extended REs in emacs lgrep?

The defaults for M-x lgrep is to use -e for the pattern. I'd like to use -E, but it looks like -e is hard-coded into grep.el. Tell me I'm wrong! Any hints? (I'm using version 22.1 - is the grass any greener in 23?)

From stackoverflow

• If understand your problem, the solution may be changing the grep-command variable.

  This variable has default value set to: "grep -nH -e " and you probably want to change "-e" to "-E"

• If you use a C-u prefix to M-x lgrep, you can edit the resulting command line before it's executed. grep-command is the default command string used by Emacs' various grep functions, and you can do M-x customize-variable RET grep-command to change it.