the other day i was watching as jackie boiled two huge pots of water to cook the langoustines.

langoustines are like tiny lobsters. or gigantic prawns. it depends on who you ask. i just asked my friend wikipedia, and it says tiny lobsters are the winner. norway lobsters, actually. and, as the name may suggest (because i don’t think that “norway” is just being used as a euphemism for “tiny”), we don’t have them in north american waters, which explains why i have never encountered them before.

they remind me of salt-water crawdads, but wikipedia tells me that crawdads are further away from lobsters on the crustacean family tree, so i guess it’s the whole living in salt water thing that binds them.

wikipedia + blogging = crazy informed kynthia. sweet.

anyway, these langoustines come out of the loch next door, and when they arrive in the kitchen, they are alive.

kind of…

what i mean is, they are legally required to be alive when sold, but in this case that translates to: heaped on top of one another in big plastic crates without any water from which to derive oxygen. which basically means they are slowly dying, and i don’t really find “alive” to be a fair description of their situation.

but anyway, the other day i was watching as jackie boiled two huge pots of water to cook the langoustines, which is an activity that i have seen before and it makes me kind of sad. it’s worse when francis does it because he puts the pots on the back burners so they are out of the way, but the front burners are still on because the burners are always on while people are cooking so that they don’t have to light and relight them a bajillion times. this is unfortunate because sometimes the arrangement results in some of the barely alive langoustines falling into the fire, which is downright grotesque.

but that’s another story.

this time i just stood there watching jackie bustle around the kitchen, finding other things to do so as to allow the proverbial unwatched pots to boil, and i said: “jackie, why do the langoustines have to be kept alive for so long without water? why don’t they just boil them right away or something?” and she laughed and said they had to be kept alive, it was the way they do things, we shouldn’t ask questions like that.

this caught me a little off guard, because i was expecting simply: “it’s the only way to ensure that they are fresh.”

you see, people have dreams about these langoustines between visits, and i am not even joking. they are an integral part of some people’s relationship with the hotel, and cooking them seriously involves nothing more than boiling them and serving them with butter and garlic, so freshness is the key factor in their fame. the other day jackie and jane were arguing about how many to order (traffic is rather unpredictable at the moment because the season is winding to a close), and jane suggested we could freeze them if there were extras, so we should err on the side of too many. jackie got angry at this and simply would not hear of it, because apparently they had done that once before and they had not tasted at all the same and customers had complained.

so “freshness” is the motivation that i had come to understand, and i had been considering a position that respected that but was also not fully convinced by the whole “let them endure prolonged asphyxiation before being thrown into boiling water” bit, and that’s what i was intending to ask jackie for her opinion on. i mean, couldn’t we gas them or something so they go sleepy sleep between when they are caught and when they are cooked? or transport them in water even though it would be heavier?

these were the questions on the tip of my tongue, so i wasn’t prepared for the whole force of habit angle, but jackie was serious.

“why question the way they do it?” she said with a shrug.

i paused here for a second to check for cameras in case i had been unknowingly cast in an after school special.

“asking questions is good!” i replied.

“but this is so obvious…” she said. “why waste time asking questions about things that are so obvious?”

“the things that seem the most obvious are the things that it’s most important to question,” i said, playing my part, but also actually believing it, and marveling somewhat naively at the fact that this conversation was unspooling itself in the real world.

but jackie just laughed again, harder, and looked at me as she left the kitchen to take a break for her lunch.

“oh, kynthia,” she said with a sigh, “you really are american.”

i stood there for a minute in the kitchen by myself, deciding what to make of that.

in a move that would probably only prove the point more securely in jackie’s mind, i decided to take it as a compliment.

but a thought-provoking one.

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 26th, 2006 at 9:13 am and is filed under food, things i do, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.