16 January 2015

Cockles in a cream and oregano sauce

We didn't eat cockles where I grew up on the North Carolina coast — at least not that I remember. I'm not sure when I cooked and ate them for the first time. It might have been when Walt and I spent a week on the Ile d'Oléron with our friend Cheryl in 2008. That's on France's Atlantic coast not far north of Bordeaux.


Cockles, or coques in French, are a kind of clam. We certainly ate clams, and oysters, scallops, and conchs (whelks) in North Carolina, so I don't know why we didn't eat cockles. The beaches in the area are literally covered with cockle shells, but I don't remember ever seeing a live cockle.


Here's confirmation from an article in a newspaper published in Wilmington, N.C. — it says: "In some parts of the world, cockles are a favorite edible shellfish." But not in that part of the world, apparently.


Maybe cockles live out in the ocean instead of in the protected bays, sounds, and estuaries where clams live. You can go dig clams in calm waters at low tide using a rake or just your hands and feet to find them buried in the sand. You can't really go dig for shellfish in ocean waters because of the surf and the strong currents.


We probably owe the fact that we cooked and enjoyed eating cockles on the Ile d'Oléron to a strike by the island's commercial fishermen. We spent a week there, and the fishing boats were all confined to port the whole time. There was no fresh fish on the markets or in the supermarkets. There was shellfish, however, including oysters, and clams of various kinds, especially coques and lavagnons. That's what we ate all that week.


There are cockles in this post about a poissonnerie (fish market) in Paris that I posted in 2006, but I have no memory of ever eating cockles in Paris.


The fishmonger at the Saturday market in Saint-Aignan comes here from a town on the coast near the Ile d'Oléron, which is about a four-hour drive southwest of us. We've only recently noticed that they often have fresh coques for sale. Walt bought some a week or two ago and we cooked them like clams and served them with pasta. I made a cream sauce with onions, garlic, white wine, and dried oregano. Yum.

11 comments:

  1. I like cockles ..not had them with Pasta though. Here in the UK especially at the seaside..you buy them in a little pot with vinegar on them. Delicious.

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  2. Meant to say , we don't have the shells in the pot , just the cockles . We can get them in jars in the supermarket too.

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    1. That's interesting. You can buy oysters that way in the States, but not cockles. You can by clams in tins or jars too, for making soup (chowder), so without the vinegar. Linguine with clams and white wine is Italian, I guess, and a lot of Italians emigrated to the U.S. over the past 150 years.

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    2. Hi Ken , interesting that you can buy oysters that way too!! Linguine with clams and white wine is certainly Italian, and of course with all the emigration in the years gone by , they kept the recipe up.

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    3. Anne, I didn't mean to imply that in the U.S. the oysters in jars are packed in vinegar. They are in their own liquid. You can take them out of the jar and cook them as part of a soup or stuffing, or poach or or fry them. Very convenient. You can also buy smoked oysters in tins like sardine tins.

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    4. Hi Ken , no I understood , but I was saying how interesting that you can buy Oysters in a jar , and also tins .. I have only seen Oysters in their shells !!

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  3. Do you have them as your main course or as a starter? And how much (gr/kg) do you buy for the two of you?

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    1. Martine, we bought a kilo (12 €) and the servings were very generous (presque trop copieux). We were having the cockles as our main course, with a salad afterwards. It also depends on how much pasta you cook and eat. Or frites -- coques à la crème avec des frites -- comme des moules.

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  4. What a delicious meal. I am jealous of it.

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  5. In Yorkshire a seafood seller used to come around the pubs with a basket, selling little packs of cockles, along with whelks and crabs' claws.They'd be in vinegar to preserve them. Cockles live quite a way out in deeper water and are often harvested by a type of dredger. They are traditionally raked out of the sand by hand in places where there's a large tidal range such as the atlantic coast of northern europe. Formerly the pickers would take a pony and trap, now probably a tractor. There was a horrible incident in Morecombe bay some years back where a group of Chinese, illegal immigrant workers, was sent out on foot to pick cockles and they were all caught by the incoming tide and lost their lives. Pauline

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    1. Thanks for that information, P. There is a species called the Great Atlantic Cockle. I've wondered why we didn't fish and eat those. It's as I expected. The clams were so much easier to come by.

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