Well, it’s Week Eight of my food firsts challenge and I still haven’t eaten anything massively out of the ordinary. No monkey brain. No camel testicle. Nothing alive, slimy or generally vomit-inducing.
This probably disappoints you more than it disappoints me (I’d not be overly keen to put any kind of gonad in my mouth – Unless, I suppose, my life depended on it… Even then, I wouldn’t be keen), but at some stage, I am going to run out of run-of-the-mill foods to eat. I will no longer be able to easily find a tin of something user-friendly I haven’t eaten before in a local supermarket. At this point, I will have to get a bit more ambitious in order to achieve the goal of fifty-two new foods eaten in 2013.
Me being me, I’ve just given it some thought and the only situation I can come up with where I would have to pop any sort of love spud in my mouth in order to stay alive would be if someone said they would shoot me if I didn’t do so.
I know there are some weird people out there, but this eventuality remains unlikely.
Imagine if I’ve just talked that one up!
Anyway…
This week’s food I haven’t eaten before is cockles.
Cockle Facts
- They are marine bivalve molluscs – To a non-scientist like me, this essentially makes them water snails. Yum snails!
- Bivalves are encased in two hinged shell parts. In the case of cockles, these are heart-shaped.
- This shape may have led to the coining of the phrase ‘warms the cockles of my heart’. It may not have, though. My etymology skills are still lacking.
- Cockleshell Bay was a favourite TV programme of my youth – Quick Quiz: Can anyone remember the name of the seagull in it?
- They are traditionally served in pints… In the past, when they were sold outside London pubs, the measurement aid used was a pint glass.
- Cockles feature in the song Molly Malone about an Irish fishwife – ‘Crying cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh.’ Click here to experience a very sweaty rendition of the song by beardy Irish folksters, The Dubliners. Have a look, join in the sing-a-long section and then grow some facial hair whilst eating seafood. It’s good craic…
I opened the jar and was immediately struck by an almost overwhelming smell of vinegar. The cockles, suspended in the cloudy solution, resembled little alien foetuses often seen in episodes of The X-Files. Their little off-brown bodies hung lifelessly in the liquid in a wholly unappetising manner. If I’m honest, I almost just put the lid back on the jar and considered taking the Scully role in this drama by denying all knowledge of their existence. I could conveniently look the other way and when I looked back, they would be gone.
But, that’s not what this whole new food thing is about is it? NO! It’s about horizon expanding… It’s about experiencing new things… It’s about putting little off-brown vinegar-infused slug-like creatures in my mouth… And becoming a better person as a result.
I picked up a fork, plunged it in to the jar and scooped a load of the cockles into a shot glass.
Yes, I know, it’s supposed to be a pint glass, but (i) there weren’t enough in the jar to fill one of those and (ii) as a cockle novice, I figured I should start small and see where that took me.
I selected one of the cockles and put it in my mouth and was hit by a sharp, acidic sensation. I began to chew… and chew… and chew… and chew… and chew… and chew… and chew… and chew… Nothing seemed to be happening. The cockle just didn’t seem to want to go anywhere. There was an unpleasant contrast of a slimy, rubbery texture and a crunchy, gritty texture. I assume the grittiness was due to sand.
… and chew… and chew… How anyone has the spare time to eat a pint’s worth of these things was beyond me.
Cockles and brussels, alive, alive, oh no, that’s not right…
And so ends Week Eight… If anybody wants a near-complete jar of cockles, please let me know. I definitely don’t like them and would rather they weren’t in the same house as me.
Week Nine will see me continuing to try to finish my mouthful of cockle and move one step nearer to camel balls…
Quick Quiz Answer: Ben Gunn was the name of the seagull in Cockleshell Bay.
Fifty-Two Weeks of Filling My Cheeks 