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Whelks
Procure the whelks alive if possible. To cleanse them, put them into fresh water for several hours. Boil them in salt and water. They are hard and leathery in substance, and will need to boil a long time. The small ones, which may be eaten as periwinkles, will require three-quarters of an hour; the large ones with shells as large as hens' eggs, one hour and a quarter. Large whelks, even after being thus boiled, are scarcely eatable; therefore take them out of their shells, flour them or dip them in bread-crumbs, and fry in hot fat. Before serving, sprinkle pepper and vinegar upon them. Good soup maigre may be made from whelks.
Whelks are large marine snails, and the whole problem of cooking them is texture: undercooked they are rubbery, overcooked they turn to elastic. Cassell's answer is a long boil, which works, but a few details in the original need translating.
- Buy them alive, and checkA live whelk pulls back into its shell when the foot is touched, and the horny operculum sits tight against the opening. Discard any that hang slack, smell of ammonia, or have cracked shells. Cook them the day you buy them.
- The purge in fresh waterFresh water kills marine snails fairly quickly, so several hours in it is a purge and a death rather than a cleansing. Modern practice is to hold them in cold salted water at roughly seawater strength (about 35 g salt per litre), changed once or twice, for a few hours to let them void grit.
- Salt in the potThe original gives no proportion. Around 30-35 g salt per litre of water approximates seawater and seasons the meat properly; whelks boiled in plain water taste flat.
- The times are long but not arbitraryWhelk muscle is dense with collagen, and like octopus it toughens before it softens again. Three-quarters of an hour for small ones and an hour and a quarter for large is the traditional route; a gentle simmer rather than a hard boil is easier on the meat, and it is worth testing a small one at 20 minutes, though large whelks may well need the full hour or more.
- Cleaning after boilingTwist the meat out with a fork or skewer. Pull off the horny operculum disc at the base of the foot and strip away the dark coiled gut. What is left is the pale foot, which is the part worth eating.
- Frying the large onesSlice thick boiled whelks across the grain before flouring or crumbing; whole ones fry into a leathery lump. Fat at about 180C, a minute or two, just to colour the coating.
- Pepper and vinegarThe recipe says only vinegar; malt vinegar was the usual British dressing for street shellfish and works well here. Add it at the table, not in the pan, or the coating goes soft.
- Soup maigreA meatless soup, of the sort eaten on fast days. Whelk cooking liquor makes a serviceable stock base, but strain it carefully for grit and taste before salting further, since it is already salty.
- YieldWhelks are mostly shell. Reckon on a kilo in the shell giving perhaps 250-300 g of cleaned meat, enough for two as a starter.
The common whelk, Buccinum undatum, was one of the cheap shellfish of Victorian Britain, sold boiled by the pint from barrows and stalls alongside periwinkles, mussels and cockles, and eaten with pepper and vinegar much as this entry directs. Henry Mayhew's mid-century surveys of London street sellers record the shellfish trade in some detail, and whelks belonged firmly to it: plentiful, landed in quantity along the east and south coasts, and priced for people who could not buy oysters. Cassell's slightly grudging tone -- "scarcely eatable" -- reads, at least, like a middle-class cookery book acknowledging a food it did not really consider genteel, and its suggestion to crumb and fry the large ones may well be an attempt to make the working man's shellfish presentable at a dining table. Much of the British catch now goes for export to East Asia, where whelk is prized rather than tolerated.