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Before consuming the pin impaled winke, it was usually dunked into a small dish of malt vinegar. Part of the fun was deciding whether to eat each individual winkle as soon as it was out, or to amass a collection of extracted winkles on a plate, enabling the whole lot to be consumed in one sumptuous mouthful. For those with a scientific bent the winkle is Littorina Littorea in Latin and it’s little door is called the operculum. I know this because I spent two years studying them many years later as a project, which helped me pass my biology A level.
Learning to
shell the little shrimps was also a challenge, since some of them were really
tiny. To do this successfully, you had to first hold the head between the thumb
and forefinger of one hand and the tail similarly in the other hand. Next you
had to push them together until you detected a small click, rather like a
masseuse cracking a human finger, but on a much more delicate scale. If done
correctly, a subsequent small tug would cause the shell to pull away cleanly,
leaving a tiny but delicious piece of shrimp flesh to be consumed. Until this
technique was mastered a lot of shrimp got wasted and the untrained sheller got
very hungry.
Again the fun was deciding whether to consume on the fly or to accumulate a stock. While it was wonderful to gobble twenty shrimps in a single mouthful and watch everyone else salivate, you had to be careful. Collecting an overly impressive heap of little shrimp corpses tended to bring out the thieving side of otherwise honest neighbouring diners. page 5 Copyright Frasquenet.com |
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