, I chose to see it as sweet, as someone trying out the new role of husband and worrier. I think I responded with shrugs, with exclamations over the sudden lightness of his hair. He is a true blond, for whom an hour in the sun gilds his eyebrows and lashes, bleaches out his thick hair straight to the roots. It makes him slightly unreal: his height and breadth, the flaxen hair and blue eyes. He is a peculiar and possibly brilliant dancer. He has never been in a fight in his life. He once stopped off for bigger pants on the way to dinner.
On soup day we drove around to various shops. The seafood store for lobster, clams, and shrimp. A farm stand for tarragon, tomatoes, garlic, and corn. A plain grocery store for olive oil, butter, and bread. At the liquor store we bought wine to cook with, lager to drink, and gin and limes for cocktails. It would never have occurred to us not to include alcohol in a great meal: I was always amazed and slightly appalled by people who could order iced tea with dinner. Though I tried to suppress it, I had even felt the same judgmental thrum when Steve’s father, an alcoholic who had not had a drink in thirty years, ordered ice water at a French restaurant. We believed in too much rather than running out. Neither of us was ready to change that, any more than I would forego all shellfish until I absolutely had to.
That last night I gorged myself on the seafood soup so filled with shellfish it was barely even soup. I started with a chunk of lobster: if I were going to have to cut this short, I wouldn’t have wasted my time on shrimp. I took the first bite, and Steve sat back and watched me. It was sort of a ritual: the slow chew, the thoughtful inventory of my responses. Was that sunburn or the first ominous, tentative itch of my skin? I was slightly flushed and warm, but it might have been the warmth on the porch. It might simply have been pleasure over the honeymoon, the meal. Did my lips feel numb at all, did my scalp or face tingle? Maybe; maybe—but the soup was peppery. The sensory recall of that one attack was fading already.
“Well?” Steve said. I ate a clam. It was a little on the chewy side, but I didn’t mind.
“I think I’m fine,” I said. “I really don’t feel anything abnormal.” Saying it made us both relax. We settled in and ate the soup, dipping our garlic bread into it and stirring it sensuously with our spoons to make it last.
“Maybe we should have gotten wine,” Steve said. “The soup kind of deserves it.”
“There’s wine in the soup,” I pointed out. “It’s too spicy for most wines, anyway. Unless we’d found a nice dry rosé.”
We were both quiet for a moment, disappointed we’d neglected the proper wine. I liked talking about what wine we should have, what drink went with which dish. I didn’t want to have to give that up, either. I did not say this, but stirred my soup until I found a lobster claw, the perfect shape of the meat still mimicking its lost shell, and ate it all at once.
Nothing happened. The allergy would lie dormant, resting up, for another six months. I was certain I must have dodged a bullet—it was all a mistake, surely. Every time I lucked out it was pure relief, even delight, to be able to have what I wanted, as much as I wanted.
We opened the extra beer because we didn’t have to drive and didn’t care about hangovers. We lit more candles and played strip poker. I talked about squeezing in one more paper tablecloth full of blue crabs before we drove back to New York the next day to start new jobs and new schools and settle into a new apartment.
Later that winter, after months of eating shellfish like anyone else, a meal at a tapas restaurant on First Avenue proved the final straw for my dithering immune system, which decided on allergic once and for all and landed me in Beth Israel. As I lay in a bed hooked up to IVs and monitors, I recalled the way I’d almost mistaken sunburn, the heat of a few chilies, or a nervous flush for the first symptoms of shock. It turned out there was no mistaking the real thing. This time my hair had stood up on end. The tingling that had ranged over my skin had been electric and distinct, almost crackling; my mouth had swelled and numbed so thoroughly that I felt my own face as meat, as not belonging to me at all. In the hospital I finally understood the obvious, that vacations full of seafood were an impossibility for me.
But at the beach that summer I hadn’t yet believed in such an insurmountable problem. We had been married for two weeks.
Here is another event from that same summer: in July, still back in Wisconsin before the wedding, Steve and I had walked to a bar. We played pool with a guy we’d just met. We all liked each other, and I remember feeling that all was going well, that I was funny, Steve was funny, everyone was funny.
Somewhere along the way, the night changed. We were still playing pool with our new acquaintance, still sipping at beers, when I realized something about Steve was off. His voice had gotten louder, his jokes were duller, and then the worm turned entirely. I can’t remember the exact moment when I knew, but I remember the guy looking down at the pool table and away from us, then quietly drifting to another part of the room. I don’t remember what Steve had said, maybe some inappropriate joke, but I realized he was drunk. Not the pleasant, sensory-laden buzz of a few drinks after work or wine with every course at a pricey dinner, but sloppy, mortifyingly drunk. In all the years I’d known him, through years at a heavy-drinking Midwestern college and lots of bars and countless boozy dinners, I had very rarely seen him like this. Yet this was the second time in a matter of weeks that he’d been badly out of control. I wasn’t sure how it had happened. I thought I knew what he’d been drinking, but maybe he’d been ordering shots when I wasn’t looking. Much later he would tell me he’d begun every evening with a big head start. My first beer might be his seventh. The vodka bottle in our apartment, which I thought was the same one for months, was refilled again and again.
