Jane: Any one for shrimping? Okay, we might at the fag end of the season but it’s still worth a go. This summer, my neighbour Gill rediscovered her lovely wooden shrimping net from childhood: it’s 40 years old and as you can see, in pretty good nick. As a child, she used to go shrimping on Happisburgh beach in north Norfolk with this very same net, and this year took her children to Waxham Sands near Great Yarmouth to see what they could catch.
The net is a good solid one with a flat edge at the bottom which you push along the seabed in a few inches of water when the tide has gone out, as shown above. The shrimp, tiny flatfish, starfish, crabs and loads of other kinds of marine life are scooped into the net.
You can see Jasmin holding a brown shrimp, a wiggly translucent thing…
Collect the shrimp in buckets as shown here (Millie and Edie are practising their mussel technique in the garden)…
The children were horrified but Gill and her mum cooked the shrimps on the campfire, then ate them with buttered brown bread and a sprinkle of white pepper. (To cook, you put the shrimp in heavily salted boiling water for three to five minutes until they turn pinkish. Take the heads off before you eat them, but crunch the other crusty bits.) Or like Millie and Jasmin, you might feel happier chucking them back into the sea… |
