Free An Embarrassment of Mangoes by Ann Vanderhoof Page B

taste and chewy texture—and widely acclaimed as an aphrodisiac.
    Elizabeth and I are making cracked conch for the birthday dinner. The name of the dish has nothing to do with the pounding the main ingredient gets; it comes from the cracker meal—crushed crackers—with which the tenderized fresh conch is coated. It’s then either deep-fried or panfried, which will allow us to add a nice coating of splattered grease to the conchy bits decorating Belinda’s galley.
    Conch live in water ranging from just a couple of feet to a hundred feet deep, sucking up algae, grasses, and other organic matter as they propel themselves—
very
slowly—across the bottom using a muscular foot. Catching them, we’ve been told, is easy: You just dive down and pluck them out of grassbeds and off the sand.
Finding
them is a bit trickier, since the ones in the shallow, easily accessible areas have long since been harvested. Mostly now, local conch divers have to work in deeper water, and off more remote cays, breathing through a long hose attached to an air compressor on the boat as they swim along the bottom stuffing the overgrown escargot into their net bags. The divers stay out for several days at a stretch, camping at night on deserted cays, until they have a full boatload to bring to market. To keep the conch alive, they thread them on ropes and leave them in shallow water, then stop on their way home to pick them up.
    Steve and Todd bought the birthday party conch from a small Bahamian boat that had pulled into Chub Cay. Knowing the fishermen were unexpectedly stranded here by the weather too, they had taken along some beer to smooth the purchase. A dollar a conch, the appreciative divers tell Todd and Steve. “And it will make the dead rise,” one of them remarks, grinning.
    Deciding not to take the comment personally, they ask the men to show them how to clean the conch—“a practiced art best learned from another boater,” our guidebook had warned. “Don’t be surprised if you are not an expert on the first try. It takes some repetition to build up your conch-cleaning skills.”
    That would be an understatement. The fishermen hand Todd and Steve each a sturdy knife and let them practice—at least until their patience wears thin. “In the time it took Todd and I to extract and clean one conch apiece, the Bahamian guys had done maybe fifty,” Steve says, overstating only slightly.
    The process involves first knocking a hole in the shell at the highest point between its second and third rows of peaks, using a machete. For those not quite so confident of their aim, a mason’s hammer will do the job without quite so much risk to the digits that are holding the shell. Then insert the knife through the hole and with a deft twist cut the tendon attaching the conch to the shell. If you’ve gone in at the right place—not as obvious to a neophyte as it sounds—you should now be able to pull the entire conch out of its shell in one piece, by reaching in the opening at the bottom and tugging on the black claw, or foot.
    The whole animal is theoretically edible, if not exactly appealing, so the Bahamians next show them how to clean it so they’re left with a solid hunk of white muscle, saving the other bits to use as bait. They pull out a gelatinous, wormlike bit of innard from the conch’s stomach. “Very good for you,” one of them says, popping it raw into his mouth and raising up his forearm at a right angle to his body, just in case there’s any doubt about what “very good for you” means. Apparently, this part of the conch—a protein rod that helps the animal digest its food—is thought to be the prime repository of its aphrodisiacal power. A real treat, too, we are subsequently told, and we spot toddlers on other cays sucking them down raw, like fat translucent strands of spaghetti.
    The fishermen then cut off the other unappetizing bits—the eye stalks and the trunklike snout—but warn Steve and Todd to leave the