A lobster as 'blue as the night sky' - BBC.com
By Emily MonacoFeatures correspondent
Hemis/AlamyOne of France's last remaining sustainable fishermen on the Normandy coast remains stalwartly dedicated to providing the prized blue lobster to restaurants and home dinner tables.
"On Channel Three, they said the wind was coming from the east. On Channel Two, they said it was coming from the west. So, Cédric… what do you say?"
Lobster fisherman Cédric Delacour smiled at the driver, a retired fisherman himself, idling alongside the port of Omonville, in the Normandy region of northern France. But to this question posed almost like a riddle, Delacour offered no response. Indeed, over the next few hours, he would prove to be a man of few words – understandable, perhaps, seeing as he spends most of his days alone on the water in search of spider crabs, brown crabs and the illustrious "Breton lobster," a term that makes the proud Norman baulk.
"There's no official meaning to 'Breton lobster'," he said, alluding to the absence of a PDO (protected designation of origin) label, the likes of which governs terroir-driven products from Champagne to Roquefort. And yet, evocation of the supposedly Breton origins of European lobster are ubiquitous in France, not only in its common name, but in one of the most popular dishes to make it a star: homard à l'armoricaine (Armorican lobster), a reference to Armorique, the Gaulish name for the region now encompassing Brittany.
The classic French haute cuisine recipe features tender chunks of lobster meat served either on a plate or piled in the shell, according to the whims of the chef. The focus is less the lobster itself than the sauce, a combination of tarragon, butter and tomato, all flambéed with a healthy lashing of Cognac.
While lobster à l'armoricaine is meant to highlight local lobster's natural sweetness, many lovers of the shellfish, including chef Edward Delling-Williams of The Presbytère in Heugueville-sur-Sienne, 100km south of Omonville, eschews the classic preparation.
"It totally blows the lobster out of the water," he said. "I like it because it's nostalgic, but I don't necessarily think that I could say that it's best combination of those two things [lobster and Cognac]."
He prefers a far more minimal preparation, grilling the lobster on the barbecue and piling it on brioche with smoked ginger mayonnaise, a dish he's planning on serving later this summer at his beachside West Bar in Pirou.
Chef Nicolas François, who serves Delacour's lobster at his Auberge des Grottes in Jobourg, also prefers a simpler touch when preparing the local delicacy.
Emily Monaco"We season it with butter and we cook it in a piping hot oven for seven to eight minutes," he said. "For me, that's the best way to have it." For François, a sauce armoricaine, classic as it may be, "spoils the flavour of the lobster more than it brings it out".
And what a flavour to bring out. European lobster boasts a meaty chew and intensely sweet, briny aroma. It's perhaps no surprise that European lobster can fetch €4 to €5 more per kilo than its North American cousin.
Also of note is the colour of its shell, which, unlike the mottled brown of North American lobsters, is blue as the night sky. This anomaly is due to the presence of a protein, crustacyanin, that interacts with the carotenoid astaxanthin also present in the shell, lending a darker hue to the lobster, allowing it to camouflage itself from predators beneath the sea. Once cooked, the protein breaks down, freeing the astaxanthin, which means that a plate of European lobster is just as orange as a North American lobster roll.
Its blue colour, intense flavour and laudable texture are certainly more apt reasons to prize European lobster more highly than its origins, especially considering the fact that lobsters do not recognise geographical delineation. Fished everywhere from Ireland to Calais, the blue lobster's ostensibly Breton heritage, Delacour mused, "is just because that's where Parisians go on holiday".
Emily MonacoWhere to eat blue lobster
Auberge des Grottes is located on the so-called "nose" of Jobourg, atop one of Europe's highest cliffs, 128m above the English Channel. Here, Chef Nicolas François grills Delacour's lobster with butter and serves it with a side of sauce: a vinegar-based gremolata with shallot, onion, parsley and confit lemon; or a house-made bearnaise spiked with tarragon, depending on the season.
The Presbytère changes its menu regularly, but Chef Edward Delling-Williams will serve Delacour's lobster on special occasions. He sees apple as a natural pair for the local shellfish; a simple sauce of local cider and cream brings out its natural sweetness.
West Bar is Delling-Williams' new endeavour, a seasonal beachside bar in Pirou that will soon be launching a food menu likely to feature Delacour's lobster in lobster rolls. The meat will be steamed before being charred on a grill and piled onto grilled brioche, paired with smoked ginger mayonnaise and thinly sliced raw leeks.
Nevertheless, the blue lobster is beloved in Normandy, and despite the challenges of back-breaking work and low pay, Delacour remains committed to providing it to restaurants and home cooks alike — and to catching it using ancestral, sustainable methods. His one-man operation is the smallest of the three remaining professional fishing endeavours in the local port of Omonville.
And on this particular March afternoon, after months of rescheduling amidst transport strikes and poor weather, I was able to come onboard.
Delacour unlocked his small portside shack to don a pair of canary-coloured coveralls before we boarded an oar-powered skiff, traversing the short distance to his 7m boat named Manola. It's not his first boat; that honour falls to his grandfather's wooden boat called Bréfort, aboard which the teenaged Delacour learned the trade. And at just 20, he bought his 75-year-old grandfather's boat.
