An oft-told tale about lobster goes like this: Prisoners or servants got so sick of eating lobster that they refused to eat it. An alternative version has towns passing laws forbidding people from serving lobster more than three times a week to servants. Still another claims prison regulations prohibited officials from serving lobster to prisoners.
Which version is true? Any of them?
Illustration created by ChatGPT
The Truth About Lobster?
Sandy Oliver, a Maine food historian, states emphatically that none of it is true.
All the stories have in common some group of people who have no control over their food choices, people who have to eat what is served them. The stories all explain that these sufferers had a meeting to form a complaint presented to an official in charge. The story, substantiated only by reference to an alleged expert who “has it on good authority” or words to that effect, is usually put in the context of former natural abundance.
Oliver then explains how the story grew legs:
So the tale is reported second hand, refers to a time from fifty to one hundred years earlier than the usual late 1800s publishing date. The most common sources for this particular tale are town histories which abounded in the nineteenth century often written by a local antiquarian, though it appears also in George Brown Goode’s The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the United States published in 1887. Lack of primary evidence is the main reason to doubt this story. No minutes of these indignation meetings, nor ordinances outlawing sea food more than twice a week, have ever emerged.
We’ll just stick with the facts about the tasty crustacean. Here are seven.
1. The British esteemed the lobster in the 17th century. The American colonists, not so much.
Seventeenth-century British cooks stewed, marinated, broiled, roasted, fried, pickled, baked and boiled lobster. British gourmands ate them hot and cold. English diarist Samuel Pepys described an elegant dinner he attended. The menu included fricassee of rabbit and chickens, carp, lamb, pigeons, various pies and four lobsters.
In the New England colonies, the abundance of lobsters made them an ordinary meal. Lobsters in the 17th century sometimes grew to 25 pounds. They piled up on the shore of Plymouth sometimes 2 feet high.
Lobster, Crab and a Cucumber, by William Henry Hunt
William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Plantation, in 1622 apologized to a new group of settlers for having nothing but lobster to serve. He told them he was sorry because the only food he “could presente their friends with was a lobster…without bread or anything else but a cupp of fair water.”
2. Canning almost killed the lobster.
In the early 19th century, the Napoleonic Wars inspired the British and the French to find ways to preserve food for soldiers’ long marches. They came up with canning, which spread to Eastport, Maine, in 1842. Canned lobster then took off. By 1880, Maine had 23 lobster canning factories.
But the lobsters were getting a lot smaller. In 1860, fishermen considered 4- to 5-pound lobsters small and threw back 2-pounders. By 1880, canneries stuffed meat from half-pound lobsters into tin cans.
Application for a trademark, courtesy Library of Congress
3. Maine enacted the first lobster regulation in 1872.
Maine fishermen, concerned that lobster would disappear, lobbied for regulations to prevent overfishing. The state then banned the taking of egg-bearing females, something Maine lobstermen already practiced.
A Maine lobsterman off Thomaston
Two years later, Maine enacted the first law establishing the minimum size for harvesting a lobster – 10. 5 inches. That put the lobster canneries out of business by 1885.
Today, Maine’s minimum is 3 ¼ inches and the maximum is 5 inches.
4. Lobsters don’t reproduce like other fish.
Scientist Francis Hobart Herrick discovered that while a female lobster can carry thousands of eggs for up to two years, very few offspring survive the larval stage. Importantly, he found that larger, older lobsters are exponentially more important to the species’ survival, as a 10-pound lobster can produce 100,000 eggs compared to 8,000 from a 1-pounder.
His findings, published in 1895, proved that harvesting the largest lobsters doomed the population. This led directly to basic conservation regulations, including:
- V-notching the tail of egg-bearing females to protect them for life.
- Minimum size limits to let lobsters reproduce before being harvested.
- Making it illegal to keep egg-bearing females.
Ironically, perhaps, Herrick was born in Vermont.
5. Lobsters can live to 100.
In 2012, a shrimp fisherman caught a 27-pound lobster in his net off of Cushing, Maine. He gave it to the Maine State Aquarium. The old guy, estimated to be 75 years old, measured 40 inches long. The aquarium named him Rocky, displayed him for a little while and released him into the wild.
The largest lobster ever caught in the scientific record was a 42.5 pound behemoth. A fisherman caught it in 1974 off the coast of Cape Cod. The best guess of his age pegged the creature at 100.
Lobster sculpture in Penobsquis, New Brunswick
Lobstermen probably caught bigger lobsters back in the day, but they never got entered into the record. What looks like an old newspaper photo shows a 51-1/2 pound lobster caught off the coast of Maine in 1926. The caption reads, “After being mounted was smashed in transportation.”
6. One in a million lobsters is blue.
The Maine Center for Coastal Fisheries in Stonington, Maine, has taken in and released five blue lobstersin the 2025 season. A lot of lobsters get trapped by Stonington fishermen. It’s the biggest lobster port in Maine.
A blue lobster will turn red when cooked. That’s because of the marine pigment called Astaxanthin, also found in algae, krill and salmon. When heated, the Astaxanthin returns to its denatured, or “relaxed” state, so the lobster shell turns red.
7. The origin of the lobster roll is another mystery.
According to one source, the lobster roll,
…traces its roots back to the rich maritime culture of New England, emerging in the early 20th century. Conceived as a practical meal for fishermen to savor their fresh catch while at sea, its initial form was a simple delight: freshly caught lobster meat nestled in a buttery, toasted bun.
But that’s doubtful, partly because lobstermen aren’t particularly fond of lobster.
The peerless Food Timeline points out lobster rolls probably didn’t come into existence until the early 20th century.
The reason? They’re made with soft buns, and the hamburger yeast roll wasn’t sold commercially until 1912.
John F. Mariani, in “The American Encyclopedia of Food and Drink,” cites a source who said cold lobster meat smothered in butter and served on a hot dog or hamburger bun has been a fixture of the Connecticut seashore since the 1920s. The lobster roll may have originated at Perry’s in Milford, where the restaurant’s owner Harry Perry made it for a regular customer named Ted Hales. Perry’s had a sign from 1927 to 1977 reading “Home of the Famous Lobster Roll.”
A word of caution: In Maine, be careful about claiming to know where to get the best lobster roll. Some Mainers are affronted by such comments. That’s because the best lobster roll is the one you make yourself.
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Images: Blue Lobster: By IntrepidReason – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=160722761 Lobster roll By Melissa Highton – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110370868. Featured image By The Pancake of Heaven! – Own work, By The Pancake of Heaven! – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0,, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50445674, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50445674 Lobster sculpture By Dennis G. Jarvis – DGJ_8491 – The World’s Largest Lobster, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117447683.