We had just become the embarrassing couple in the bar. Every bar has one, and everyone dreads their arrival. Walking home I was silent; Steve veered between sappy, seductive, and annoyed at the silence. He wove slightly into the grass and back onto the sidewalk again. At home he went to bed and passed out.
There was no reason he’d drunk so much, he later told me. No secret grief, no special fear over the wedding. It just happened.
I knew that this was trouble, as surely as I knew the night I met him that I would see him again. I had watched for this. His father was a recovered alcoholic sober for many years; his grandfather an alcoholic who died of it. It ran through the men in his family the same way blue eyes did, or the shape of their noses, and deep down I knew what I was seeing. I asked myself if I was really going to do what, perhaps, I ought to: cancel the wedding, tell him to stay in Madison while I moved across the country. Was I going to dump someone after six years because he got drunk? This was both a gross oversimplification and also the basic truth.
There are so many things that can go wrong with those late summer meals if you don’t time them right or if luck is simply not on your side. You can get impatient and try for tomatoes before they’re ready, or end up with puckered, brunette ears of corn from a store that calls itself a farm stand but is really an outdoor A&P. The bread can be pallid. The clams can die in your fridge, sad tongues of flesh drooping over the lips of their shells. The lobster can be stringy, the crab frozen, the parsley dried.
The last meal of our honeymoon was perfect, it was true, but we missed the luck part of the equation. We thought it was our doing. The corn and tomatoes had come to us with skins stretched taut with juice, the shellfish as lively as is required by the rather brutal pleasures of eating seafood. It had nothing to do with us, but as we ate that late summer meal, we thought that this was the next thing, that we were on the verge and it would be splendid. We had changed almost everything in our lives, thrown our lot together. The surfeit of cash from the wedding gave us a taste of what a little wealth might feel like. The sea had washed our new rings so clean they sparkled. The filaments at the edges of Steve’s lashes and eyebrows were bright gold.
You couldn’t have guessed, looking at him as we sat on the porch and talked idly about the lemon-scented blueberry cobbler we would have for dessert, that he would turn into someone totally different, someone whose eyes went as dead as a trout’s, who within a few years would stumble in without looking at me long after work, after midnight if at all. I could not have known he would someday come out of a blackout to find himself walking along a rural highway twenty miles north of our house, still carrying his briefcase, but I think he knew, even then, that something like that was on its way.
The cobbler that night was rich and still warm when we ate it, the syrupy blueberries staining the biscuit and the vanilla ice cream. Its texture was rustic (I had been experimenting with cornmeal), studded with bits of lemon peel that candied as they baked. We ate cobbler again for breakfast, and then we drove north.
Five years later, we live more like monks: our herbal tea after dinner, the endless seltzer. I don’t touch shellfish, too frightened by the second, ferocious attack to risk it. For several months after the honeymoon I’d gone on eating as I pleased and never carrying the EpiPen, cooking feasts of lobster and shrimp and ordering blue crab and oysters with an appetite like a gangster. Then came the clams and shrimp and scallops and squid and sardines at the tapas bar, and the trip to Beth Israel, and that was it for shellfish. There is no longer a special wine with an anniversary dinner or beer on a hot afternoon. There is not supposed to be anything alcoholic at all, Steve is supposed to be sober, but in truth it is a cycle. Weeks of sobriety, then the fall. Every month or so it returns, secreted in a briefcase, brought in from the trunk of the car when I’m not home. We’re long past pretending these binges are accidental, or that even a single glass of wine is acceptable. So instead of too much wine at dinner, it’s the bottle in the closet, the thermos tucked among the ceiling tiles. He can only hide it for a day or so. Then we clear the place out, dump the bottles, and the next attempt begins.
Monastic life, if only intermittent, has its benefits, the biggest one being that ninety percent of the time I have him back, the person I knew for the first six years. But sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, the bed next to me empty. Steve is home; but he’s on the couch, and I go and stand over him, knowing that he falls asleep out there when he has hidden a bottle somewhere in the house and waited till I’ve gone to bed to get it. In these moments I don’t know what will follow—whether I’ll go to work or call a moving van. It could be thirty more years if he recovers, or it could be one more day.
