My buddy Vinny, who taught me how to make wine, also taught me how to find whelks on the ocean beaches around Stone Harbor and Cape May and how to make delicious scungilli with them. He could make dogs*it taste good if you gave him a little garlic and olive oil.
Scungilli is very popular in Italian cooking.
Dottie and I and Vinny and his wife would comb the beach looking for a wisp of thin, grass laying flat on the wet sand near the wash line. There we would find the whelks, We would haul 4 or 5 wine buckets of them back to our trailer and we would make up a mess of scungilli. To make it, we would boil the whelks live for about a half-hour in big pots and then extract the body. There is a thin, bony plate on the foot called the operculum which is the "door" that keeps the whelk safe. You cut that off and throw it away, along with the guts. You are left with a large muscle that you slice thinly. Then we would lightly sauté' everything in olive oil and butter seasoned with garlic and a little basil or oregano. It was delirious eaten just like that or chilled and worked into a big Italian salad. Nothing like it!
There are still some commercial conch fishing in the Cape May and Delaware area but they fish the open ocean with conch pots. One is located near where I keep my boat in CM.
Here is a good video of some DE whelkers.
“This is the definition of multitasking.” – Shawn Moore It’s 8 a.m. on the sixth day of an unusually mild run of mid-November weather. Easy winds out of the south, temperatures in the 60s and 70s, the ocean calm about six miles off...
www.capegazette.com
And info on the conchs/whelks in general. It is a very healthy food loaded with protein.
Scungilli is one of those foods that most people have little to no idea what it really is. Here's what to know about what's often described as "sliced conch."
www.thedailymeal.com
