Nominate your favorite Maine businesses for Best of Maine!

Wrinkles

Wrinkles

grew up on stories of Harpswell fishermen who took bags of steamed periwinkles to school for lunch, but I didn’t start eating them myself until I ran into them below a cloak of fermented black-bean sauce at a restaurant in Chinatown, in New York City. The snails were the same ones that walk slowly up and down wharf pilings in Maine harbors, that line rocks below thatches of seaweed, that inhabit salt marshes. And they tasted delicious. Still do.

Some Mainers call them wrinkles (although the word can also refer to whelks, the periwinkles’ larger and carnivorous cousins, also an old coastal Maine delicacy). Those who harvest them — mostly by hand, a back-breaking task performed at low tide — are wrinklers. Nearly all of the state’s modest commercial harvest happens way Down East, where the periwinkles are meatier, but anyone with a pail and some free time can pick up to 2 quarts a day without a permit.

Steam them with white wine, a bay leaf, and a few peppercorns, if you like, until the meats — that is, the snails — loosen in their shells, then toss them in garlic butter and serve with toothpicks with which to pull out the meat. Or steam them with beer and plain butter instead. Cold, they actually make for a very good lunch. — SAM SIFTON

Sam Sifton is the food editor of The New York Times and the guest editor of Down East‘s April 2019 food issue.

Wrinkles

grew up on stories of Harpswell fishermen who took bags of steamed periwinkles to school for lunch, but I didn’t start eating them myself until I ran into them below a cloak of fermented black-bean sauce at a restaurant in Chinatown, in New York City. The snails were the same ones that walk slowly up and down wharf pilings in Maine harbors, that line rocks below thatches of seaweed, that inhabit salt marshes. And they tasted delicious. Still do.

Some Mainers call them wrinkles (although the word can also refer to whelks, the periwinkles’ larger and carnivorous cousins, also an old coastal Maine delicacy). Those who harvest them — mostly by hand, a back-breaking task performed at low tide — are wrinklers. Nearly all of the state’s modest commercial harvest happens way Down East, where the periwinkles are meatier, but anyone with a pail and some free time can pick up to 2 quarts a day without a permit.

Steam them with white wine, a bay leaf, and a few peppercorns, if you like, until the meats — that is, the snails — loosen in their shells, then toss them in garlic butter and serve with toothpicks with which to pull out the meat. Or steam them with beer and plain butter instead. Cold, they actually make for a very good lunch. — SAM SIFTON

Sam Sifton is the food editor of The New York Times and the guest editor of Down East‘s April 2019 food issue.

Wrinkles