Eating crustaceans considered

They don't seem to appear in the frozen section of all Woolworths, but several months ago, my wife and I independently noticed that at one we visited they were selling boxes of frozen, raw scampi.   (We both tend to look at the seafood section of the supermarket when we are in a new one.)  

These interesting crustaceans come from somewhere in the North Atlantic, and we don't have anything very similar in Australian waters.   I am very fond of Moreton Bay bugs, which have a lot more meat in the tail, but they are so ridiculously expensive I pretty rarely eat them.

In fact, Australia has a pretty limited range of affordable crustaceans.  Sure, farmed prawns are now very reliable in terms of taste and often quite affordable.   But our blue swimmer crabs, the type most often available, tend to be somewhat watery and weak flavoured.  Mud crabs have a better flavour and can be nice, but tend to be expensive and I've never tried to cook one at home.   They tend to be an occasional treat from an Asian restaurant.    The lobsters from Tasmania we saw on holiday there can be enormous and (from little we ate of them) tasty, but again, they are really expensive.

So, I quite like eating crustaceans from other parts of the world, and when on holiday.   It's been a long time since I had one, but I remember being impressed with the gigantic prawn like thing served in Singapore.   When in Japan, it is definitely worth eating their crabs.  My wife believes that crabs from colder water are always tastier, and I think the Australian experience with blue swimmers backs that up.   I see that some supermarkets here now sell sections of the huge spiky crabs from somewhere cold - I've never tried them, as I am generally not so keen on defrosted, cooked, crustaceans.    (I'll take defrosted raw prawns though; they seem to do OK in the process.)

So, what about the scampi?    We had some in a soup some months ago, and they seemed OK, but their flavour was not all that obvious.

This weekend, we split some down the middle and grilled them, before serving them on a paella.    Well, this went quite well - it seemed quite clear that the meat (what little of it there is in each tail) was distinctly sweet and flavoursome.  The claws contain some meat but are very hard to get into.   Still, they were a pleasant surprise.

Only a week ago, I had been watching some SBS cooking show (Ottolenghi's Mediterranean Island Feasts) when he was on Mallorca (aka Majorca) and eating a local, very expensive, species of prawn which was famous for its sweetness (and also for being very red straight out of the sea.)   I thought it odd that a prawn should be "sweet", but this seemed definitely to be the character of the scampi meat too.

So, what about scampi generally?    I see via that authoritative source, the Daily Mail, that deep fried nuggets of what is called scampi have become a popular British pub food, after they were introduced as a way of dealing with (what appears to be) the unwanted catch when they were trawling for white fish.   However, the cheapest versions of pub scampi are apparently like our "crab sticks"  (who on earth actually buys those?) - a small amount of the actual crustacean with heaps of "extender" added.

Scampi thus seems to have followed the reverse culinary trajectory of oysters in Britain:  the latter went from being food for the working class until they were all dredged up (the English seem to have long been keen on fishing methods which scour the sea bed) to something for more exclusive tastes;  scampi have become a food that apparently is still only eaten on special occasions in Spain and Portugal but is mere "pub food" in England. 

Anyway, they were nice, and now I know more about them...