Time to get cracking: American boiled lobster

obsters are the ultimate luxury food, just one notch below caviar. Or, at least, when they are served in restaurants at overinflated prices.

This day and age, however, even Lidl carries lobsters as standard fare, eight quid a pop. Seven if you wait for a sale. At the same price, it may not be as satisfying as a Tesco grilled chicken, a family-size bag of crisps and a gallon of generic Cola for dinner but, hey, there's no perfection in this world!

Frozen lobster is not exactly quite like fresh Maine lobster but it is a very good and honest approximation, especially if you consider the price difference. The Dutch in me can't help getting micro-orgasms just thinking that I pay thirty quid less for the same pleasure as some hedge fund manager in a posh Chelsea eatery. That's how socialism corrupts you.

Celebrity chefs keep coming up with more and more convoluted and far-fetched ways of cooking lobster to please the jaded gourmet but I prefer the good old American boiling. Why interfere with the sweet succulence of God's created crustacean when you only need too accentuate it with melted butter and, perhaps, some dry white wine?

The recipe? Boil, melt, crack, eat, be grateful!

P.S. In our age of luxuries becoming commodities, there is probably only one way to tell a real culinary aesthete from a casual supermarket hound. You can only claim to be true blue-blood food connoisseur, if you have the right utensils to eat fancy food in your kitchen drawer.