Multiple non-recipes for seafood
When I was a kid, my mom, sister and I went to Florida for vacation. During that trip we spent a night in Miami, where I learned that it was a place I would never vibe with because I am the aesthetic opposite of most of its residents--translucent in skin, whatever the converse of Day-Glo is in clothing (black. It's black). So driving away from the city down the small spit of land called a highway buffered on both sides by water felt like a relief, made even better by the night of the trip I remember the best: cooking dinner in the small vacation bungalow my mother had rented in Key Largo.
It may have been on that trip when my interest in vacationing in a house, not just a hotel, solidified, and hasn't left me since. Now that house swapping and Airbnb have become the norm it sounds quaint, but one of my ultimate treats is enjoying an evening in a house that is not mine. The night I remember best involved my mother and I eating lobster tails while my sister probably downed pasta with butter and parmesan (which was all she ate for about 10 years). I don't know that that was the moment I decided I loved, not liked, lobster, but it sticks with me all the same, sitting in a tiled living room/kitchen overlooking a small beach, in a house that had all the trappings of a vacation home. You know, the odd artwork, many copies of Dan Brown's various works, bad knives, and multiple lime squeezers. It felt decadent; relaxing in a way that eating in restaurants rarely feels, fancy in the way that the food we were having was easy and delicious.
The vacation I just took was essentially that: 11 days in a house where I spent most of the time lying down and the rest of the time eating, which meant a lot of time cooking. We went into the week-plus with big plans for new, complicated meals that are hard to do in a small city kitchen--things that take days to marinate (pickled shrimp) or lots of space (attempting fresh pasta for the first time). But because we were at the beach, most of the focus was on seafood.
For much of my life, the first reaction people had when they heard I lived above a fish market for 18 years was "you must have eaten a lot of fish." Yes, I suppose, compared to people who don't live in coastal cities or like that subcategory of animal byproducts? But also no, not fish from the actual Fulton Fish Market, where you could only buy mussels in massive bags, and the tunas were so big I thought for years that they were sharks, lying prone in large wet cardboard boxes packed with ice that I gingerly stepped around on my way to school. The seafood dishes I remember weren't intended to serve 100 covers at a restaurant; they fed just our family. Shellfish is what I grew to love above all else, though, puzzlingly, when I looked through Fave Recipes for the dishes myself and my father fixated on most of all--soft shell crab and lobster--they were nowhere to be found.
I guess that's because both foods don't really require recipes in the traditional sense, as is often the case with stuff that's really fresh. Summer was the season my father's love of food really seemed to come alive; he'd take a ripe tomato, salt it and eat it over the sink like an apple. He waited obsessively for the good corn to come in August. Nights when it was just him and me and my sister he'd make BLTs for dinner (I'd have the very decadent BCK--bacon, cheese and ketchup). And he'd speak reverently about soft shell crabs, so impressive to me because they were only around for part of the year while the crabs molted their exoskeletons away.
One day on this most recent vacation--by chance I swear--we made both: soft shells for lunch, lobsters for dinner. Extremely Too Much in probably every way but that is the point of vacation. After fearing it'd be too early for the soft shells to be in season, as the woman at the seafood store said it might be (she also drew our attention to the fact that crabs are extremely expensive right now because no one has the labor to harvest them because Trump is fucking up visas), my traveling companion and I actually ended up eating them in a restaurant. And while those were very good, they weren't as good as the sandwiches we made ourselves later. When it comes to shellfish, I find that often people also do Too Much. If something is delicious, I don't want to add a bunch of stuff to it; only when I've exhausted a food does being creative with the ingredient start to get interesting.
To make the crabs we briefly assessed some recipes, most of which recommended a flour/salt/pepper/some sort of spice breading and not much else. We stuck to that, dredging them with the aforementioned items and some Old Bay. Then they went into some hot canola oil for a few minutes and were done. Slapping them on toasted sourdough bread slices with mayo and some surprisingly nice tomatoes was enough for me, though the fancier among us might go for a pickle or some mustard as well.
While that was a substantial lunch--two crabs a sandwich is a hearty but necessary serving--we'd already committed to lobster for dinner as well. A very very large pot with a strainer came in handy to cook these bad boys. Though I've had lobster just about every which way--during one trip to Maine I ate it literally every day, Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza style--I think I prefer steaming over boiling if you can hack it, because you don't get all the water pouring out of the lobster shell when you crack it. We had two. One of the guys was normal sized--about 1.5 lbs--but the other was over 3, and all it's weight was in its hips, I mean claws.
Seriously, look at the right one! It had the thickest shell, to the point where it was almost not worth the effort to get the meat out, which is basically blasphemous coming from me. Anyway, this particular guy went along with the usual melted butter and lemon dipping sauce, and we served him with buttered baked potatoes topped with arugula for a little green. You don't really need anything extra if you're eating a whole lobster for dinner, but it's nice to have a flavor break.
A few days later on the drive back we listened to previously mentioned Lidia talk about her new memoir on Fresh Air. Hearing her discuss cooking "peasant food" reminded me that it made sense that some of my dad's most beloved foods aren't in his cookbook devoted to gathering them, that there are some recipes you don't think of writing down. They have to be taught. Or sometimes I guess you have to teach yourself.
KATE
P.S. Read my pal Kara's VOGUE profile in which she looks beautiful while making beautiful pasta.