What do Crab Cakes Have To Do With Lobster?

Just a few miles North of Boston, maybe by the time you cross over the river into Portsmouth, New Hampshire, you start seeing pine trees. Then, from then on until you run into tundra somewhere up near Hudson Bay, it's pine, pine, pine.

Pine trees to the left of them, pine trees to the right of them, into the Valley of Lobster rode the two Plotniks.



Navigator and First Mate Finch met them at the Concord Bus station in Bangor, and immediately dove back into those pine trees, waving in the wind on both sides of what now are narrow, windy two lane blacktops, slipping in front of farmhouses fronting on "ponds" (which is what Down Easters call any body of water smaller than an ocean), water or views of water everywhere, pine trees, cedar trees, spruces. The first road dead ends into the second road and the second road comes to a Y where you have to choose another road which ends shortly thereafter at a T, followed by a few more Ys, and eventually one of those letters leads on to the Deer Isle Bridge.



Has everyone read Robert McCloskey's "One Morning in Maine" to their kids? This is the island we are talking about. Scenic? Sheesh.

So now how many of you know what Finchie's crab cakes have to do with lobster?



In the car we are bringing home two pounds of fresh picked crab. One of Finchie's friends' husbands is a lobsterman. "Peeky-toe" crabs are a side-harvest of lobstering -- they get caught up in the traps with the lobsters -- so Mrs. LobsterMan 'picks' those crabs -- painstakingly removes all the sweet meat from the bodies and claws, packs it into plastic tubs and sells it achingly cheap to augment her husband's living.

The lobstermen are always suffering -- and this year, with a record harvest, the price they receive per pound is so low that they lose money every time they put their boats in the water, no matter how many lobsters they catch. Apparently, people in the rest of America don't go to Red Lobster so much during a recession and that, plus lots of lobsters available, drives down the price.

And why are there so many lobsters? Well, for hundreds of years this area of the North Atlantic was the home to a cod fishery so enormous it was thought to be invulnerable to overfishing. Wrong. They fished it out and killed it dead. There is no more cod fishery in America, or Canada for that matter, because there are no more cod. Period.

What did cod feed on? Lobster roe. Without the cod, all those little roe were free to grow into large lobsters. That's why there are so danged many lobsters up here, which also keeps the price low.

BUT if you go down to Valencia Street and order a Maine lobster it costs you two arms a leg and both claws, right? Somebody explain that to poor Plotnik.

But if you live up here -- they don't give lobster away but they practically do. And now you know how these crab cakes of Finch's relate to lobster. And my, are they good.