They only had two giant lobsters left when I called Truluck's Steak & Stone Crab, so I made up a story. Then I forced a young woman named Sonia to tell it on my behalf. Sonia is the friend of a friend and an avid reader of this column. Hearing that Red and I had broken up, she offered to keep me company at dinner sometime. So I took advantage of her offer.
"Call up Truluck's and ask them to reserve one of those big lobsters for you," I said. "Tell them it's your birthday!" It seems a little craven in retrospect. But I was desperate.
I like big lobsters better than small ones. The claws and tail contain a lot more meat, and the flavor is as good or better. And each leg of a big lobster has a nice piece of meat.
This lobster is steamed so the claws don't hold any excess water. The messy insides have been thrown away. The tail is enormous. I soak a mop-like chunk of succulent white meat in the butter, and then lean over the plate as I guide the dripping morsel into my mouth. The first bite is a gusher of butter and sweet briny richness. I close my eyes and savor the satiny texture and the faint aroma of seaweed. This lobster has a tasty pocket of bright red coral in the tail, which I spread on a piece of the soft white meat. But I miss the tomalley.
The kitchen has discarded this greenish goo, actually the lobster's liver, to save us the trouble. But the tomalley is incredibly flavorful. It is sometimes eaten on buttered bread or used in a stuffing. Jasper White, a respected Boston seafood chef and author of the Lobster at Home cookbook, gave me another idea for what to do with it in a restaurant: Use the tomalley to flavor the drawn butter.
Every year at about this time, I go on a lobster binge. I developed this habit in my twenties while living in New England. The price of lobster hits rock bottom in August up there. I can remember buying them for $3.99 a pound. We would gorge on lobster for days at a time, with nothing but native corn-on-the-cob, steamer clams and butter on the side.
New Englanders view their local crustaceans a little differently than folks in the rest of the country do. To New England's early settlers, lobster was not a fancy food. In fact, they weren't even sure it was edible. Legend has it that when huge lobsters washed up on the shores of Cape Cod, settlers fed them to their pigs. When not swine feed, lobster was also used as fish bait, a practice that continued late into the 19th century.
Even today, lobster as a luxury is a strange concept to many New Englanders, as is the idea of eating such a messy food in an upscale restaurant. Old-time Yankees eat the crustacean at home or at a lobster shack, which is usually a ramshackle building near the ocean where food is served on paper plates at picnic tables.
In my later years, I have attempted to give my lobster binges some dignity. One August, I wrote a magazine article about Jasper White, who gave me a tour of some of his favorite East Coast lobster shacks. That was perhaps my best lobster pig-out ever. Except for two summers ago when a gang of us bought lobster right off a fishing boat and boiled them in seawater on the beach at Acadia National Park on Mount Desert Island in Maine.
This year's binge was not quite so bucolic. Attempting to recapture the spirit of summer lobster fests in New England, I'm afraid I did some strange things. What can I say? It was August in Houston, and the heat got to me. At one point, I was so delirious, I ordered steamer clams at The Stables on Westheimer. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
There are two Stables (7325 South Main, 713-795-5900; 3734 Westheimer, 713-621-0833), and both sell lobster for the modest price of $17.95 a pound. The Westheimer location is a funky joint that probably hasn't been remodeled since the Johnson administration. When I first sat down, they served a little plate of crudités and a crock of cheese spread. The waitress sounded like a country music singer. I loved the place. I thought that maybe this could be Houston's equivalent to a lobster shack -- sort of a surf-and-turf shack. They had steamers too, and that was the clincher. I love eating steamers with lobster.