Now it’s summer again, and it comes back to me how entwined with heat are the pleasures of dry rosé and cocktails and beer. I think of that week at the beach fondly, bitterly, as if it were a lost paradise and not a beach like any other. The house was just a house, a free shelter near the sand. That dinner was glorious because we were being granted a respite before we even understood it. The sharp scent of the flickering candle, the lime on our fingers, the sea-sweet lobster, the torn basil leaves, and the buttered clams frilled with yellow muscle—it was all a mirage, but we actually lived inside it. Nothing existed beyond that little house and the dark, starred beach with its water foaming whitely around our feet, and nothing malevolent came inside its boundaries. We had inklings of what was coming, what circled us even then. But during that week, that last night, those clues had all receded, or else we simply pushed them back. The future waited, as it always does, melting patiently into the hazy edge of the horizon.
A big slosh of olive oil, plus more for brushing the bread
2 to 3 shallots, coarsely chopped
6 garlic cloves, coarsely chopped, plus 2 halved garlic cloves
2 pounds clams, scrubbed clean and soaked in water with cornmeal or salt, whichever you prefer
A cup or two of dry white wine
Salt and pepper
A handful of chopped parsley
4 thick slices sourdough or other hearty bread
SERVES 2 TO 3: In a saucepan deep enough to fit all the clams, heat the slosh of olive oil over medium heat, and add the shallots and chopped garlic. Cook till they are golden. Put in the clams and pour the wine over, adding more if it doesn’t look generously steamy enough. Cover the pan tightly.
While the clams are cooking, toast the slices of sourdough or other bread. Rub them with a cut clove of garlic and brush with olive oil, then sprinkle with salt.
After a few minutes, peer into the saucepan. When the clams are all open, divide them between two bowls and pour the broth over them. Scatter the parsley over before serving. Serve with the bread. Add salt and pepper as needed.
SOME COMBINATION OF THE FOLLOWING, WHATEVER YOU LIKE
1 lobster
Olive oil
A few dried red chili peppers, to taste
Many cloves of garlic—at least 5
A small onion, chopped
Lots of dry white wine
A few pounds of beautiful late-summer tomatoes, skinned and chopped (fresh is ideal, but high-quality canned will be better than out-of-season tomatoes)
Salt and pepper
12 clams or mussels
12 shrimp, ideally with shell and head on, but why quibble?
½ pound crabmeat, picked over for cartilage
Fish, such as red snapper, monkfish, or any white-fleshed fish
Fresh tarragon, basil, or parsley
SERVES 6 TO 8: Steam or boil the lobster for a little less time than you normally would. Let it cool in the fridge a bit, then remove the meat from the shell and save the shell, the green tomalley, and any roe. Cut the meat into bite-size pieces.
Heat a few tablespoons of olive oil over medium heat in a big, deep, heavy pan. Add the chilies, garlic, and onion and cook until the garlic and onion are pale gold. Add the lobster shell and try to smash it slightly with a spoon without accidentally flipping it out of the pan. Add lots of wine. Let this combination simmer gently for ten minutes or so before removing the lobster shell. Then add the tomatoes and salt to taste and simmer a little longer. Begin adding the seafood and fish in order of cooking time: the clams or mussels, the shrimp, the crabmeat, the fish, and finally the lobster just to heat it through. If you require more stock at any point, just add more wine and some water, and be sure to simmer the alcohol away. Taste toward the end for salt and pepper, and drizzle with olive oil if you like. Garnish with lots of torn tarragon or basil leaves.
You could also add fennel, sliced and cooked like onion, and a pinch of saffron, and finish it off with orange juice. All of these things are delicious. I have added fresh summer corn at times as well, which makes it more chowdery and hearty, a little sweeter. This dish is best served with toasted bread to dip into the broth.
A true cobbler has biscuit dough rolled out over the top of the fruit. I don’t know that I have ever had a true cobbler; I grew up eyeing this shortcut version of my mother’s as it cooled on the back of the stove. There was a brief ambitious period in my early twenties when I might have tried out a real cobbler, but Ihave since given in to my own laziness.
4 tablespoons (½ stick) unsalted butter
2 cups blueberries (I often try to pack in more, reasoning that it offsets the butter)
1 cup flour (or ½ cup flour and ½ cup fine cornmeal)
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 cup milk
1 tablespoon pure vanilla extract
Zest of 1 lemon
SERVES 5 TO 6: Heat the oven to 350 degrees. Melt the butter in the glass or ceramic dish in which you’ll bake the cobbler. Add the blueberries. In a bowl, combine the flour, sugar, and baking powder. Add the milk and vanilla and mix till smooth. Pour on top of the fruit. Do not stir the fruit into the batter. Bake until just brown, 35 to 40 minutes. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream.
This turns into hot fruit with a golden-brown cakey top that seems so moist it’s almost custardy. Other fruit works just as well—pitted sour cherries or peaches especially. I have also made this with as little as two tablespoons of butter, so that I could think of it as “breakfast cobbler.”