Conch

The exquisite shell of the conch (queen conch to US readers) will be familiar to many. We’ll have seen it in childhood, perhaps, gracing an elderly relative’s mantlepiece or display cabinet. We might have been handed it, gingerly, with an injunction to hold it to our ear, so we could “hear the sea in it”. This notion of a live marine broadcast with its rolling waves is, of course, fanciful – the swirly cavity of the shell simply amplifies ambient noise – but also indicative of conch’s rich semiotics. The mollusc’s function as a proto-loudspeaker, with solemn or quasi-mystical attributes, appears to echo through a number of traditions. In Hindu religious practice, the shankha shell is used as a ceremonial trumpet. In William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, only the boys who hold the conch may speak: through it flows the voice of authority.

Materially, the conch shell is extremely tough, its structure potentially replicable through 3D printing to devise near-unbreakable helmets and body armour. Three-layered, it features what one research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has described as a “zigzag matrix”: any cracks, the team told MIT News, would be forced to “go through a kind of maze”.

A little lost in all the talk about conch is the living creature itself – the actual conch, as opposed to the shell whose biological rationale is, after all, to shield the animal within. This is a sea snail, indigenous to the Florida Keys and the Caribbean. (Natives of Key West endearingly refer to each other as “Conchs”.) Its meat goes into burgers, soups, stews and curries. It is occasionally seen raw, or as ceviche in Panama. An ancestral source of protein for the area’s Arawak and Carib people, it has a sweet, delicately oceanic flavour, and a consistency that’s somewhat cartilaginous. If you enjoy textured foods, this chewy slipperiness is a pleasure in itself. Bear in mind that as a rule, the larger the conch, the more rubbery: cook it too long, or not enough, and you may render it inedible.