Crustaceans I have known

It's interesting how many types of shrimpiness there are. We all know the delicious tail meat, hopefully shucked and de-veined before cooking. Here, we get shrimp, the whole shrimp, and nothing but the shrimp. Boiled completely whole in its b-day suit.

The Vietnamese way is to nibble off bits of shell, gleam some meat and deposit the hard parts. Not fond of that technique. It's annoying, and I notice they don't get all the meat and probably swallow some shell. So I spend some messy moments shucking the shell first, fully soiling my hands, and then eat the tail meat.

But it doesn't end with the tail. You have to open the carapace and to terrible things with the stuff inside. On these large prawns, It wasn't so bad, as I got away with discarding the gills and eating just the head meat, which is very delicate tasting and oyster-ey. Finally, the legs are holding thousands of tiny purple shrimp caviar. On the regular size shrimp, these had an extremely light shrimpy taste and were a bit sweet--very pleasant. The larger the shrimp the yuckier they taste, and the prawn shown above is as big as they get.

And then there is the dreaded tiny dried shrimp that goes in the vegetable soup sometimes. Awful--just awful. Purely concentated shrimp taste that will kick your tonsils. Not dissimilar from the dried shrimp powder that goes on crackers and chips, god knows why.

In conclusion, white folk everywhere stop at the tail, and they're not missing much.