DEATH BY LOBSTER PAD THAI

A COUNTERPHOBIC PAEAN TO FRIENDSHIP, CRUSTACEANS, AND ORAL TRANSCENDENCE

I am frightened of many things: death, Mormons, Stilton cheese, scorpions, Dick Cheney, the freeways of Los Angeles. But I am perhaps most frightened of lobsters. The spiny antennae, the armor-plated cephalothorax, the serrated claws—they are, to my way of thinking, giant aquatic cockroaches who can snap your finger off.

I mention this because for the past few years now I have been heading up to Maine to visit my pals Tom and Scott, and specifically to partake of the transcendent Lobster Pad Thai that they prepare together, lovingly, painstakingly, over the course of a long, drunken summer afternoon. And because this past summer I played an unwitting (and reluctant) role in the preparation of the greatest single Lobster Pad Thai in the history of man. And lobster.

It began with a simple request: Would I be willing to stop by an establishment called Taylor Seafood to pick up some things?

Of course I would.

“We’ll need a pound or two of shrimp,” Tom said. “And some lobsters.”

I swallowed.

“They’re selling four-pound lobsters at a great price.”

I now spent perhaps half a minute trying to imagine myself picking up a four-pound lobster, with my actual hands, but blood kept getting all over the lens.

“Hello?” Tom said. “Hello?”

“Yes,” I said miserably.

“Did you get that?”

“Yeah. I got it. Four-pound lobsters.”

“Four of them. We’ll reimburse you when you get here.”

You’ll reimburse me, I thought, if I live that long.

         

I’M NOT SURE how many of you out there have seen a four-pound lobster. (Most of what you see in the grocery stores or restaurants are less than half that.) Neither my partner in crime Erin nor I was quite prepared.

The creatures were—as Tom would later observe unhelpfully—larger than many newborn infants. Their tails were Japanese fans. Their claws were baseball mitts. They squirmed unhappily as the guy working the counter packed them into flimsy plastic bags. The biggest one swung toward me before he was lowered down and I am here to tell you there was murder in those beady stalked eyes.

Yes, of course the claws were bound with thick bands. The animals had been rendered sluggish by ice and air. They were in no condition to attack. And yet…

And yet the true phobia is marked not by the threat of actual harm, but a fantasy in which the subject imagines harm into being. Thus, as Erin drove north, as the bags rustled about in the backseat, I felt certain the lobsters were merely pretending to be sluggish and out of sorts while in fact communicating with one another via their antennae, biding their time, preparing to launch a coordinated attack. How would this happen? I didn’t know exactly. I envisioned them using their tails in a sort of ninja-pogo maneuver, bouncing from dashboard to emergency brake while nipping at our fragile extremities.

Thus I kept close watch over the bags until such time as we arrived at the home of Scott and his wife, Liza, Tom’s sister. Also on hand for our arrival were Tom’s lovely wife, Karen, and their two darling children Annabel (age: almost eight) and Jacob (age: four), all of whom gathered in the kitchen as we lugged the four heavy bags inside. Scott immediately opened one of them and hoisted out one of our purchases. He whistled admiringly while Jacob—perhaps the only other one of us who realized the danger we were in—took a step backward.

         

SOME BACKGROUND IS IN ORDER.

Fifteen years ago I flew down to Miami to interview for a job at the alternative weekly and, after two days of vapid schmoozing, decided not to take the job. Then two things happened: I ate my first bowl of black bean soup, and I met Tom, the managing editor, for a cup of coffee. I felt almost immediately that I had found a long-lost older brother, the kind of guy who might rescue me from my own glib excesses—both as a writer and a human being.

There is plenty to explain this. We’re both Jews, suburban depressives, painfully susceptible to the song of language. In the four years we spent together in Miami, Tom taught me most of what I know about writing. He also taught me how to eat.

I can remember practically every meal I’ve eaten with him over the years: not just the epic five-course AmEx-buster partaken at Kennebunkport’s hallowed White Barn Inn, but the pillowy gnocchi in vodka sauce ordered from a tiny Miami trattoria called Oggi, as well as any number of grilled fryers exquisitely prepared by Tom himself, using butter, rosemary, and sea salt.

