Lobster at Home

With its vibrant color, its delicate and luscious flavor and its excellent nutritional value, it's no wonder that lobster is such a favorite. Yet for all its specialness, lobster is actually an affordable luxury when made at home. And as a food, the meat in a one-pound lobster has only 98 calories, 13 milligrams of cholesterol (less than the same amount of skinless chicken) and is high in the Omega-3 acids known to help reduce cholesterol levels.

More than five years in preparation, Lobster at Home will teach anyone, from the most inexperienced novice to the seasoned professional, to master the art of cooking lobster. Written clearly and with care for important detail, Lobster at Home goes far beyond any other seafood cookbook. It explains everything from how to choose just the right lobster for a delectable dinner to how to extract every last morsel of meat from a cooked lobster. A treasure trove of information, it also contains completely reliable chapters on lobster anatomy, the basic cooking techniques and the essential equipment. Recipes cover the full range of dishes: soups, chowders, stews, salads and sandwiches, as well as pot-pies, pastas, risottos and classic main courses, along with a special chapter on chefs' creations. Now you can easily turn out restaurant favorites such as Lobster Bisque, Baked Stuffed Lobster and Lobster Fra Diavolo right at home, and at a fraction of the cost.

Among this book's unique features:

• a beautiful illustration showing how and when to select lobster, helping the cook know at a glance when hardshells and soft-shells are available, as well as the best prices

• a handy chart giving cooking times for each size of lobster

• a list of recommended sources for mail-ordering live lobsters

• many recipes that call for the use of already-cooked lobster

From cover to cover, this is a book that welcomes all kinds of lobster lovers who have always wanted to cook lobster at home for family and friends.

If you are the sort of cook who blanches when fresh, troll-caught king salmon costs more than $8 a pound, you're going to want to own a copy of Boston restaurateur Jasper White's Lobster at Home on the day you tumble for one or two of these shellfish kings in your local market. Lobster may well be relatively inexpensive in some parts of the country, but at anything from $9.99 to $13.99 a pound in cities where the delicious beasts from the deep must be flown in, well, a cook is likely to think twice about the purchase. For about $15, you get four ounces of actual edible lobster. To tread in such waters without an appropriate guide is, at best, foolhardy. Thank goodness for Jasper White.

Lobster at Home is the most comprehensive book available on the subject of selecting, cooking, and eating lobster. With this book in hand, you will know how to find and buy the best possible lobster for your money. And then, with a lobster at home scuttling across the kitchen counter, you will know what do with the beast, how to dispatch it, and a world of variations on how to cook it. Knowing what to do is an important issue when half the recipes in the book seem to start out asking for $30 worth of lobster. There are no recipes that call for anything resembling Lobster Helper.

White's enthusiasm for lobster is infectious, and his collection of recipes that rely either on lobster meat or broth, or enhance the experience of eating it, are nothing short of delicious. It will probably always remain something of a special-occasion treat for anyone who doesn't grow up in or marry into a lobster-fishing family. The special nature of this food demands the careful and creative handling espoused by Jasper White. If you ever buy and serve lobster, use this book. --Schuyler Ingle