The appellation "prawn" seems often attached to what to me are simply shrimp. Then there's "langostine" which also covers a lot of territory. In my eyes (and to my taste), prawns come from colder waters and are larger, sometimes with claw appendages.

For shrimp, having grown up with wild caught Gulf Grays/Browns, they remain my fist choice. Folks who have eaten Gulf shrimp since childhood often claim with some validity that smaller shrimp have more flavor, having had not been "prepped" by removing the "vein".

maybe that is it, I never remove the vein.

Does it really make any difference with respect to the flavor? We always de-vein because someone in the family is a bit squeamish..

I had a date one time who ate the shells and all. That stopped me

It does. It is the prawns intestines and is bitter. If you don't remove the vein you are largely eating prawn poo.

You decide!

Sounds rather nasty to me. I'll keep taking the vein out...

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".

True shrimp fans prefer cooking the little buggers with the heads on. No, unlike frequent crawfish eaters, we don't often "suck haids", but protecting the shrimps' tails from total immersion of the open end, leaching out flavor, is traditional and beneficial.

Around here, we speak of "Hotel" shrimp, those frozen and defrosted bright pink jumbos offered at cocktail parties and buffets, "chewy" and bearing only minimal resemblance in flavor to real shrimp. So big that the digestive track may contain identifiable grains of sand, deveining is needed.

Okay, I think I have it - it's not a taste issue but a labor issue. For a brief moment I thought you were implying that the vein somehow added to the flavor of the shrimp. I didn't really want to go all Anthony Bourdain, but I might have been tempted

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 .....

I brought back some Basik's Angler's Blend from RSW. This with some olive oil is gooood!

Someone mentioned eating the shells here on FT one time. I tried it (I'll try just about anything ) but I'm not sure what the appeal is.

Over the years the best that my wife and I have had were either in Ireland, or Scotland.

Not frozen, not farmed, but fished (nets) local out of the cold bay waters.

And the best way to cook them is grilled, simply with nothing added. Perhaps a little sauce on the side but nothing on the prawn itself.

Served on airlines ? Yes, Well ..... I'll be diplomatic and state that nothing beats fresh grilled prawns, or shrimp out on the beach or quayside.

On this we both agree. When it comes to shrimp around the world, we differ. I prefer head-on, and my wife head-off.