The man has always been a foodnik. But in recent years, his culinary interests have bloomed. Part of this is due to Karen, whose abilities are of such a caliber that she regularly enters (and wins) national recipe contests. But it is Scott, his cheery brother-in-law, who has been his most concerted enabler. The two of them are deeply in love, and cooking has become the purest expression of their devotion. For a number of years, they prepared crab cakes together. A few years ago, they decided to undertake Lobster Pad Thai.

Tom’s reasoning was based on the following factors:

1. He refuses, on principle, to eat lobster outside the state of Maine;

2. His central goal, therefore, when visiting Scott and Liza each summer, is to eat lobster every single day;

3. The rest of his family, particularly his children, do not care to eat lobster every single day;

4. 4. The pad thai format is one way of sneaking lobster past these ungrateful philistines;

5. The recipe plays to Scott’s strength as a cook: the ability to organize and prep tremendous numbers of ingredients (what the French call, somewhat grandly, mise en place).

It is Liza’s contention that her brother Tom employs one additional factor, namely that this recipe calls for the use of every single utensil in her kitchen.

         

TO RETURN TO the scene of my terror: The lobsters had arrived. Scott was holding one in his hand, waving it about so that its claws clacked like castanets. Jacob and I were not amused. Eventually, the lobsters were shuttled down to the basement fridge. The people rejoiced. (At least, I rejoiced.) Erin and I were fed many scones. A miniature-golf excursion was initiated, then a long discussion concerning Liza’s latest sandwich creation, a lobster roll Reuben, which sounded obscene, delicious, capable of clogging a major coronary artery at fifty paces.

An hour or so after noon, Tom and Scott stood up and looked at one another and announced (in the same way I imagine the lead climbers announce an assault on the summit of Everest) that it was time to get started.

I feared this would mean a reappearance of the lobsters, but there was a good deal to be done before that. The chefs use a recipe from Jasper White’s noble volume Lobster at Home, one White attributes to Gerald Clare. As with most Asian recipes, it calls for various esoteric ingredients (shrimp paste, fish sauce, Thai basil, cilantro), all of which must be precisely measured, poured, mixed, whipped, and sliced.

It may well be true that Tom and Scott use every single utensil in Liza’s kitchen. But it is equally true that they have a fantastic time doing so. Indeed, for me, the second great pleasure of the Lobster Pad Thai ritual (after the eating, at which we will arrive in due time) is watching these two commandeer the kitchen. Their style, in terms of grace and economy of motion, calls to mind Astaire and Rogers, though in terms of alcoholic consumption, Martin and Lewis might be closer to the mark.

Scott does most of the blade work, and it says something profound both about his skills with his trusty eight-inch Wüsthof Classic and my own culinary incompetence that I have watched the man julienne lemongrass for a full ten minutes.

Both chefs do a good bit of punning, with Tom—a longtime headline writer—taking the lead. (To give you a flavor of his style, consider this groaner, which topped the review of a particularly dismal Chinese eatery: Wonton Neglect.) These shenanigans compose a kind of theater in the round, given that the kitchen is the home’s central hub, and given that their pace is, to put it charitably, a leisurely one. It is not uncommon to hear Liza and/or Karen mutter that they could prepare the same meal in an hour, rather than six. Scott and Tom are entirely impervious to such kibitzing.

This is what I find so enchanting: that two men should lose themselves in the spell of collaboration. My own experience, growing up with two brothers, did not include group food prep. The closest we came was the time Dave stabbed Mike with a fork.

         

SO SCOTT AND TOM were having a swell time cooking, and I was having a swell time watching them, and Liza and Karen were having a swell time both not having to cook and gently mocking their husbands for being slowpokes; the kids were climbing all over Erin. The afternoon was cooling off. The ginger had been minced, the scallions finely chopped.

“Is it time?” Tom said.