"I still have it, in Cherbourg," he said of the Bréfort, though he has since transferred his professional fishing license to this plastic model, purchased in 2014.
We quickly arrived at the first of 11 lines he dropped just days prior; he hooked the rope to a mechanical pulley that hoisted it from the watery depths. One by one, each metal trap arrived at the edge of the boat, and Delacour deftly withdrew his catch, setting the trap aside just in time for the next to arrive. Despite their design, with a trap door that ensnares the lobster, these traps have also tempted brown tourteaux (rock crabs) and red-orange spider crabs, a predominantly local delicacy Delacour prefers to lobster, which the fisherman ironically doesn't "particularly" eat much of, unless he has dinner guests.
Emily MonacoLaws are strict about the calibre of each crustacean, but while Delacour boasts a handy three-in-one measuring device, he reaches for it only rarely: so swift is he with his judgment that often I just barely glimpsed crabs caught on the wind, as though flying from the traps back into the sea.
"See, it's a millimetre shy," he said, double-checking a lobster before tossing it overboard. "This one's the right size… but it's missing a claw. I'll keep him for my snack."
Delacour whistled melodically as we moved into deeper waters concealing the rockier sea beds preferred by his beloved spider crabs. We stopped alongside a promontory boasting a crumbling stone edifice: an old fort, he said, from the Hundred Years' War. As I often do, even after 15 years in France, I consider the deep well of history, the countless fishermen this fort has born witness to, the changes it has seen, especially of late.
Fishing, like many human interactions with nature, has been profoundly affected by climate change, with research suggesting that 60% of all fish species may go extinct by 2100 if global temperatures continue to rise. But in his two decades on the water, Delacour has witnessed less a lack than a shift: gilt-head bream and bluefin tuna are new arrivals to the Channel; mackerel, once line-caught in the spring is now net-fished in late winter. Lobster populations are stronger than ever, their reproductive cycle shifting from twice to thrice yearly. Even 350g lobsters now boast a belly covered with black roe, as opposed to the reproducing females of yore, consistently weighing 800g or more.
"There were eggs under their tails in February," he said, scooping a fingerful of the roe and crunching down on it. "Before, it always happened at well-defined times."
He offered me a taste; the eggs were briny and sweet. Their presence, however, was hard to swallow.
"It's a sign that the species feels endangered," he said. "And so, it lays more."
Laurence Hégron-Macé, an engineer monitoring regional fisheries at the SMEL (Synergie Mer et Littoral) in nearby Blainville-sur-Mer, said Delacour is not alone in noticing this change.
"One could imagine that it's an adaptation, that its environment means it's in higher demand," she said. "We've observed it, but we would need to do a more precise analysis to prove it."
But climate change isn't Delacour's most pressing worry. When his grandfather finally moored, it was a well-earned break taken 25 years after he had the right to retire. But Delacour isn't sure his back will hold out that long.
Emily Monaco"They didn't work like us," he said. "First off, they didn't have as many traps."
Not as many to pull up, and not as many to maintain. Delacour's 160 metal traps run about €100 (£85) each, and upkeep is a second full-time job.
"All of my traps look like this, now," he said, gesturing to the busted rubber, the rusting metal. He'll take advantage of the cloudy forecast tomorrow to get them into shape for one more season.
After four hours, the traps were empty, the buckets full, and some internal clock was telling the Frenchman lunch is on the horizon. We returned to the port, to a space akin to a Waterworld set, boasting on-site tanks filled with abundant seawater. Here, he said, crustaceans will live for up to six weeks, in stark contrast to fish, which must be sold immediately. Given the quantities he unloads – sometimes 800kg at once – he's forced to work with auctioneers and middlemen who set often egregiously low prices.
It's an industry trend that worried agricultural engineer Charles Guirriec enough to lead him, in 2015, to found Poiscaille, a start-up that seeks to do for fishermen what CSAs have done for farmers. For Guirriec, the model is even more essential for seafood, where extreme price swings force some to overfish to guarantee a living wage. His goal is to pay fishermen 20% more than the average, mitigating effects both on underwater ecosystems and on their lifestyles.
Delacour's career at sea may not last much longer; to maintain his back, he's already considering transitioning to offering tours of his beloved seascape and its hidden coves. He eschews the idea of a higher-paying seafaring job, like scallop fishing, which he dismisses as "uninteresting", sketching an image of days spent dragging nets, pulling them up every 20 minutes to sort the molluscs from mounds of rock. Of course, the monotony pays: scallops are Normandy's highest-value seafood, with a €60m (£51m) turnover.
"That's why they can afford to be on strike today," he mused. "And also, because their season just ended."
As we ventured away from the port, he put on the radio; the fishermen's strike was well underway.
"They don't say what they want," he muttered. "They're just on strike."
"Why aren't you?" I asked, thinking of the long hours, the difficulties he has just making ends meet.
"Ouf," he sighed, shrugged. "I'd rather go fishing."
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