Lobster · When It Was Cheap · Heritage Holiday Ornament
Lobster · When It Was Cheap · Heritage Holiday Ornament
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Lobster. A cooked lobster on a white plate at the end of a working wharf, around 1890: a shingled fish house, wooden pots stacked by the door, a dory tied alongside. The plate is the joke. For most of American history, nobody would have served a lobster on the good china.
Early New England accounts describe lobsters so plentiful that storms left them heaped along the shore, and for generations they were cheap food, eaten by the poor and often cut up for bait. A much-repeated story says servants once bargained to be fed lobster no more than a few times a week; no such contract has ever turned up, but the story shows what lobster was worth. By the 1840s canneries were packing it in tins, and the lobstering trade grew up around lobstermen hauling wooden slat traps, which they called pots, from small open boats.
Then the cities found it. Live lobsters began reaching inland markets by rail, dealers built lobster pounds to hold the catch for market, hotels and restaurants put them on the menu, and the near-shore catch thinned. By the end of the 1800s the old poor man's food was on its way to becoming a luxury, and the shacks on the wharf were selling to summer people.
Our own engraving-style drawing of a shoreline fishing wharf around 1890, set in crystal so the shingles and the slats of the pots hold under the lights; the lobster supplies the red. Three inches across.
For lobster lovers and lobstermen, fishermen and seafood people, shoreline families anywhere, and everyone who has paid market price and wondered how it got that way. Profits go to hunger relief.
Faceted crystal, three inches across, with a white back so the line work reads clearly from anywhere in the room once the tree is lit. Red ribbon. Boxed in gold or white, your call at checkout. Ships free anywhere in the U.S.
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