Winkles

Winkles lined up on my stick of celery

The winkle or periwinkle, when purged, boiled and cooled over night, makes for a great Sunday night tea.  One of my earliest memories is of sitting in a high-chair removing winkles from their shells, using a hat pin.   I can also remember, as a much older child, being sent with a ‘shilling’ to buy a pint of winkles from the ‘Shellfish man’  who would bring boiled shrimps, winkles, cockles and whelks from Herne Bay to Maidstone and stand outside the Bower Inn Public House at 1.00pm on Sundays. Nowadays, I buy my winkles ready frozen from ‘The World of Fish’ Lowestoft   Very nice they are too!   But no longer by the pint; in days gone by the fishmonger filled a pint beer mug with shellfish.  Today, a ‘shilling’ or ‘twelve old pence’ wouldn’t buy many winkles.   In current pounds sterling, the equivalent of a ‘shilling’ would be ‘five new pence’.   My frozen winkles, probably about half a pint, cost  two pounds and seventy pence (£2-70p).  Mind you when my Dad gave me a shilling for a pint of winkles, he was buying his first house for one thousand pounds (£1000).  The same house today would cost about two hundred thousand pounds (£200,000).

Winkles and celery go together like strawberries and cream, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding or fish and chips.

I have collected my own winkles from the Thames Estuary at Southend on Sea, purged them of sand by leaving them overnight in a bucket of fresh water with a sprinkling of plain flour and then boiled them for ten minutes. They are very easy to collect from the foreshore but you must take them alive from  unpolluted sea water.  The Thames is now clean enough for winkles to be harvested.

The winkle is not often seen on menus in British restaurants but makes more frequent appearances in France and Belgium.  Well done you Europeans, come on you Brit Restaurateurs give winkles a chance!  Three cheers for Littorina Littorea - "They're real fishy"

My granddad George, who was a very good fishmonger, told me that God designed celery with  a horse-shoe cross section so you could line up winkles in the groove and they wouldn’t  fall out as you raised them to your mouth.

At one time winkles were so popular in Great Britain that a music hall song was written about them  with the rousing chorus:

Oh, I can't get my winkle out. Isn't it a sin?
The more I try to get it out, the further it goes in.
I can't get my winkle out. Isn't it a doer?
I can't get my winkle out. Has anybody got a skewer?

For a more modern version of 'The Winkle Song' from 1986 follow the link:

https://myspace.com/gardenofengland/video/the-winkle-song-i-can-t-get-my-winkle-out-comedy-/53015419

Credits: Wikimedia for the winkle shell image,  Old Grizzly on  Mudcat Cafe  mudcat.org Lyr Req: for the chorus lyrics and Paul Carr for the Winkle Song.