On a trip through the Canadian province of Nova Scotia, you simply can’t avoid lobster. Tender meat from massive claws steams away in a delicious seafood chowder. Juicy pieces spill out of a proper lobster roll, coated in light, homemade mayonnaise. There’s lobster with pasta, lobster on saffron rice and, of course, whole lobsters of all sizes, complete with tools for cracking the claws and shell.
In Nova Scotia, where the fishing seasons are as varied as the dishes on the menus, you’ll find lobster in every conceivable form. Here, lobster is as much a staple on the menu of even the smallest snack bar as currywurst is in Germany or the croque-monsieur in France. To paraphrase M. F. K. Fisher, the grand dame of food journalism, the motto for Nova Scotia is: You must consider the lobster!
Lobster and people
Anyone in Halifax today who happily pays thirty Canadian dollars for a lobster roll often has no idea that, one hundred and fifty years ago, lobster was considered food for the poor. Domestic servants and prison inmates were served it because it was caught in such abundance off the Atlantic coast that nobody considered it a delicacy. Keira Montgomery, owner of Lobster Supper in Baddeck, tells us that farmers used the creatures as fertiliser for their fields and fishermen as bait for more valuable catches. Lobster fisherman Dale Stewart-Smith, owner of The Lobster Galley on Cabot Trail Road near Baddeck, reports that even as recently as the 1950s, his uncle was ashamed to have lobster on his school lunch. Anyone who had lobster shells lying outside their house was considered poor, not a connoisseur.
From tinned food to cult status
It was not until the second half of the 19th century that this perception changed. Canning factories sprang up along the coast, from Pictou to Cape Breton, and shipped lobsters in tins as far as Europe. The railway did the rest. It brought the lobster inland and served it to passengers who were unaware of its reputation as ‘poor man’s food’ and simply tucked in. After the First World War, prices rose significantly. What had been a cheap tinned product became a delicacy that New York’s fine lobster restaurants added to their menus. The transformation from a scorned to a coveted creature took a good seventy years.
Little has changed in Nova Scotia since then, apart from the price. To this day, Atlantic Canada divides its coastline into more than forty lobster fishing districts, with over twenty different fishing seasons. Off Yarmouth and in the south-west, where fishermen land the largest quantities, the season traditionally begins on the last Monday in November and lasts until the end of May. Around Cape Breton, however – in Cheticamp, Baddeck or Iona – fishing takes place only from early May to early July. Anyone travelling through the region in summer will therefore find that in Yarmouth the lobsters are served straight from the tanks, whilst in Cheticamp they come fresh from the traps. This overlap in seasons is a result of fisheries policy, not a whim of nature. It is intended to conserve stocks. The side effect is a boon for travellers. In Nova Scotia, fresh lobster is available practically all year round somewhere.
The craft itself has hardly changed either. Fishermen set their traps individually and check them daily, usually from small boats. The catch is transferred alive to freshwater ponds – the ‘lobster ponds’ – or sold on immediately, as lobsters do not tolerate long periods of storage out of the water. Anyone standing at the harbour in Lunenburg and watching the colourful fishing boats set sail will witness the same scene that could have been observed there a hundred years ago. We experienced exactly what happens during a working shift aboard a lobster boat whilst on board Dale Stewart-Smith’s Lonestar.
Only a few hours separate these two photographs taken at Halls Harbour. In the top picture, the cutter ‘Roberta Louise’ lies in the harbour mud. In the bottom photograph, the boat is moored at the quay wall and is being prepared for its next trip to the fishing grounds.
The tidal range at Hall’s Harbour
Nowhere is the interplay between fishing and the tides as striking as in Hall’s Harbour, a fishing village in the Annapolis Valley on the Bay of Fundy. The tidal range there is among the highest in the world. Within six hours, the water level in the harbour rises and falls by up to fifteen metres. At low tide, the fishing boats lie tilted on their sides on the dry seabed; at high tide, they float metres above the very same spot. Directly above, in the Hall’s Harbour Lobster Pound restaurant, you can choose your lobster by weight from a water tank. Shortly afterwards, it is served with a small portion of coleslaw. Were it not for the fact that, from this point on, all your attention is focused on cracking open and carving up the lobster, you would notice how the harbour basin is visibly filling up or emptying. A whole lobster with a starting weight of 1.5 lbs = 680 g costs 39 Canadian dollars here – the equivalent of just under 25 euros. If you add tax and tip back in, you end up paying close to 39 euros for a proper lobster meal. In terms of pure meat, even the smallest lobsters contain only around 150 g of shelled meat. Depending on how carefully you remove the meat from the joints and legs, the precious yield can be greater.
Hall’s Harbour Lobster Pound is more of a fast-food joint than a gourmet temple. For a fair comparison with European lobster restaurants, simple establishments are therefore a better benchmark than Michelin-starred restaurants. In Spain, you can find lobster dishes at a comparable price. In Germany, too, there is this more down-to-earth segment, for example in Hamburg’s fish-and-chips shops on the banks of the Elbe. Yet even on Sylt, a lobster weighing 600 grams or more will set you back a good 100 euros, whilst in Paris, seafood restaurants charge 90 euros for a Breton lobster of a similar size. The difference also lies in the supply chain. What in Nova Scotia goes straight from the fishing boat to the plate has, in Europe, often already passed through several middlemen, endured a flight, been transported by lorry and incurred higher operating costs before it even appears on the menu.
Incidentally, it was not the fishermen themselves who elevated the lobster to such status, but outsiders. From the 1880s onwards, summer visitors from Boston and New York discovered the Canadian Atlantic coast as a holiday destination and suddenly found the local catch to be exotic. What the locals regarded as a meal of last resort was served up by hotels to city-dwellers as a speciality. The roles were completely reversed when Nova Scotia reinvented itself as a gourmet destination and turned what was once a poor man’s meal into its culinary icon. Today, a Lobster Trail winds its way through the province, helping visitors choose the right restaurants.
When it came to lobster rolls, we travelled the country on a trial-and-error basis. We were always pleased with the amount of lobster meat in the roll. The disappointment lay more in the quality of the rolls and mayonnaise. We had the worst lobster roll at the aforementioned Hall’s Harbour Lobster Pound. Here, the lobster roll – bread and all – came straight out of the fridge. Granted, in large kitchens you have to prepare and set aside a lot of things in advance, but a bread roll that’s cold straight from the fridge is absolutely appalling.
We had our most delightful lobster surprise in Baddeck on the Cabot Trail. Even from a distance, the sign for The Lobster Galley shone in lobster red. When we tentatively asked whether they served a lobster dish as early as 11 am, we received a cheerful reply: ‘Of course! You’ve missed our lobster breakfast, but from now on the daily menu features lobster in all its variations.’ You can sit either inside or outside, with a fantastic view of St Ann’s Bay and right next to the Gaelic College of Arts & Crafts, which preserves Scotland’s heritage. A stop that’s well worth it in more ways than one!
But no matter where in Nova Scotia you have your finest lobster experience, the story of the lobster is always part of it – whether you’re being served lobster with saffron rice in Lunenburg or enjoying steaming seafood chowder in Ingonish. It is the story of a decline that turned into the opposite. The only constants were the sea and the method of lobster fishing. Our night shift on the Lonestar tells the story of how this is done.
This feature was supported by Visit Nova Scotia
