You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
I’ll eat that.

I’m not sure exactly how often, on average, this poem comes to mind – monthly? weekly? daily, god forbid? – but it’s often enough to mark me as a covetous, omnivorous glutton.

Whelks, the pretty side

And so it was this past weekend, when I volunteered to help seed shellfish beds.

The town of Barnstable, where I live, has an extensive shellfish propagation program, and the professionals in the Natural Resources department routinely recruit recreational shellfishers to help plant quahog seeds, move beds around, and do any of the other chores necessary to ensure that we will continue to be able to rake up something other than rocks.

Last week, Kris Clark, whose real title is Shellfish Technician but who is known in our house as the Clambassador, got a bunch of us together to seed the shellfish beds off Cordwood Landing, in Cotuit Bay.

Before you put down the seeds (which are not seeds at all, but little tiny clams) you rake the area to get rid of any nasty creatures likely to see a shellfish bed as a smorgasbord. In Cotuit Bay, that means whelks.

Whelks, the business end

Whelks are gastropods, a group that includes slugs and snails of land and sea. Whelks, and their look-alike cousins the conchs, are both sea snails, and the critical difference between them is that conchs are herbivores and whelks are carnivores. It was a bit hard for me to get my mind around the idea that a giant snail in an attractive shell was a dangerous predator, but that’s nature for you. The whelk may not be up there with the grizzly bear or the great white shark, but it’s threatening enough if you’re a clam.

Whelks eat clams (and oysters, and mussels) by wedging the edge of their spiral shell between the shells of the bivalve and then using their proboscis, evolved for the purpose, to suck out the innards. Clams have no way of defending themselves – they can’t run away or squirt caustic ink or do ju-jitsu – so they’re sitting ducks. Since we want as many of our quahog seeds as possible to live to adulthood (but only just – they’re best as littlenecks), removing whelks is a necessary seeding step.

Because I row in the early mornings, I was late to the party, and the predator round-up had already wound up. The catch, four good-sized whelks, was in a net bag in the Clambassador’s boat.

You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
You gonna eat that?
I’ll eat that.

I’d never cooked whelk before. I knew its reputation, of course – mild and sweet, with the texture of rubber bands – but I needed to taste for myself.

Whelks, unwrapped

There are two classic dishes made with big sea snails: fritters and marinara sauce. Conch fritters have their origin in the Caribbean, and scungilli (Italian for whelk) marinara comes from, yes, Italy. I was going to go for the fritters, but I try to keep my fried food intake to a reasonable minimum and we’d had smoked bluefish cakes just a few days before. Scungilli marinara it was.

I steamed the whelks for about ten minutes, and then pulled them from their shells. I took off what seems like a kind of sheath, and sliced the central part beneath in half. Out came the innards, off came the little black parts, and I was left with a pile of chunks of off-white meat.

I tasted a piece. Mild. Sweet. Texture of rubber bands.

I put the chunks through the food grinder attachment of my KitchenAid mixer, which turned them into much smaller chunks. I made a standard-issue marinara sauce (but with clam juice to give it a vaguely sea-like flavor) and added the whelk.

It was fine. It was even good. The whelk got a bit lost, and didn’t seem to add much except bulk and chewiness, but the overall effect was a nice, spicy, pasta with marinara sauce that had something weird in it. A weird, predatory, giant sea snail, actually.

You gonna eat that?

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