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Periwinkles, Boiled
Wash the periwinkles in several waters, and then let them soak in plenty of fresh water for half an hour; when that is done, wash them again. These precautions will be found necessary to cleanse the fish from the mud and sand which adhere to them. Before boiling, shake them up to make them withdraw into their shells. Put them into a saucepan, and cover with boiling sea-water that has stood a little while to settle, and then been poured off from the sediment. Boil quickly for twenty minutes, and serve, accompanied by brown bread and butter. Probable cost, 2d. a pint. Sufficient for three or four persons.
Winkles are still sold cooked at seaside stalls and raw at some fishmongers; the method here is sound apart from the boiling time and the pot of sea water.
- Sea water, replacedSalt water at roughly 35 g of salt per litre (about 2 tablespoons per quart) matches sea water closely enough. If you do use sea water, take it from clean open water, not a harbour, and settle and decant it as the recipe says.
- Twenty minutes is far too longWinkles are small, and modern practice is 5 to 8 minutes at a rolling boil from the moment they go into the water. Twenty minutes turns them to rubber, which is the single change worth making here.
- The shake testShaking them so they withdraw does more than tidy the shells: any winkle that fails to pull back its foot behind the operculum, or whose shell is cracked or broken, is dead and should be thrown out before cooking.
- The purge mattersThe half-hour soak and repeated rinsing are not fussiness. Winkles graze on rock and silt, and grit in the shell is the usual reason a plate of them is unpleasant. Change the water until it runs clear.
- Eating themFlick off the little horny operculum covering the opening and pull the meat out with a pin or cocktail stick; discard the dark coil at the tail end. Malt vinegar, white pepper and the brown bread and butter are the traditional accompaniments.
- Where they come fromGather your own only from water that local authorities classify as safe for shellfish harvesting; bivalve and gastropod closures exist for sewage contamination and algal biotoxins, neither of which cooking removes. Bought winkles from a fishmonger have come through that system already.
- Quantity and costA pint of winkles in the shell weighs somewhere in the region of 350-400 g and shells out to a modest amount of meat, so the book's "three or four persons" assumes a small savoury course rather than a meal. The 2d. a pint places winkles among the cheapest shellfish on the market.
Periwinkles — winkles — were one of the cheap shellfish that fed working-class Britain in the nineteenth century, sold by the pint measure alongside whelks, cockles and mussels from barrows and seaside stalls, and eaten with a pin. Henry Mayhew's surveys of London street sellers, gathered in 1849-50 and published as London Labour and the London Poor in 1851, record the trade in exactly these terms, and Cassell's price of 2d. a pint places the dish firmly at the bottom of the fish market. That is why the entry is so brief and so concerned with mud and sand: nobody needed teaching what a winkle was, only how to get the grit out of one. The pairing with brown bread and butter is the same convention that still attaches to potted shrimp and dressed crab, and the survival of winkle stalls in coastal towns means this is one of the few recipes in the book whose subject you can still buy the way its readers did.