Jude wrote:

> OK, here's my shellfish story.
>
> Precocious child that I was, I tried my first escargot at age 4. When I
> was 5 1/2, we were visiting friends at their summer house on Long
> Island Sound. I swam, sailed, played around the docks......and came up
> with the brilliant idea of gathering a bucket of escargot for dinner.
> So I took my sandbucket, rinsed it in the sound, and filled it to the
> brim with small snails.
>
> My mom and Aunt Jane were such good sports, they rounded up the garlic
> and some butter and we feasted on Long Island Escargots for dinner that
> evening.
>
> And we all survived!
>

When I was a kid (before the days of water pollution and Red Tide)
we spent every summer weekend at our little beach house on Buzzard's Bay
(MA). We would often gather bucketsful of periwinkles from the rocks
and take them to someone's mother who would boil them with some red
pepper flakes. We'd sit on the seawall and fish them out of the shell
with a straightened safety pin. What a feast!

We also ate raw littleneck clams and learned to open them at an early age.

I can't look at escargot now because compared to the periwinkles they
are too big and snaky-looking.

gloria p