Thursday, December 5, 2013

How to Stockpile Lobsters, 1660

Anne Vallayer-Coster, Still Life with Lobster (1781)
"To keep lobsters a quarter of a year very good. Take them being boild as aforesaid, wrap them in course rags having been steeped in brine, and bury them in a cellar in some sea-sand pretty deep." 
Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook (1660)
The power of planning ahead! Just think: if you'd done this a few months ago, today you'd have... a cool CSI-style lobster graveyard in your basement.

(Or there's this lobster gardening technique.)

3 comments:

  1. No wonder lobsters were not regarded as a luxury food until many decades after this "accomplisht cook" wrote this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. OK, I think I am now slightly less puzzled by Dickens's description of Marley's ghost as glowing "like a bad lobster in a dark cellar." Slightly.

    ReplyDelete

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