MANNERS & MORALS: Lobsterclde Made Easy

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MANNERS & MORALS

Boiling a lobster is not a difficult kitchen feat, but it is usually mastered more easily if a bottle of smelling salts and/or a double dollop of gin are placed close at hand. According to ancient ritual, the beast must be plunged alive into a potful of boiling water; it invariably spends the better part of two minutes frantically trying to climb back out, and the cook needs a firm hand to keep the lid pressed down until it succumbs.

Those who become hardened and casual lobster boilers usually do so by a firm belief that the lobster, despite its claw-waving, eye-rolling, scrabbling and thumping in the boiling vat, really doesn't feel a thing, since, after all, it is only a lobster. But last week the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals managed to suggest—without really saying so—that the lobster might screech with pain and horror at this treatment if only he were wired for sound.

The suggestion was the work of one Dr. Svend Nielsen, a Danish pathologist currently employed at the S.P.C.A.'s Angell Memorial Animal Hospital in Boston. After dispatching a total of twelve burly and belligerent New England lobsters, the doctor came to the conclusion that they were capable of pain. With a sharp, clinical eye, he noted that shortly before death "the tail is seen to perform small fitlike movements" and that it curls tightly when the lobster finally cashes in its chips. This did not mean, however, that "our humane friends" could not enjoy lobster meat without "those disturbing thoughts" which may have inhibited them in the past.

If the lobster is placed in cold water, which is then brought to a boil, the doctor suggested, it will cooperatively lose consciousness at between 80° and 90° F. Better yet, it can be anesthetized by immersion in a solution made by mixing a pound of table salt in two quarts of cold water. After one minute in this heady brew, it passes out cold, stays groggy for from three to five minutes, and can be boiled with no "visible signs of discomfort."

It seemed doubtful that New England housewives would pay much attention to his theory; with salt at about 7¢ a lb., it was much, easier to reflect that nobody had ever heard a lobster holler "Help!"