A whelk to remember

New York Times, food section article: Elaborate photos of a little seashell-encased delicacy served beside a ramekin of unnaturally bright green parsley and garlic butter, with a glass of white wine in the soft-focus background. International overtones: the Italians call them scungilli, the English have popularized them as whelks – along with talk of executive chefs and lists of high-end-sounding restaurants that serve them mixed with “crispy duck tongues,” or dressed with “fenugreek-cashew pesto.”
Really?
These are the same little seashells I picked up on the beach when I was a kid, excited to be gathering up something we’d be eating for dinner that night, far from the linen-covered tables of Manhattan.
As I remember it, the whelk is a humble little critter, in the way a dragonfly is humble: common, in its habitat, but stunningly and intricately beautiful when you take time to really look at it. The whelks I encountered all those years ago were a study in black and white, like a houndstooth tweed whorled around a spiral snail house.

I don’t remember exactly how we ate the whelks – probably steamed until we could ease them out of their shells, and dipped in butter, if we had it. We were living aboard the Glad Tidings, a 40-foot sailboat that was home for a family of five (sorry, Jean, you’d disembarked by this time), and on this particular occasion we were in Virgin Gorda, in the British Virgin Islands. One expanse of coastline, called the Baths, is all rock, great for 9-year-old girls like me: I climbed and scrambled and explored, discovering the dips and recesses in the rock where centuries of crashing waves had worn the granite into smooth recesses, now filled with seawater warming in the sun. These still pools were full of tiny fish and shellfish, the sort that are perfect for filling small pockets. And they were full of whelks.

Our guide, Cap’n Tony, a boisterous, dark-bearded sailor and ex-pat we’d met at the dock a few islands back, told us the whelks were edible. Full of 9-year-old purpose, I began to collect them.
I kept one of the shells for years, proud to know the provenance of such a thing – but aside from that keepsake, I’ve never encountered whelks since. Until the New York Times.
In typical fashion – it’s what I love about this publication – the Times is thorough: I read that whelks are closely related to conch, the other Caribbean shellfish we learned to eat on the boat (we would follow their trails in the sand, visible through gin-clear water, then dive down for them). Whelks are usually sold as scungilli, often for Italian pasta sauces, and they are a by-catch (like the rock shrimp and stone crab my dad used to get in his shrimp nets, years later in Florida).
All good information. But the most important thing to remember about whelks, for me: that magical day I spent gathering them from the rocks, under a Caribbean sun.