Enjoying a tasty treat from the salty sea

Damien Enright and family get stuck into the lovely limpet.

WHEN my granddaughter, from Hertfordshire, in England, started eating live limpets (aka barnacles) with gusto on a west Cork beach, I thought she was so enthusiastic there’d soon be none left. Where did the little girl learn to eat these exotic, delicious creatures? From her grandfather, I’m afraid, who learned from the Canary Islanders.

A pretty seven-year-old girl eating grey-brown molluscs, wet and slippery and prised from rocks, is not a common sight in Ireland and small girls generally turn up their noses at snails. Not Matilda, who finds them irresistible.

The limpet is a snail of a marine type. With a conical shell on its back, it crawls around as the tide washes over it, grazing on seaweed and algae. It is like a snail cow. Seaweed is nutritious and full of healthy trace elements, so the creatures that graze on it should be, too. The limpet’s environment is pristine, washed by the wide Atlantic twice a day. They are rocky-shore dwellers, and are not found far up estuaries, where they are vulnerable to pollution.

The misnomer ‘barnacle’ is used by land-lubbers. Barnacles are the tiny, white, conical shells that blanket the rocks in vast swathes, numbering thousands. While the limpet shell has only one opening — the base, which is firmly adhered to the rock — the barnacle shell has a kite- or diamond-shape opening on top. The limpet moves around and grazes, but the barnacle stays in the same place, opens the top of its shell when the tide runs over it and extends tiny ‘tentacles’ that catch minute food scraps passing on the tide.

The limpet is solitary while the acorn barnacles, to give them their full name, live in colonies. The same applies to goose-barnacles, the lovely, white-shelled, mussel-like creatures that are sometimes found on storm beaches affixed to flotsam, on which they may have travelled thousands of miles.

Limpets, of which there are millions on Irish shores, are palatable, acceptable human food. Shell-middens, where Stone Age Man threw his detritus after dining on the gatherings of the shore, often contain limpet shells, along with those of oysters, mussels, periwinkles and whelks. Also found are ‘limpet hammers’, rocks which, archaeologists say, were chosen or fashioned specifically for knocking limpets off rocks. It is true that a ‘grippable’ stone is best when attempting to swipe a firmly-stuck limpet off its hold, but I can slip a thin knife blade underneath, if I approach with sufficient stealth; there is often a slim, but visible, gap between rock and shell, especially in the varieties my granddaughter and I favour.

These are the ‘brodírí’ and ‘fianaigh’ as the Connemara people, great limpet-lovers until recent times, called them; the Beara people called them ‘sea bacon’. The shells are smaller, darker and flatter, with deeper grooves. While the common limpet, the ‘glás-bairneach’, often has a thick, white shell, with a base that may be two inches in diameter, the shells of the more palatable varieties are lighter and thinner, and, when they are turned over, are bluish or mother-of-pearl on the inside.

The ‘glás-bairneach’ were also eaten, but could be heavy going. Tough as boot leather, they were boiled or roasted; eaten raw, they would be a challenge to the teeth and jaws. Nevertheless, they were welcomed in times of hunger and were sometimes added, as a soup, to relive the monotonous potato diet. Some recipes suggest beating them with a meat hammer and frying them in butter, or boiling them with potatoes, onions and fish stock.

Little Matilda’s and her grandfather’s favourite ‘seashore’ recipe is to select small — maximum one-inch diameter — limpets, slip a knife under them to remove them from the rock, whisk them out of their shells with the same knife, discard their bellies and pop them onto the tongue. While they do not ‘melt’ in the mouth, they are more tender than calamares, and carry a rich, delicious flavour of the salty sea.