Scott nodded and went out back to fire up the propane-heated turkey fryer that he and Liza bought a few years ago (I believe I’ve conveyed that they’re foodies). This could mean only one thing: the reappearance of the lobsters.

Yes, up they came from the basement. Scott carried two of them outside and lowered them, tailfirst, into the scalding water. Erin, who is a vegetarian on moral grounds but eats seafood, wanted no part of this. None of the females did, actually. Scott and Tom were interested in a purely scientific sense: How many four-pound lobsters could fit in your standard turkey fryer? (Answer: two, just barely.)

In the end, Jacob and I were left to watch the pot and its unhappy crustaceans. I am sorry to report that they did not die immediately. One in particular did a good bit of writhing before giving up the ghost.

“Is it still alive?” Jacob said.

“No,” I said. “Those are just death throes.”

“But it’s moving.”

“Yes, that’s right. But sometimes an animal makes little movements after it has already died.”

Jacob looked at me skeptically.

“What’s that stuff?” he said finally.

The lobsters were emitting strings of pearly, coagulating liquid.

“That’s…that’s…I don’t know exactly.”

Jacob had been curious about the lobster boiling in the way of all morbid four-year-olds, but this latest development exceeded his tolerance. He headed back inside.

The lobsters were dead now, no question. Their shells were turning a luminous red beneath a veil of briny steam. I had watched them perish. I felt bad about this. They were innocent creatures, after all. Terrifically ugly and potentially lethal, but only if I found myself on the ocean floor, a place I did not often find myself.

Tom and Scott reappeared. Their only concern was timing. How long did it take to parboil a four-pounder? Scott poked at one of the lobsters. I decided that I probably needed a beer.

         

IN TERMS OF lobster guilt, the cooking phase was only a prelude. For the central scene of the entire pad thai drama resided in the gathering of the partially cooked lobster meat, which required the complete destruction of each animal’s exoskeleton and the scrupulous removal of every single morsel therefrom.

To bolster this effort, Tom had bestowed unto Scott several Christmases ago an implement which has since come to be known (to them, at least) as The Eviscerator, a pair of truly fearsome kitchen shears used to cut through the shell of a lobster. Also deployed was the traditional claw hammer. The other members of the family gave the kitchen a wide berth.

I’m not sure that I can describe the action adequately, other than to observe that it made open-heart surgery look tame. This was nothing like the dainty dissections performed by casual diners on restaurant lobsters. It was carnage, an orgy of twisting and snapping and hacking and smashing and the emission of numerous fluids. To say that Scott and Tom enjoyed this ritual is to understate the case. They conducted their operation in a giggling ecstasy. This was a treasure hunt, with gratifying elements of gross-out humor.

Tom peeled off the top of one tail to reveal a dark, veiny line.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Back end of the digestive system,” Scott said.

“It’s full of shit,” Tom said.

“The shitter,” Scott said.

“The poop pipe,” Tom said.

They had each drunk about a six-pack.

There was also a great deal of green gunk, which is called tomalley [insert your own pun here] and is technically, somehow, the lobster’s liver. Scott would later inform me, rather against my wishes, that he and Tom sometimes smear tomalley on a piece of bread, a snack he touts as “pungently tasty.” (On a related though unnecessary health note, Scott felt compelled to warn me that tomalley should not be consumed by pregnant women or children, because it contains toxins, which he claims, implausibly, can be counteracted by the consumption of beer.) The harvest went on for nearly an hour, because the four-pounders were so incredibly large and because both men pride themselves on a thorough excavation of all body cavities.

It is a strange thing to see the source of your phobia systematically disemboweled. It made me feel guilty again. These lobsters were senior citizens, after all. They might have been grandparents. For all I knew, they had been involved in the labor movement. I saw them scuttling feebly along the ocean floor, muttering curses at the agile young lobsters, lining up for the early bird specials on krill.

It was time for me to go into the living room.

When I returned a half hour later, a large silver bowl sat on the counter brimming with glistening lobster meat. It was more lobster than any of us had ever seen. We took turns lifting the bowl and trying to guess how much was in there.

