ABOARD THE VICTORY CHIMES, Maine—The crew refused to eat lobster.
It wasn’t so much mutiny as a surfeit of a good thing. No matter that the lobsters had been freshly caught that morning, steamed in seawater to a bright scarlet, and were now dripping with butter and juices, served with corn on the cob on the side.
“They get a little tired of lobster,” says the chef, James Tompkins.
That’s how you know you’re in Maine.
Tompkins churns out hearty breakfasts, like pancakes with those little Maine blueberries that burst with flavor, and eggs Benedict with lobster; warming lunches like Thai red curry or beef barley soup; and sumptuous dinners of spice-encrusted prime rib, and more. He does it all in the galley (that’s a kitchen, for us landlubbers) of a tall ship that comes and goes through Penobscot Bay at the will of the wind.
It’s to be expected that his cooking is also at the mercy of the elements to some extent. For 16 years, Tompkins cooked in Las Vegas, under the bright lights, with eight ovens, four stoves, and tons of room at his disposal. Here, he does it all in 100 square feet of space, cooking on a temperamental diesel-powered cast iron stove nicknamed “The Beast” that has no thermostat. The Beast has to be woken up every morning at 4:30 a.m., since it takes a full hour and a half for it to muster enough heat to cook anything. Tompkins takes advantage of the ship’s stability—relatively speaking—while it’s moored to poach eggs or bake a cake. Even so, a lopsided cake, thanks to the movement of the tides, isn’t unheard of.
