Ormers

I’ve been meaning to do an appreciation of Marcella Hazan, the cuuco di tutti cuochi (I believe I use the masculine here, though she is a she?) but I can’t find my notes, so I will have to substitute this recipe for cooking ormers:

My mother knew how to cook ormers. When she had cut the parts you eat out of the shell, she would scrub the black edges with a scrubbing brush until they was perfectly clean; and that took some doing. Then she would put them between two towels and beat them with a flat iron for half an hour or more. They are hard as leather, but she’d roll up her sleeves; and she had muscles on her arms, my mother. That was when she was happy. She’d be singing hymns all the time and you could hear her all over the house. When they was properly broke up and soft, she’d fry them over the fire in the cast iron frying-pan; and then stew then in the oven to finish up with. Some people stew them with onions, but my mother didn’t believe in that. She said it takes the taste away and spoils the gravy. She liked them with just boiled potatoes.

When there was a lot to be had, she would pickle some. They was fourpence a dozen, if you bought them; but that wasn’t worth it. After they had been scrubbed and beaten, they was boiled for a long time; and then pickled in the best vinegar with bay leaves in an airtight jar. We didn’t have no bay leaves in our garden; so I had to go and steal some from Mr Dorey of Oatlands. He had a bay tree with leaves hanging over the road.. Mr Dorey would have given us as many bay leaves as we wanted, if we’d asked him: but my mother wouldn’t let me out. She was proud, my mother. She would rather steal than beg; and I’m the same. The jar was kept on the shelf with the pots of jam; and sometimes I’d be given a picked ormer for my tea with bread and butter, when I came home from school.

I can’t say what ormers taste like. They are not like fish, flesh or fowl. They are like no other food on earth. I have heard of the nectar of the gods. Or is it ambrosia they feed on? They must be ormers. Well, my poor old mother is in heaven now, if she is anywhere at all. If they got any sense up there, they will get her to cook them meal of ormers. I can just see her banging away at the old ormers with a flat iron and her sleeves rolled up and singing ‘Where is my wandering boy tonight?’

—G. B. Edwards, The Book of Ebenezer Le Page 16-17 (1981).

Fn.: An appendix on the Guernsey Island dialect defines “ormer” as “the sea-ear, abalone-like shellfish unique to the islands.”

Fn.: Did you notice the cool use of the semicolon (and colon)? They’ve pretty much gone out of the language—along with the dash—and it is a loss.