Cockles & Mussels, Alive, Alive-o!

“She wheeled her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow, crying “cockles and mussels, alive alive o.”

The Irish have been eating shellfish since humans first set foot on the Emerald Isle. Huge shell piles called middens have been found at every seaside archaeological site, which proves that shellfish was a dietary mainstay for Ireland’s Mesolithic hunter-gatherers. Some mollusks were used to make the rare purple dyes reserved for garments of kings and princes, but for the most part, shellfish provided a vital source of protein along with fish and marine vegetables like dulse, laver, and carrageen moss.

Eons later, during the Great Famine, it was the inhabitants of fishing villages who survived best. Ironically, tales of starving victims desperately searching the beaches for food turned succeeding generations against shellfish. It took more than a hundred years for the bitter memory to fade.

Today, mussels and oysters take top billing on the list of Irish mollusks, but in times past all manner of shellfish were eaten. The catch was especially rich in Galway Bay, once the exclusive territory of fishermen who lived in a settlement near the Spanish Arch, known as the Cladach. A 19th century advertisement for fish sold on Claddagh Quay offers “…cods, lings, hawkfish, turbets, plaises, pilchards, a liberal of oyster, scallops, cockles, mussels, razures, also plentie of lobsters, crabs and shromps.”

The wild Atlantic off Ireland’s western coast has always been known for its abundance. Tomas O’Crohan, who was born on Great Blasket Island (an Blascaod Mór) in 1856, wrote about local seafood in his masterpiece, The Islandman.

“The food I got was eggs, lumps of butter, fish, limpet and winkles – a bit of everything going from sea to land… My mother had brought a dish of limpets from the strand with her… She was roasting the limpets and throwing them to us one by one like a hen with chickens.”

According to a Gaelic proverb: is iad na  diúilicíní bia na ríthe, is bia na tuathánach iad na géagairíní  (mussels are the food of kings, limpets are the food of peasants). Certainly mussels are bigger, more flavorful and easier to prepare in myriad ways than tiny limpets. But it is their sheer numbers that always made the black bivalves a primary food item for rich and poor alike. Mussels grow almost everywhere. They are found clinging to offshore boulders, adhered to the rocks of pebble beaches, and bound up in the seaweeds of muddy estuaries. When the tides retreat, they are easily harvested by hand or with nets.

Thanks to huge offshore fanning operations, mussels are the most common shellfish sold in Ireland. Although mussel farming was perfected by the French, the method was actually invented in 1235 by an Irishman named Walton who was shipwrecked in the Bay of Aiguillon on the west coast of France. Obliged to come up with ingenious ways to guarantee his survival, Walton devised a way of trapping sea birds with a net attached by long poles to the seabed. When he discovered that the poles became covered in mussels, the savvy Irishman abandoned bird hunting for full-time mussel farming.

Today mussels are most commonly farmed on ropes suspended from rafts that are anchored in shallow waters. Tiny mussels are seeded onto the ropes, and when the spawn reach a mature size, the ropes are simply pulled up and harvested. Until recently, most of Europe’s mussels were grown in the Mediterranean Sea, but it has become so polluted that Ireland’s pristine waters are now the principal source of mussels for the European market. One of Ireland’s largest mussel farms can be seen permanently bobbing in Bantry Bay.

Fishermen believed that cockles could not be eaten “until they had three drinks of April water.” Immediately after the third April tide, cockle pickers flocked to the beaches. Where the sand curled like a worm was the place to dig. Sometimes the meat was extracted from the shell with a pin and eaten on the spot, but usually the cockles were taken home, washed to remove the sand, and boiled in salted water. Cockle Pie (cooked cockles and grated onions baked in a pastry shell) was once a favorite summer supper.

Few people go to the bother of gathering mussels or picking cockles anymore, it being easier to select dinner from the wide assortment of seafood offered by a fish-monger or supermarket. But Molly has not been forgotten. In central Dublin, a bronze statue of a maid pushing her cart laden with mollusks pays eternal homage to the cockles and mussels women who once sold cupfuls of their wares from wheelbarrows in the Liberties. We always will love you, sweet Molly Malone. Slainte!

Recipes

Ed. Note: Many restaurants in Ireland serve superb mussels, but two places stand out particularly: McGann’s Restaurant and Pub, Doolin, Co. Clare, in the hearth of the Burren, and Johnny Fox’s (the highest pub in Ireland), in the Dublin mountains. After lunch you can take the back road to Powerscourt and drive on to Glendalough.