Before the days of fancy food vans and gourmet seafood platters, there was something much simpler and somehow much better… The fish man turning up at the social club with his big wicker basket, calling out to see who fancied a bit of seafood.
He'd dish up mussels and shrimp into little round polystyrene cups, give them a splash of malt vinegar, and hand you a tiny plastic or wooden fork. No fuss. No frills. Just proper old-fashioned club food.
And if you'd had a few pints, that little cup of seafood somehow tasted even better!
A few facts from the old days:• Seafood sellers traditionally travelled around pubs, clubs and markets selling shellfish as an inexpensive snack.• Pickled cockles, mussels, whelks and shrimps became particularly associated with British seaside towns and working-class communities.• Vinegar wasn't just for flavour — pickling and vinegar were long-established ways of helping preserve seafood before modern refrigeration became widespread.
There was something wonderfully British about sitting in a social club with a pint in one hand and a little cup of mussels in the other.
Did your local social club have a fisherman who came round?