French cooking and motoring

La Cuisine Francaise

Lesson 1

The Lobster (not for the squeamish)

by Chas

Out of the many joys of sailing in France is the abundance of wonderful food. In Boulogne this generally means fish – and although a visit to the excellent fish market is always a plan of anguished decisions, and regrets of wonders left untasted, we often end up with a lobster or two.

In the UK, if you are lucky enough to find a lobster at all, it will usually be bright pink ,and extremely dead – not so here, where they are blue glistening, and very much alive.

So your first task is to dispatch and cook your lobster in the most humane way possible – the French are much more robust about these things, and generally plunge them straight into boiling water.

However, to appease my conscience, I normally first destroy the main nerve centre by driving a sharp knife through a very convenient cross marked on the head. After this all movements are nflex only and the lobster can then be immersed in boiling water for about 15 mins, depending on size. Leave to cool for a while, then cut in half using scissors to cut through the carapace and a sharp knife for the flesh.

The claws can then be removed and cracked, and the tail separated from the head. Remove the fairly obvious gut, and you are ready to go –

with lots of garlic mayonnaise, bread and Muscadet

Voila!

Boulounge sur mer to Dieppe

Sailing boats should sail, motor boats should motor, but I’m afraid sometimes you have just got to do what you have got to do, even if there is no wind you have to move.

We slipped our lines at 0830hrs. Shades of blue had to refuel, these fast boats are all well and good but they have small tanks, fuel and water, it all seems a bit of a pain to me, having said that Escapade carries enough water for a humanitarian relief mission.

Escapade and Lily made it out on green lights, but by the time Shades had refuelled they got stopped with the harbour red lights, a French coastguard vessel was returning towing a small rib with an outboard and with 6 very wet & cold refugees wrapped in foil rescue blankets on her deck, it was very sad sight.

Outside the breakwater I set the mainsail ( no point in that really), set a course for Dieppe and got very bored.