Conch treats
Variations of our national dish
Everybody knows about the gourmet’s love of snails, and many beyond the tables of France have tried this unlikely delicacy. Outside of The Bahamas, the Caribbean and parts of Florida, however, few are aware of the world’s second-most popular edible mollusc: the conch (pronounced “konk” everywhere it is eaten, and “consh” just about everywhere else).
Queen conch (strombus gigas) is a herbivore that lives within a spiral shell with a glossy pink or orange interior. It pulls itself along the sea bottom using a single muscular foot tipped with a sharp claw called an operculum.
It’s a Goliath compared to its wimpy terrestrial cousin, growing up to 12 inches in length and sometimes weighing more than five pounds. The average specimen landed by fishermen–often by diving in shallow waters–weighs a third of a pound without the shell.
Inhabitants of New Providence island alone consume more than two million of these weighty gastropods
a year. The appetite for conch is not a modern one. In the 19th century, discarded shells were piled as high as buildings in downtown Nassau.
Today, conch has found its way into a variety of dishes, from deep-fried fritters to sashimi. Traditionally it is eaten raw, as scorch’ (laid flat, scored with a knife and seasoned with lime) or in a salad, mixed with diced onions, peppers, tomatoes and celery, along with hot pepper to taste, doused with citrus juices. Cooked, it might be stewed, grilled or fried, but in each case it must be tenderized beforehand.
“That conch, it’s a muscle … a real, serious muscle,” says chef Elijah Bowe, at the elite Graycliff restaurant. It must
be softened before it can be cooked, as in one of the most popular island dishes, crack’ conch. The conch is beaten until thin and tender, then cut into strips, coated in batter, flour or breadcrumbs and deep-fried.
Haute cuisine conch
Chef Bowe thinks that, to provide a cordon bleu experience, even beaten conch can be too much of a challenge for the uninitiated. He serves a dish of minced conch in curry and coconut milk, “to get the flavour into it. Then we squeeze it almost dry and bake it into a filo pastry. It’s a sophisticated, unexpected way to treat it.”
Another of Nassau’s leading chefs, Ronnie Deryckere, until recently proprietor of Sun and… restaurant, goes even further to make
the firm, white flesh more manageable. To make his conch mousse, Deryckere chills conch meat in a freezer until it is almost solid before passing it first through a grinder and then a food processor. “That way you get a true purée, not bits and pieces,” he says. Then he lightens the mixture with chilled cream, finely chopped vegetables and thyme. “It’s like a classic fish mousse,” he says, “but the conch gives it a unique sweetness.”
Despite their skills, neither Bowe nor Deryckere is embarrassed to serve conch in a style that the humblest Bahamian would recognize. It is one of the ingredients in Bowe’s seafood stew, and Deryckere served conch chowder for more than 27 years at Sun and... before opening a teahouse and bakery on Charlotte St in downtown Nassau.
As Bowe’s predecessor at Graycliff discovered, “You mess with a Bahamian’s conch at your peril.” Chef Joshua Campbell recalls inventing a post-modern variant on conch salad, made with caramelized pineapple, for which he “was almost run out of town.”
Bad weather staple
What Bahamians now consume with relish, they once ate mainly from necessity. The conch’s great appeal for early settlers was that it could be easily collected, dried and stored for periods of bad weather when fishing was impossible. As a result it earned the nickname “hurricane ham.”
Conch shells discovered at archaeological sites in Abaco and Eleuthera suggest that this slow-moving sea-snail was just as important a staple for the pre-Colombian Lucayan indians.
Other than 1,000-pound loggerhead turtles, with jaws powerful enough to crush the shell, and tiger sharks, which have been known to swallow conchs whole, man is the only animal that can satisfy its hunger for the gastropod.
Although the adult conch can baffle most predators, its larvae and juveniles are prey to almost the entire ocean. A female conch may produce half a million eggs after one breeding, adding up to several million over a year. The hatched larvae, called veligers, float as plankton until their initially transparent shells become heavy enough to drop them to the sea floor.
Still less than an inch long and with a shell too fragile to afford much protection, the juvenile conch must evade lobsters, crabs and rays. Only a tiny fraction survive the four or five years it takes to reach the size where they attract the interest of fishermen–after their shells develop to the degree that make it legal to take them.
Against human ingenuity their shells are useless. A skilled fisherman or conch vendor can shuck, or “crack,” a conch in less than a minute, hammering a small hole in the shell a few inches behind where it starts to flare and severing the muscle with a knife. Then the conch is pulled out whole to be cleaned and skinned.
There are conch cracking competitions in The Bahamas, the best known being held on Columbus Day at McLean’s Town on Grand Bahama. But in Nassau the best place to observe the art is Potter’s Cay, just under the exit bridge from Paradise Island.
Conch shabu shabu
It was the unpretentious stalls of Potter’s Cay that inspired one of The Bahamas’ most unique, up-market contributions to world cuisine. When Nobuyuki Matsuhisa, founder of the world-famous Nobu chain of restaurants, came to Nassau three years ago he found that the local warm-water fish were not appropriate for top-grade sashimi. Determined to make a signature local dish for his soon-to-open Atlantis restaurant, Nobu-san was almost in despair until he visited Potter’s Cay and encountered the conch.
Now cold conch shabu shabu, with special sauces, is served at Nobu Atlantis and nowhere else in the world. Shabu shabu is the name of a Japanese meat delicacy which comes from the sound made by dipping a piece of beef quickly in hot broth or water. For the conch version, thin slices are dipped in hot water for a second and then plunged into iced water just as briefly. Conch also appears on the sashimi menu, provocatively labelled as “Live Conch.” Strictly speaking, the flesh is alive and reactive for eight hours after being cleaned.
Magical & medicinal
The muscular foot that the conch uses to pull itself along the ocean floor is the part that most often ends up on the plate, but aficionados will tell you that all of the animal is edible, except the eye-stalks, mouth and operculum. Gregory Edgecoe, a vendor at Potter’s Cay, says, “You can eat it all, and each part has its own subtle flavour.” He admits, though, that “some parts are a lot chewier than others.”
Popular legend also has it that the entire conch has aphrodisiacal properties, although here too some parts are better than others. Most potent is the “pistol” (or even less romantically the “slop”) a thin, slimy translucent tube about an inch or two long that forms part of the digestive system. Conch crackers often pop these casually into their mouth as they are working. Edgecoe is not sure if the stories are true, but adds: “I eat 20 pistols a day, and I ain’t never had no problems.”
Whether magical, medicinal or just a good square meal, the conch is clearly as much a part of the Bahamian psyche as it is a staple of the national diet.
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Conch treats
Variations of our national dish
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