Some hardy people perhaps foolhardy go along beaches gathering mussels for eating, periwinkles, too, or rake up cockles from the sand, and even razor shells. But nobody surely eats the limpet? Well, they do, or did anyway, according to. P.G. McBride from north Antrim. His father brought his sons to Carrickmore, a beach below Fair Head. He showed his bays where to find the best dulse and also how to "stab" limpets i.e. to get them off the rocks with a sudden bang. Best instrument was an old chisel. If you don't get them off with the first go, they cling all the tighter.
So they brought home a can of limpets. The father was well used to cooking and eating them. They were put into a saucepan, and boiling water was, poured over them to remove the shell. Then they were cleaned of the yucky guts. The remainder, leathery stuff you will remember, was used to make soup. The writer doesn't remember what was added. The father like to keep his recipe to himself.
"The soup," writes Mr McBride, "had a flavour entirely of its own." The rest of the limpets were chopped up and fried with salt and pepper." I certainly did not like the limpets. They were tough no matter how long they were boiled or fried, it would still be like chewing a lump of rubber.
Mr McBride's father, having been reared near the sea, "could have lived on fish and he always kept a big dry salted cod in the house. It was always salted fish and white sauce for dinner on Friday, and I used to love those dinners. But dried cod seems to have vanished from the market now." Though not from the homes of the western coast, you would hope? "Sometimes," continues McBride, he would roast a piece of fish on an iron, called a `brander', on the turf fire. It was much like the barbecue grill we know today.
I loved the roast salted fish, as it had a lovely flavour, but when the range or stove came in, there was no way of roasting the fish." A non fish dish he also mentioned was Meala Crusbie it was oatmeal fried in the pan with plenty of seasoning and he comments. "It was a useful standby when there was nothing else, along with eggs and bacon."
This is from a small paperback book Watertop. Where the Curlew flies, published by Patrick G. McBride, in March 1990.
Watertop, the farm, gets its name from its situation at the top of the Carey river, which rises just above the farm. It flows seven miles to the sea at Ballycastle. It is run as an Open Farm with a video and tearoom and small museum. The river once turned five mills on its way to the sea.