Dark and delicious, these Black Queens are a taste of seafood heaven

Martin Hesp shares his new-found love of an estuarine clam harvested from the Fal

One of the most exciting things that can happen in the life of a mature food-lover is the increasingly rare moment when you realise there’s an ingredient or perhaps an entire type of dish you have never tried before. And it is especially exciting if the revelation comes your way in the area or region where you live.

And all this becomes even more electrifying when you’ve been a professional food writer for over a quarter of a century and you learn there’s a delicious new item right there on your patch waiting to be discovered.

A deliveryman has just arrived with a big white chiller box at my Exmoor cottage – and it contains a type of Cornish shellfish I’ve never tried before. I cannot tell you how excited I am about the prospect of cooking and eating them.

They are called Black Queens and they are a bycatch of the highly sustainable Fal Estuary oyster fishery, which – as most readers will know – is carried out under strict laws that mean no vessel with an engine can be involved. The Fal oyster smacks are famous – and I believe they make up what is the only professional fishing fleet in Europe where all the work is done under sail or simply by manpower. The oysters (and therefore the Black Queens) are also caught by fishermen who use special rowing boats with hand-cranked dredges.

The point is that the dark but delicious estuarine clams have always been regarded as bycatch and were always simply thrown back into the water once the dredges full of oysters had been hauled on deck.

My old friend Robin Turner – who has spent his life working in and around the Newlyn fishing port – takes over the story. “I was an auctioneer and wholesaler at Newlyn for many years and my work would take me to France where I had a lot of contacts. I had seen these small dark clams on sale in the fish markets along the west coast of France down by Bordeaux. They are highly sought after by the French and Spanish.

“And I realised I’d seen the Black Queens being thrown back on the Fal. Not so long ago I was in France and I saw an old friend of mine one day and asked if he’d be interested in buying our Cornish version of this delicious shellfish. He said, ‘If you can get a good supply and they are clean we can sell them’.

“So we started to see how we could get permission to harvest these previously unwanted shellfish as a food stuff. That meant getting them registered in this country and getting permission to fish them – getting the depuration (cleaning and purging process) sorted – and getting the paperwork to have them sent over to France,” said Robin. “We’ve been going for four years now – and they really are sought after on the Continent, but hardly any are sold in the UK. They have an amazing flavour – a bit like normal clams but sweeter and somehow they taste slightly of truffles – which is probably because they live in the river sediment rather than on the sea-bed, which is where all the other clams on the market come from.”

He added: “I became involved with the sales across The Channel but have no involvement if the clams are sold here in the UK. A company called Fal Catch sells them and I am only too happy to help out the British fishing industry in general to promote anything that’s caught, because once Brexit happens it could be that the Cornish fishing industry needs all the help that it can get.”

Robin, by the way, has kindly agreed to become a regular contributor to these food and drink pages bringing us all manner of seafood news relevant to the South West – you can read about him in the panel…

So what are Black Queens like to eat? Well, I have just shucked open half a dozen and dealt with the insides – which I must say is a little fiddly as they are small and you need to cut away the digestive tract which will still have some debris inside even though the shellfish have been purged by the fishermen.

So fiddly, yes – because you only get a chunk of meat which is about the size of a fat £1 coin – or a two quid coin at the largest… But! The flavour is astonishing.

For my taste-test I simply dolloped a tiny dot of Trewithen Dairy’s salted Cornish butter on each and grilled the meat on the shell for just under two minutes. I promise, the Black Queens are the sweetest shellfish I have ever eaten - and believe me, I have eaten marine molluscs of varying species all around the world.

But it’s more than sweetness. Robin is absolutely right – the little flavour-bombs do have a background essence of truffle.

So here’s what I am planning for dinner tonight… I reckon the Black Queens of the River Fal will make the ultimate spaghetti vongole – which happens to be my all-time favourite pasta dish.

It will take me twice the time to process the clams than it will to cook the dish – but if we’re talking quarter of an hour’s prep’ followed by eight minutes cooking, then my wife and I will be having the best seafood dinner we’ve had in 2020 with less than half-an-hour’s work.

The plan will be to heat through some Trewithen Cornish butter so that some chunks of garlic can very, very, gently turn golden over the mildest heat on the hob, as I prep the Black Queens. I’ll discard the bits of cooked garlic, then toss the clam meat in the flavoured butter as I cook the pasta. The Italians would no doubt choke on their spaghetti, but I will also add a spoonful of Trewithen’s Cornish single cream as I toss the pasta into the clams, and I’ll finish the dish with just a few droplets of truffle oil.

We’re talking about a unique form of truly Cornish seafood heaven here. An extremely simple dish but you really, really do not want to be disguising the flavour of the amazing little Black Queens in any way whatsoever…