I just spent 8 days in the maritimes. I didn’t make it home to Newfoundland (not a maritime province – it’s an Atlantic province), but I did make it to lots of places where cars slow down when you even think about crossing the street. I traveled with the band I play with to Halifax, Charlottetown, Stratford, Mt. Vernon, just outside Morell, Fredericton, the Saint Mary’s Native reserve, Sackville (NB), and Quebec City. 7 gigs, I think? We had a lot of extra time in some places for beaches, bbqs and markets and none in others. Food-wise, the highlight was definitely all the lobster. Yes, mussels and clams are cheaper, and I did see the giant Mussel factory in Morell, PEI (PEI King Mussell) where a lot of PEI mussels shipped in Canada and internationally seem to come from. They’re part of the $30 million export industry and are hung on longlines in waters where you see the patterns of lines floating on top of the water.
They’re also dirt cheap. And some are huge and delicious. They’re supposedly better than Newfoundland mussels, but I find them all the same except the giant ones. The female ones are more orange in colour than the light, beige males, but the taste is the same. Quahogs are hard-shelled clams and come from the same PEI waters. You buy them for something around $.45/clam. That adds up, but they’re delicious too. And the shells are better keepsakes than the black mussel ones, and easier to take home since they don’t break. That is, if you clean them thoroughly and get rid of the shellfish smell. The best bet is to go to a gorgeous white sand beach on the northeast coast near the mussel farms and pick half oyster shells along the water’s edge, which is what I did.
But I’m not here to talk about mussels of clams, really. They were fine, but the sterotypical peasant/gourmet food of PEI, NS, and NB is lobster. It’s not a whole lot cheaper than it is in Montreal, and it’s no less alive when you buy it, but taken from the water a little more recently, they seemed to have a big more pep. So when I picked them up one by one them fought a little more than I’m used to, which is a good sign. You grab their backs, avoiding the elastic banded claws and toss them into boiling water. Seawater, ideally. I asked our band’s bass player to run down to the sea with the big pot and get some sea water. He cam 15 minutes later, sweaty, saying, “The water isn’t as close as it looks…”
He was not happy with me, to say the least, but I’m pretty sure he loved the lobster for dinner. So hopefully he forgave me. I really appreciated it.
So you wait for the water to come back to a boil (which takes awhile), toss the lobster in (as many as you can at a time depending on the size of your pot) and then what you do is debatable. You could also kill them by inserting a pin in their necks just before putting them in the water. Some say this reduces the amount of lactic acid created by a slightly slower death by boiling. Note: this all sounds pretty horrible and animal rights people are going to be jumping down my throat, and I’m going to lose my vegetarian friends, but I generally think that if you’re not willing to kill it yourself, you shouldn’t be eating it.
Back to what you do after tossing it in the water. Leave the elastic bands on, for one. Then decide on the cooking time. The guy at the Lobster Pound – the Charlottetown harbour shop, aka Seafood on the Wharf – said 16 minutes once the water came back to a boil for our 1 1/4 lb lobsters. (They have them in plastic cases grouped by weight – 1lb, 1 1/4, 1 1/2, 1 3/4 – and then one beefy 4lb lobster in the water next to crates, just hanging out. Apparently the giant ones aren’t that tasty, though.) 
That seemed like a lot, 16 minutes, but he also said you can test by sticking a thermometre in the meat until it registers 140F. Or until the meat turns opaque. If you really overcook it it’s supposed to get stringy and tough, but it’s pretty hard to overcook. A few extra minutes generally don’t make the biggest difference in the world.
Some people go as low as 12 minutes of boiling (once it come back to a boil), and some just set the timer for 19 the second they put the lobster in, but that really should depend more on how many lobster you have in the pot, since it will take longer to come back to the boil with more lobster.
The other thing is, the lobster will keep cooking inside a little once you take it out, so try 16 minutes the first time with 1 1/4 lb-er and then knock it down by a minute the next time if you want it a tiny bit more tender. Slathered in butter it won’t matter. And not slathered in butter (for the lactose intolerants), it won’t matter either. I ate my 3 lobsters (over the course of 4 days) plain, and was completely happy. They’re sweet, and yes you get bored of the flesh taste, but it take s along time if you eat all the legs between the giant chunks of tail and claw meat, since your tongue has time to readjust to the taste of nothing in between tastes of lobster, making the lobster flavour stronger for longer (three bites of something in a row usually is all the tongue handle. After that it starts to taste like nothing. So if you take longer breaks to crack lobster pieces you can more taste bang for your buck).
The first night I cooked 5 lobsters for the band. Then 1 lobster for me a few days later when they had steak. Then another 5 for some of the band and friends at a friend of one of the band members up by that Mussel King plant on the northeast shore. I also found some wild blueberries and raspberries on the path to the beach and picked them into my bag on the way back, scraping my legs on rose bushes and trying very hard to not tumble into the ditch. It was worth it. The berries, layered with vanilla yogurt and PEI “Island” honey from the Charlottetown farmers market and they were phenomenal. the blueberries (maybe water-starved), were a bit starchy and fermented, a little like cassis, to the point where I was a little scared to eat them, wondering if they were actually blueberries. But they were darker than normal and richer and basically blueberries on drugs – the PEI drug of choice being that of the American draft doggers, hippies and organic farmers who immigrated awhile back to the island. It’s mild and smokable, but I’d much rather fill my body and lungs with blueberries and leave the drugs to them.
Lobster is a drug. It’s sweet and addictive. 1 is sometimes not enough. In lobster season, you eat the claws and tail (the easy pieces to shuck), and throw the rest out wastefully. They’re too abundant and cheap to bother with. I at every scrap, with scissors or crackers or just my hands, starting with tearing off the legs and arms, and tearing open the body to suck every connecter joint, checking for the red female row (a delicacy that I find bland), eating a bit and gifting the rest to someone who appreciates it, and tossing out the green contents of the intestine. Some people cook with that or turn it into lobster salad, but I’ll take the snobbish, abundant lobster high road and just suck every leg, claw, joint, and tail, pulling the meat out with my teeth instead of pointy metal utensils. This is meant to be eaten with your hands. It’s supposed to be messy. And it’s supposed to be a feast. I hate lobster in restaurants because it’s so restrained and so expensive, but plop a pile of them down on a platter and dig in with friends and you’ll be the happiest person in the lobster-eating world. We were.
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