First of all, Nova Scotia lobster is nothing like Bermuda lobster. It has claws. It’s very much like Maine lobster, but with a lot more personality and without the funny accent.
It doesn’t have the snob appeal of it’s spiny cousin, but that makes it a more accessible, friendly meal. In fact, Nova Scotia lobsters prefer to be eaten in large groups surrounded by cold beer. Nova Scotia lobsters don’t require fancy tools or sauces and they are best eaten on a bed of newspapers.
In the ideal world you buy them straight from the fishermen in Main-a-dieu and you haul back gallons of seawater.
Once home, you fill up an old oil drum (cleaned of course) with your sea water and fire it with propane to a boiling point.
Meanwhile, thirty or forty of your closest friends and relatives arrive and help you set up plywood on sawhorses, so that you have a few banquet tables. You spread some old copies of The Cape Breton Post over the plywood, just to fancy things up and then you lay out hammers and knives as big as machetes. For the fussy few, you’d offer the nutcrackers used for Christmas walnuts nobody ate.
Inside, the children have lobster races on the kitchen floor.
Once the water has come to a boil you send the crustaceans to a watery grave. When they turn a brilliant red, your meal is ready.
You throw a couple of dozen on each table and people go to work. They don’t put on bibs, they don’t fill their plates with salads and rolls, they eat the lobster and drink beer because that’s the way it’s done-Nova Scotia style.
If you’re really lucky someone will pull out a fiddle.
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When we were in Cape Breton last month, John showed us his lobster pot which is a propane fired customized old beer keg (all gussied up) and he says it will boil two dozen market lobsters at once. We put in an order for one the next time he comes across a discarded keg. We bought lobsters off the dock in St. Ann’s this summer. So good!!
A Beer Keg! Much better than an oil drum! Yum!