Homard Breton, au beurre de vanille

A defining moment in the Frenchification of my cooking (and therefore of my life) was when my son Tanguy, then five, appeared beside me in the kitchen, horrified, just as I was lowering a frisky lobster into a huge pan of boiling water. ‘What are you doing Mummy?’ A wave of guilt flooded over me and I had to quickly choose between using some watery euphemism like ‘Don’t worry darling, he’s just having a nice warm bath’, or telling him the truth about why one living being ca