Butt End of a Butter Knife

This year we decided on lobsters for Easter dinner instead of lamb. It seemed the right thing after the hard winter, although I’m not sure why. More celebratory perhaps, or because Duryea’s has a great price on a package deal that includes lobsters, New England clam chowder, and either a bag of mussels or Little Necks. 

We had invited a few friends over, so I set about getting the big lobster pot out of mothballs and searching for the tools needed to pierce the lobsters’ armor. Personally, I don’t need the hinged shell crackers and meat picks.

I’ve found that hitting a claw right at the junction where the two pincers come together with the butt end of a butter knife is the way to go, although the last time I showed off my method, I sprayed two of our guest’s finery with lobster juice. I poured them more wine.

I was afraid I’d have to fall back on the butter knife method — perhaps provide towels in which to drape our guests before my tutorial — because I found we were short of crackers and it was too late to buy new ones. I found only two deep in the knife drawer, but it had been so long since they were used that the hinge on one was rusted, as was one of the three picks. Six people would have to share one cracker and two picks unless I could resurrect the rusted hinge.

As everyone knows, there is only one cure for a bound-up, rusted anything — WD-40. But, of course, this solution posed an even greater danger. The lobster would taste like the WD-40. I thought about lubricating the cracker hinge with melted butter, but melted butter tends to grow rancid quickly, and the tool would look like it hadn’t been washed since last summer. Talk about the horns of a dilemma.

Damn, a boneless leg of lamb imbedded with slivers of garlic and brushed with a glaze made of fresh rosemary and mustard would not have required medieval armor-piercing weaponry.

I headed to the toolshed to see if I cold find a couple pairs of pliers or channel locks, which would serve the purpose, but would not go well with the yellow flowered tablecloth, a fragrant hyacinth centerpiece, candlesticks, and white linen napkins. En route to the shed, I thought about lobster tasting like WD-40, about the connection between lobsters and oil.

You see, lobsters and crabs love oil. Menhaden, the oily fish also called mossbunker, bunker, and, in New England, pogy, is the best lobster bait in the world, especially — because lobsters are scavengers — when they are in the process of decaying.

Whenever possible, lobstermen bait their traps with ripening bunker. The story goes that during World War II, bunker bait became hard to get, or to afford. The processing plant located at Promised Land on Napeague needed all the bunker its boats could catch in order to render their oil and meet the demand for oil used to grease the machinery of war.

Knowing the lobsters’ penchant for oily things, local lobstermen soaked rags, and the bricks used for ballast in their traps, in kerosene. The lobsters came running. 

I’m not sure whether this affected the taste, but if so, it might have been forgiven as the flavor of patriotism, the sense of contributing to the war effort, like replacing melted butter with melted margarine. 

So what if I get the shell cracker limber again using a squirt of WD-40, wipe off the excess as best I can, then plant the kerosene bait story in my guests’ heads before the lobsters are actually served. They might not notice, or chalk it up to the power of a fascinating, historical suggestion.

After careful thought, I abandoned that approach. I served six lobsters, apologized for having only one cracker — “we can share” — and showed them — “and who needs crackers any way” — that the best way to crack lobster claws was with the butt end of a butter knife. In the process, I sprayed our good friend Carey across the table with lobster juice.

As I served her more wine, I wondered if having one’s silk blouse showered with lobster juice was better or worse than consuming a tender morsel of lobster meat dripping with butter and with just a hint of WD-40. It’s the kind of thing my wife would recognize as a conundrumm.