Originally Posted by
TMOliver
For those of us in the "Boil'em, peel'em & eat'em" class of shrimp addicts, the amount of time and effort to perform the extensive microsurgery necessary to devein small shrimp would be ridiculous.. The best 'eating" shrimp are small, and you folks must be dealing with some awfully big "jumbos".
And here you have the great Atlantic divide ....
And how would you better use the time you had wasted on deveining? Eating more poo soaked prawns,.
What is the point of going to all the trouble to eat something as potentially sweet and wonderful as a tender little prawny in a perfect state compared with the temptation of gobbling them down in much more quickly and in some quantity inflated by the taste of prawn poo? You devein lobster?
No one in the uk will devein what we call brown shrimp .. but anything from small prawns upwards .... it will probably be deveined.
Much of us Brits are burdened with the East End ethos and traditions. It was a cockney tradition to decamp to the local Tubby Issacs stall outside the pub and have the welks, and jellied eels and winkles and prawns before heading home. The annual holiday was a trip down to Westcliff, or Southend or Leigh-on-sea. Sitting down together and enjoying the shrimps was prolonged by the deveining ceremony. It made the shrimp last longer.
Some of it started there and remains .....
