Species sheet · The Edible Ocean
Warty venus
Thick, warty, and far better raw than you would think.
- Open it with a knife like an oyster and serve raw with a squeeze of lemon
- Or stuff it with garlic butter and give it three minutes under the grill
- Never boil it, it loses all its juice
- In French
- Praire
- Scientific name
- Venus verrucosa
- In the water
- Coarse sand and gravel, Atlantic and Mediterranean, from the surface to 15 metres.
- Season & buying
- Best from October to April.
- Common length
- ~5.5 cm
- How to identify it
- Thick almost round shell, strongly domed
Strong concentric ridges ending in blunt warts
Finely crenulated inner rim
On the plate
Firm briny meat with a long finish, meatier than a clam.
Avoid: A warty venus already gaping that does not shut when tapped is dead.
Its warts are not decorative: they catch the gravel and stop the current rolling it away, so it spends its whole life within a few metres of where it settled.
In Umay recipes
One Umay recipe calls for it.
