Day nineteen: Lobster murderfest
Posted on | February 4, 2010
Shortly before we moved here, a restaurant in the last city we lived in announced their newest special by hanging an enormous banner outside their establishment that proudly announced “Lobster Lovefest!”
When my husband and I saw the banner,I turned to him and said: “Not for the poor lobsters. For them, it is lobster murderfest.”
Welcome to lobster murderfest at culinary school.
Why did the tomato blush?
~ Because it saw the salad dressing!
As of this morning, there are only two days left in this semester. Then, I enter my last semester.
In this semester, we spent about an hour and a half in production and three hours in the classroom. In my next semester, we will spend the entire time working in the school restaurant. So these two days are the last days of kitchen lesson and classroom lectures.
And we can already feel that this semester is coming to an end. Because today, we had our very last mirepoix challenge, ever.
This is the third term mirepoix challenge: Medium dice two carrots, two onions, and four stalks of celery in eight minutes. If you can’t do it in eight minutes, do it again until you can, for as many times as it takes.
What a way to start the day!
So I set up my cutting board, got out my peeler and chef’s knife, grabbed my vegetables, and waited, knife in hand, hand poised over the celery.
Yeah, I was a little keyed. After all, I didn’t know, for sure, if I could do it.
“And, start!”
Unlike the other students who start with the onion because it is easiest, I start with the celery. Instead, I save the onion for last. See, my thinking is, if the onion fumes irritate my eyes, I won’t be forced to cut my carrots and celery half blind.
Besides, if I have to race at the end, the onions are the easiest vegetable to speed cut.
I chop the ends off all four stalks, turn them around, line them up, and chop the other ends off.
Then I cut them in half.
And I slice down each half so I am left with celery sticks that are the same width.
Take a bundle of celery sticks, line them up, and slice, slice, slice until they are diced. Ditto a second bundle, then a third. Scoop into a container.
Clean board and knife.
Chef does not count down the time, so I have no idea how I am doing. Hurry, hurry.
Grab the carrots and peel them. Chop off the ends. Cut them in half.
Shave off a thin piece from one of the four carrot halves to give me a flat surface. Discard. Roll the carrot onto the flat surface and cut into planks. Repeat with the other three halves. Stack the planks and cut into sticks, much like I did with the celery. Line up the sticks and dice. Keep doing this until all the carrots are done.
Scoop into a container, clean knife and board, and grab onions.
Glance up. Two people are done. Can’t tell how far along the other students are. Haven’t even started onions yet. Hurry, hurry, hurry.
Cut off the root ends and cut the onions in half. Peel the halves. Score the halves. Slice, slice, slice and the onion dice goes into a third container.
Clean board, clean knife.
Okay. Now I can look up.
Some people are done; other people are still cutting. I’m somewhere in the middle. Glanced at Chef. He is still looking at his stopwatch. That means I did it.
Yes!
What did the baby corn say to the mommy corn?
~ Where’s the popcorn?
Once everyone finished (and everyone did finish under eight minutes, although Mama only just made it under the wire and Make-up Girl was going so fast she gave herself a nasty nick on one finger), we were given our task for the day: Make two risottos.
Not another damn risotto. I made eight million in the first and second terms. In fact, I was famous for them. Because when anyone needed a risotto, they always seemed to get me to make it.
So I made another risotto. And the Chef tasted it and proclaimed it “Pretty good.” And, like everyone else, I had to make a second one.
I really wasn’t learning anything new here.
But I made a second one, along with everyone else.
Then when everyone was done making their risottos, we all cleaned up.
And that’s when the Chef dragged out a lobster. A live lobster.
How do you fix a cracked pumpkin?
~With a pumpkin patch!
She, for the lobster was a she, was pretty active for a creature that was kept in a stainless steel bowl covered by a few sheets of damp newspaper.
Her legs were moving, her tentacles were moving, her eyes were moving, and when the Chef picked her up, her tail was not just moving but was actually thrashing with a fury I had only ever seen in a chained dog lunging at a chattering squirrel happily collecting nuts just a link or two out of reach.
The Chef put her on the table and identified her various parts. Then he explained how to dispatch the lobster and mimed, twice, what he was going to do.
Then he leaned over, kissed the lobster (yes, kissed it), then put the tip of his chef’s blade on the back of her neck, and pushed, hard. She spasmed. He clung to her body. She tried to curl her tail. He forced his knife forward and cut her head in two. Her legs twitched. Then he ripped off her tail, ripped off her legs, split open her body, removed her innards, and, finally showed us her heart.
It was still beating.
We’ve been fabricating, cooking, and devouring meat on an almost daily basis for months and months now. It would be hypocritical for me to cry. Besides, I did not want to be the stereotypical weak girl, giving into her emotions.
But it was difficult.
And lest you not understand what this was like for me, let me tell you two things you might not know about me. First, I am the world’s largest animal suck. I’ve had pets practically non-stop since I was a baby. I believe animals have hearts and minds and souls. And I suspect most animals are nicer than most people.
