Above: “Lobster Landing” colored pencil by Edward M. Fielding
We took our RISD student out for dinner at a fancy seafood restaurant the other week in downtown Providence. The waitress came over and read off the nights specials which included a five-pound lobster.
Noting the per pound price in the menu, I quickly did the math and chuckled. I wasn’t about to spend over $150 on my meal! Does anyone really order these monsters I asked? The waitress chuckled and said, yeah, someone ordered a five pounder last week, ate the whole thing.
Having lived in Maine for seven years, I’m used to doing two things with lobster. 1. Cooking the live lobsters myself and 2. Getting boat price from one of my lobsterman neighbors.
Prices depend on the market of course but we’d get lobsters from a local fisherman for something like five-six dollars a pound. Or get them cooked down at Thurston’s Lobster Pound in Bass Harbor for something like $9.95 a pound.
Of course, most of the lobsters were in the one pound to two and a half pound range. I asked the waitress where the heck do they even find these monster lobsters. The menu said “Maine Lobster” but I recall Maine having some strict regulations on the lobster fisheries.
She didn’t really know anything about them so I looked it up later. My recollections were correct.
“A legal lobster in the State of Maine has a carapace or body shell length that measures between 3 ¼ inches and 5 inches. The measurement is made between the extreme rear of the eye socket to the end of the carapace. Minimum lobster size has a carapace or body shell length of 3 ¼ inches.”
Maine and I think all of the New England states regulate lobster fishing to protect the egg-bearing females. If they catch a lobster bearing eggs, they make a v notch in the tail and let it go. From then on, that lobster is off limits. They also protect the old timers. I would call them the smart ones who avoided capture for a long, long time.
I suspect the monster lobsters come from way off shore. A quick look on the Internet confirms that “Since Maine limits the sizes that are harvested, this lobster would harvested in federal waters and brought back to shore in either New Hampshire or Canada.”
So menus that claim to only serve “Maine” lobsters are not exactly telling the truth when it comes to these jumbos. One online retailer even carries 10-15 pound gigantic live lobsters. Interestingly they refer to the lobster as “homarus americanus, which is the same species of the Maine lobster” – see what they did there?
But Maine won’t even let you land such a lobster in the state. If you caught one of these monster lobsters outside of state waters, you’d have to pilot your boat down to the tiny coast of New Hampshire to sell it.
By the way, be prepared to have a fat wallet, these giant lobsters can be shipped via UPS for $300 a piece on up!
I hadn’t thought about these huge lobsters until good old Facebook popped up a brag about one of my wife’s cousins who ordered a six pound lobster for dinner in the Hamptons.
Who orders SIX POUNDS of anything for dinner? Imagine ordering a six-pound hamburger or a six-pound porterhouse steak? How about sitting down to eat a six-pound Salisbury steak? Talk about gluttony!
Then it got me thinking about how old that poor lobster was before he toss into the giant soup pot to be boiled and then smashed with a hammer.
Unless caught or eaten by a giant squid or something, lobsters can live for a very, very long time — nine-pound lobsters are estimated to be between 30 and 50 years old!
“George” was the oldest lobster ever caught, he weighed 20 pounds and was approximately 140 years old! Caught in Newfoundland, Canada but ended up in New York City in 2008.