How to eat with your hands
Lobster is as New Brunswick as any seafood you can get.
JAY REMER
The etiquette guy
Published Saturday March 15, 2008

I have heard tell of the glory days at Katy's Cove in St. Andrews, where lobster salad was served as a delectable lunch. Private cocktail parties for the local swells would boast lovely chunks of lobster tail in overflowing silver bowls with curried mayonnaise for dipping. Elegantly laid dinner tables with fine linens, silver flatware and crystal champagne flutes would herald a special feast of these feisty bottom-feeding crustaceans.

On the other hand, there were the local hard working people and fishermen. To these folks, lobster was considered poverty food. A woman told me that, when she was a child, her lunch box would usually have a lobster sandwich in it. She would try to trade it to someone who had a peanut butter sandwich. Lobster was so plentiful that if you had nothing else to eat, you could go right down to the beach and pick some up. My, how times have changed.

When I was a young boy, I was lucky enough to have had lobster from time to time, especially in the summer months. As a family, my mother, father, sister and I would sit around a low Chinese-style rectangular table on generous cushions. We would each have a lobster, shell crackers, picks, seafood forks and a large wooden "graveyard" bowl for discarding the used shells. At an early age I learned how to pick a lobster, to suck the meat from the small legs, get the delectable knuckle meat from the spiny claws and save the tail until the end. It was the real treat.

Served with melted lemon butter, the whole affair was quite messy, requiring extra paper napkins, but it was one of the most fun dinners I remember as a boy. It was right up there with beef fondue, also a great treat. However, we got to eat the lobster for the most part with our hands, which made it all the more delicious, or so I thought. Then one evening, I saw the dining room table beautifully set for 10, complete with silver candelabra and champagne flutes. My mother said we were having lobster for dinner.

Wow, I thought, how is this going to work? As luck would have it, one of the dinner guests was a distinguished highly decorated Air Force General. He had survived a fiery crash and was left with limited use of his hands. He asked if I would come to the table to pick his lobster for him. At 12, I was honoured and thrilled to oblige, and he gave me a $5 tip, which in those days would buy several toy cars. Anyway, during the process of picking his lobster, I watched the rest of the guests attack their crustaceans, gobbling down the delectable morsels using seafood forks, and a dinner fork and knife when it came to the prize tail. There were finger bowls brought out with dessert, which were really needed before dessert. The graveyards were filled and whisked off to the kitchen.

In stark contrast, when I arrived in St. Andrews one of the first dinners I had was a real lobster feast. There were a number of people I had never met before and I watched them eat their lobsters, I could not believe when one of them reached into the graveyard and pulled the body of the lobster I had recently discarded as finished. They opened the body and picked out an amazing amount of tender morsels, including the red roe and green tamale. By the time they were finished, all of the bodies had been picked clean, save for the creature's lungs.

People up here really go to town on a lobster. With their hands. Which as I said, makes it all the more delicious. Paper towels, no finger bowls.

Which brings me to our etiquette question. What foods can you eat with your hands in a more formal dining situation?

As a general rule, if you are out and there is no cutlery put out, such as at a picnic of fried chicken or crabs, burgers, fries and hot dogs, then everything is fair game for your hands. In some countries, forks and knives are never used. However, in most cases you will have cutlery.

The exceptions include: Asparagus for sure. Although the most fastidious people will use a fork and knife, I love using my fingers. I had a friend who used to grow a thousand acres of asparagus for Jolly Green Giant. During the short season, we would go down to his farm and have platter of asparagus a foot high in the middle of the dining room table. We had bowls of delicious lemony hollandaise sauce and we all delighted in dipping the freshly steamed spears into the sauce and then dropping them into our mouths.

Other foods acceptable to eat with your fingers are artichokes (impossible to eat otherwise), crisp bacon, shrimp cocktail, French fries (though if served with a steak, use a fork), olives, pastries (at breakfast) and raw veggies with dip. Otherwise, use cutlery as provided and you will not be in fear of making a faux pas.

► Read this column at the Telegraph Journal online.