Coastal Cooking- Cod a la muffler

If you’ve been snowmobiling, you may have run into the little steel pans that look like old-fashioned mess kits. You pop them on your exhaust manifold, and it warms up your hot dogs. Well, hot dogs and beans ( Burnham and Morril or homemade) are too much a New England tradition to ruin them that way. Buried in a beanpot over a slow-cooking bed of coals…but that’s another story. Cod à la muffler was a different sort of gourmet meal available only on a lobster boat.

Cod a la muffler

One day, I was out lobstering with Lowell, and a lovely cod came up in one of the pots. He promptly pulled out the tin foil. Then he gutted the cod and put it onto the long upright muffler that rose from the engine compartment. He looked at me and said, “Lunch will be served soon!”

While the cod cooked, we continued pulling lobster traps, measuring the catch, and replacing bait when needed. When the cod was done, out came some silverware and plates. Evidently, this was a regular occurrence. The cod was delicious and straightforward; you could hardly expect fresher seafood.

About a month later, I was out with someone else who prepared the fish with more than salt and pepper. It was a feast with several courses prepared by compartmentalizing the fish, veggies, and condiments to cook together. When I asked if he ever tried steaming lobster on the pipe, he looked at me as if I were crazy and told me, ” I don’t eat the darn bugs at all. That’s for people from away.” Meaning people like me.

So the next time you are out boating, and see a wad of aluminum foil on the lobster boat muffler, it’s not a weird sort of muffler bandage. It’s lunch.