The formal weigh-in: 5.7 pounds.

         

DUSK WAS NOW approaching. The shadows on the back lawn had grown long. Tom and Scott took some time to clean up the kitchen, then devoted themselves to the preparation of a batch of Vietnamese spring rolls, which were being served in honor of Annabel’s upcoming birthday, along with nuoc cham, a tasty lime-juice-and-fish-sauce dip, which the birthday girl (predictably, according to Tom) refused to eat.

This was, in its own way, an involved process, one that required wrapping noodles, shrimp, vegetables, and cilantro in fragile rice paper. I was even more impressed by the notion that a nine-year-old child would request such a delicacy. My own ideal meal at that age consisted of Chef Boyardee Beefaroni, Ho Hos, and Orange Crush.

With the spring rolls done, Tom and Scott turned to the main event: stir-frying. Owing to the sheer volume of the batch, this had to be done in two shifts. Scott made sure the right ingredients were going into the wok at the right intervals, and Tom stirred, somewhat frantically. First peanut oil and the lobster (the smell was dizzying), then ginger, lemongrass, chili paste, shrimp paste, sugar, rice stick noodles, fish sauce, lemon and lime juice, scallions, and egg.

The formal recipe calls for this stew to be dished up in separate bowls, with peanuts, bean sprouts, and cilantro. Then, and I quote, “Garnish with lime wedge and sprigs of Thai basil and crisscross the lobster antennae over the top.” (Italics mine.)

Thankfully, Tom and Scott dispensed with the frou-frou approach and simply made up two huge communal bowls. We gathered on the screened-in porch. For a few moments, we could only stare at the Lobster Pad Thai. It was like the gastroporn on the Food Network: too beautiful for our mouths. Then someone (I suspect me) spooned a portion onto my plate and all hell broke loose.

I must note here that I am not generally a fan of pad thai. Because often, in restaurants, the pad thai has been sitting around for a while and it gets dried out and—owing to some strange alchemy of, I think, the rice noodles and the fish sauce—smells like old socks.

This pad thai, however, was so fresh, so exquisitely prepared, as to explode on the tongue: the aromatic herbs, the loamy snap of the bean sprouts, the citrus juice, the chewy noodles, the crunchy peanuts, and, at the center of the action, the sweet succulence of the lobster. I can’t begin to capture the experience of this pad thai; words are inadequate, because all of these flavors and textures were being experienced simultaneously, interacting in the course of each bite.

         

AND HERE’S WHAT made the whole thing so special: Tom and Scott were right in front of us, downing significant quantities of wine and beaming. They had cooked this feast for us, for our enjoyment, and just as much for themselves, for the sheer pleasure of a thing created together.

It made me think of all the stories Tom and I had worked on over the years—more than a hundred. It was what Tom thrived on: the chance to guide a process, to help headstrong schmucks like me get my sentences in order, to usher beauty into the world. And I thought of all the Monday nights we drove out to the Miami Shores Bridge Club for three hours of cutthroat duplicate under the yellow lights, how deftly Tom played and how patient he was in the face of my incessant overbidding. It choked me up a little to think of all the history between us and how we could never have that back.

People were offering toasts now. To the intrepid chefs. To the lobsters. To “The Eviscerator.” We had been at the table for nearly two hours. The candles were burning down. The kids had gone to bed. I was on my fourth serving.

There was some debate over whether this was the best pad thai Tom and Scott had ever prepared. I did not see how one could make a better pad thai, and said so. Then, after checking with the proper authorities, I began to eat directly out of the serving bowl.

The rest of the evening begins to get a little blurry. I believe I suggested that Tom and Scott consider opening a restaurant dedicated exclusively to Lobster Pad Thai (proposed name: Booth & Claw) though there is some chance I merely thought this to myself. I know there was a dessert that involved chocolate. We eventually went inside and played a rather silly game of something or other. For the most part, we sat in stunned gratitude, digesting. The next morning, Erin and I had to return to Boston. We did so reluctantly, and only after securing a large plastic container stuffed with pad thai. It was half gone before we left Maine.