The Mollusks—generous hosts when they weren’t trying to kill you.
No one ever explained the octopuses.
If you've got cockles, those nickel-size, heart-shaped mollusks, and you want to get fancy, steam them, then toss the meat in finely ground cornmeal.
Tender and sweet, Manila clams partner well with a wide variety of foods - white wine, sake, beer, butter, leeks, fresh herbs, roasted peppers, olives, and wild mushrooms, to name a few.
I learned snails don't have ears. They live in silence. They go slowly. Slowly, slowly in silence.
We will admit that, out of the mud or sand which is found on the seashore or the beds of our rivers, at low water, shellfish or testaceous animals come forth, but it does not from thence by any means follow that they are produced without any regular course of generation.
When I get through tearing a lobster apart, or one of those tender West Coast octopuses, I feel like I had a drink from the fountain of youth.
It took me years to eat a lot of shellfish. I was probably 20 years old before I had even seen a shrimp cocktail. I like oysters, but fried.
I make a wicked clam chowdah, and linguine with clam sauce. Oysters I like to eat raw, and mussels in either a white wine sauce or in beer with paprika.
I've always been so interested in both the visual beauty of mollusks and the tactile feel of them. As a kid, I collected them all the time.
Strange that creatures without backbones have the hardest shells.
Calamari isn't too bad. That's what I thought cuttlefish was gonna be that. I've eaten octopus and eel and shark and sea urchin before, and - and those are good.
Littlenecks and cherrystones are chewy and sweet on the half shell with mignonette, served raw. But a well-cooked clam is a toothsome, tender thing, full of that magical stuff known as clam liquor.