And, second, before I started culinary school I was an almost vegetarian. I rarely cooked or ate meat at home and tried to steer our diets to healthy, non-animal choices (a bit of an uphill battle with my Italian husband!). So, yes, I knew culinary school would mean abandoning this type of life, at least, for the duration, but that does not make it easy.
But I’ve been game about all this. I’ve eaten frogs legs and foie gras and even my arch nemesis, pork. And I’ve ripped beards off mussels and thrown live clams into steaming liquids and I’ve even filleted fish, cut chickens into parts, and even sliced strips of silver skin off pork.
But all of that pales in comparison to having to stick the point of my knife in a creature’s head and watch it die and know that I killed it.
A task we have to do in the next class.
So the question is, can I murder a lobster. Or, even, should I?
What would you do?
Comments
7 Responses to “Day nineteen: Lobster murderfest”
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February 4th, 2010 @ 6:48 am
I could murder a lobster I believe, I haven’t done it because my partner and sister won’t be able to look into my eyes again if I do it here.
I had to go through that experience with Pork and Chicken… Fish, shrimp, oysters and clams, mussels too.. but the Lobster is always different than the rest of these Seafood, they keep moving.
I don’t think it would be worse than the pig, my cousin became a vegetarian they day we had to kill the pig, I had to do all the cleaning and butchering by myself, but I respect that.
I wish you the best and I think YES you will, should you? that’s the toughest question, it’s like asking yourself should I eat meat? I don’t do it anymore. I already know the answer.
Good luck =)
February 4th, 2010 @ 7:11 am
I think you can handle it, my dear, and I think you could try, at least once. I think we’ve unfortunately lost the connection with what we eat when we just buy meat from the grocery store. Seeing the animal alive, and then killing it in a dignified manner, and then not wasting what you take from it – there is something beautiful about it. My family is Muslim, and when I was young we were not able to easily get halaal meat (sacrificed in a particular manner according to Islamic law) so I used to go with my parents to an abbatoir, who would let us sacrifice the animal ourselves. I never actually saw my dad make the cut, but I remember the immense respect he gave to the animal and to the process as a whole, making sure the knife was clean and sharp and that he made a quick and precise cut, etc. It makes you appreciate the meat even more.
anyway, my four cents. i’m sure you’ll make a good and respectable decision either way! good luck.
February 4th, 2010 @ 11:32 am
I am utterly sympathetic to your plight. I could not kill a lobster, or anything else for that matter. That’s a large part of why I am a baking and pastry arts student (also returned to school as an “older” woman like you). While there are many things I’d love to learn in a kitchen culinary program, I’m just not willing to do or eat certain things, so I had to make a choice. I respect and understand your decision that you could suspend certain aspects of your “real” life for the sake of learning, but I think you kind of have to kill the lobster. It would be a little arbitrary to make that distinction at this point. Well, that’s my two cents. Best of luck – that’s gonna be rough.
February 4th, 2010 @ 2:14 pm
Your description made me shudder. It reminded me of sitting in on the euthanasia of a family pet once. Not fun at all. Participating in the procedure made me have an enormous amount of empathy for Vet techs. I could never do their job.
Raising my own chickens has been an eye opener. (We are so far removed from our food sources as Americans.) I feel that the “ownership” of raising our own food or butchering our own meat, whether it be through fishing, game or domestic sources of beef and pork, makes me a better consumer. I am less likely to waste portions, or simply toss away food. Even keeping it in well wrapped packaging for freezing is important to ensure it doesn’t get freezer burned and be wasted.
Maybe this is how you approach this dilemma. It should never be easy to take a life, even an animals’.
February 4th, 2010 @ 4:49 pm
Shudder. Thats why I’m a vegetarian, although I do eat fish and lobster, so I’m even more of a hypocrite, but I feel like I didnt really ought to eat anything I wasnt prepared to kill…
I hope it works out, whatever you decide…
February 4th, 2010 @ 5:18 pm
Welcome to the best kept secret in cooking
– fish and seafood in general is quite a bit more aggressive and direct a death than, say, pork or beef products.
We eat it alive, we drive knives into their brains, toss their living bodies into boiling water, suffocate them until they die thrashing for oxygen.
Yet, strangely, pescetarians seem to consider it OK. Even animal health organizations seem to focus exclusively on land based animals.
Then, however, we need to put perspective onto this. Anyone who ever stepped on a cockroach, crushed a spider, flushed one down the toilet or the shower drain while still alive, swatted a fly, poured a drain cleaner down their sink, is guilty of destroying the same level of sentient life as a lobster.
And anyone who ever stepped on a slug or worm doesn’t do much more than kill a close member of the clam family of animals.
I’ve come to terms with my own eating. Instead of living a vegetarian life, absolving myself from the cruelty outside by not participating, I make bacon from local CSA pigs, hamburgers from my own, range living, grass fed, cows, chops from lambs that never saw a steroid injection, and don’t touch veal unless it’s SLM.
That way I not only don’t participate in the cruelty that is CAFO and mass farming, I bring other to not to, either. And if I slaughter things myself, I know it’s done in the most humane and painless way possible.
February 10th, 2010 @ 4:34 pm
I am really not looking forward to this. As it is, I hate filleting fish because I don’t like dealing with anything that has eyes.