by Tom Mason

ALONG THE ATLANTIC COAST OF Cape Breton Island, the lobster was once the most maligned of creatures. A couple of generations ago, just the idea that your neighbours might be forced to consume this undersea vermin was enough for pitiful looks, whispers and community charity drives. Fishermen who resorted to a feed of boiled lobster were always careful to bury the shells in deep backyard holes under cover of darkness lest the word get around, while feeding the shellfish to prisoners was once listed as cruel and unusual punishment. Lobster was poor man’s food.

Not any more. Today the lowly lobster is flying high – traveling in style to tables in Singapore, London and Dubai in climate controlled tanks stowed in the holds of jet airliners. A multi-million dollar industry now exists based on making sure the lobster is the guest of honour at feasts around the world, and many a fortune has been made on the crustacean’s spiny back. Now one New York culinary maven wants to turn that respect for lobster up another level. Actually, Dorothy Cann Hamilton has her sights on one lobster in particular – the Fourchu lobster.

Cann Hamilton is an internationally recognized restauranteur, author, television producer and the founder of the New York and California French Culinary Institute. In the last 30 years she’s jump-started the careers of more than 15,000  of America’s best chefs, including such notables as celebrity chef and television star Bobby Flay. She also has Cape Breton blood in her veins. Her grandfather hailed from the tiny Cape Breton fishing community of Fourchu, where she still owns a summer home.

Cann Hamilton admits that she was skeptical at first when a local lobsterman named Gordon MacDonald told her a few summers ago that the Fourchu lobster was the best in the world. MacDonald explained to her that because of the cold water off Fourchu, the lobsters grew slower – aging like fine wine as they developed hearty, healthy blood protein. At the same time, they were eating the nutrient-rich foods from the rocky Atlantic bottom – not the muddy slop that lobsters in some other places were munching on. That palette of conditions gives them a unique signature flavour that’s as much married to geography as Bordeaux wines, Vidalia onions or Alba truffles.

She quickly became a convert, and wasted no time inviting a number of top New York chefs to come to Fourchu and taste the lobsters for themselves. She also enlisted the help of food writers at Time Magazine and the New York Times to tell the world about the discovery. “They were all very impressed, not just with the texture but with the flavour,” she says. “Most of them agreed it was the best lobster they had ever tasted.”

Today Cann Hamilton and MacDonald are working together to set up a distribution network to bring fresh Fourchu lobster to the tables of New York restaurants. She sees it as more than just introducing a new culinary experience to the world. Creating a recognized Fourchu brand could be a way of preserving a Cape Breton fishing lifestyle that has nearly died out in recent years. “Artisanal farming is becoming a huge movement in North America,” she says. “Chefs are sourcing unique artisanal farm products as a way to set their restaurants apart. Why shouldn’t we have artisanal fishing too? The Fourchu lobster could be the start of that trend.”