Percebes is a Spanish word now popping up in Canadian newspapers and magazines and, over the last decade, in technical fishing reports both private and governmental, particularly on Canada ’s Pacific coast.

What is a Percebe?

The percebe is a delicious, edible gooseneck barnacle. Seafood lovers proclaim the succulent lusciousness of its slippery, slurpable innards make percebes earth’s best-tasting seafood. This opinion holds sway throughout Spain, said to consume more seafood per person than any country in the world.

The Castilian Spanish pronunciation of percebe is per-THAY-bay. The th sound is that heard in English words like thin and think. The language of the Spanish province of Castile is the linguistic standard of a country which boasts a toothsome paella of dialects.

The word is filtering into Canadian English because there has been a brief history of exporting our gooseneck barnacles to Spain, as the Spanish percebe catch has begun to decline, due both to mass deaths and reproductive failure of barnacles because of oceanic pollution and oil spills off the coast of Spain and perhaps also due to overfishing.

This barnacle may look like a mollusc but it is in fact a crustacean related to shrimps, lobsters and crabs. The goose barnacle or percebe thrives at the ocean’s foamy edge. Slammed by boiling sea waves, laved in saline by constant saltwater surf, the percebe thrives clinging to wave-lashed crags of the sea, to coastal rocks in narrow inlets called ‘surge channels’ up which the ocean thrusts oxygen-rich waves tumbling and roiling to wash over the barnacle colonies, thus providing tiny planktonic food to be caught by the winnowing fan-like legs poking out and up from the barnacle. Barnacles attach themselves to rocks by their “heads” and feed by means of their feathery “legs.”

 

Canadian Citation # 1

Here’s a snippet from an aboriginal fishing website operated by the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board:

August 14, 2003

“Imagine 300' cliffs towering straight out of the Ocean, non-stop winds pushing waves atop the ocean swells right into the rocks at the base of the cliffs.

“Out of the white water and foam, the bright red shirt of a goose barnacle fisherman appears. What saves him from getting swept out to sea is a line, tied to his waist, the other end at the top of the cliff where his fishing partner watches the swells and pulls him out of the worst. What drives him to risk his life is the lucrative percebe or goose barnacle.”

Josie Osborne, NTC Central Region Biologist, Ha-Shilth-Sa Newspaper

How to Eat a Percebe

The delicate meat of a goose barnacle is in the peduncular stalk (pedunculum Latin ‘little foot’ from pes, pedis Latin ‘foot’ + -unculum Latin, common diminutive noun suffix indicating the root meaning is made smaller.) You obtain the freshest percebes possible, then you boil them, strip off the outer skin of the stalk and bite off the interior meat which has a delicate, seafoody flavour recalling lobster. In Spain, the culinary belief is: the shorter the stalk, the tastier the meat. Hence short-footed percebes fetch astounding prices. Here's a 2007 blog entry confirming how dear they are:

“They reserve this label for the goose barnacles [percebes] that often prove fatal to collect and which I saw on sale in a Santiago restaurant last week for 120 euros a kilo. Personally, I find them as repulsive as gizzards and tripe. But, then, I have always been a fussy eater.”

and here are prices quoted inAmerican dollars from a 2007 New York Times food column:

“Prices of percebes range from $13.50 a kilo (2.2 pounds) at the village bar in San Andres de Teixido to $54 in La Coruna and $144 in Madrid. Prices vary according to season, availability and the setting. Five ounces or so serves two as an appetizer.”

 

Etymology of the Word Percebe

The Spanish word percebe finds its root in the compound medieval Latin word, pollicipes, literally ‘thumb-foot,’ an apt name, referring to the barnacle’s edible part, its anchoring peduncle and its resemblance to a gray thumb.

Pollex, pollicis Latin ‘thumb’ + pes, pedis Latin ‘foot’ = Scientific Latin pollicipes ‘thumb-foot’

Pollicipes was transformed during the early growth of the Spanish language into percebes. The scientific name was incomprehensible to Spanish and Portuguese fishermen who knew very little if any Latin except the church formulae which they mouthed at Sunday mass. Thus, as frequently happens in linguistic simplification, everyday users of the word changed the dauntingly Latinate pollicipes into a term that resembled some word the speaker did know. In this case, based on the sound of the Latin word spoken in Spanish, users thought the name of their barnacle might have something to do with the Spanish verb percibir ‘to perceive, to notice, to observe, to sense.’ It does not. But ordinary users altered the word’s pronunciation and spelling so that it did appear related to percibir. Somewhat later a Spanish agent noun was formed, percebeiro ‘barnacle fisherman,’ naming the brave man who pries this dangerous catch from slime-slicked rocks in the midst of high, whipping seas.

 

Spanish Citation

In which the ‘Canadian goose barnacle’ is defined:

Percebe canadiense , que procede de las costas Atlánticas de Canadá. Es más grande que el percebe de nuestras costas y tiene la boca rodeada de una membrana negra en lugar de roja, como en el caso del europeo. De color más claro su sabor, al igual que los percebes procedentes de Marruecos, tiene menos intensidad.

Surprising Origin of the Term ‘Gooseneck Barnacle’

“The resemblance of this barnacle's fleshy stalk to a goose's neck gave rise in ancient times to the notion that geese, or at least certain seagoing species of wild goose, literally grew from the barnacle. Most notably, the wild Barnacle Goose (Branta leucopsis), whose eggs and young were rarely seen by humans because it breeds in the remote Arctic , got its popular name because it was imagined to grow from gooseneck barnacles.” Quoted from an internet definition

 

The ‘Long Schlong’ Boast

However lowly the humble barnacle may appear, it has one phallic claim to fame. The barnacle has the longest penis in the animal kingdom, in proportion to its body length. Needless to say, the moment this penile bounty was bruited about on fishermen's lips, the barnacle instantly became renowned as — what else? — a potent aphrodisiac. Is it? Science tells the inquiring mind that the barnacle consumed is about as aphrodisiacal for the average male as repeated viewings of Dr. Condoleezza Rice news videos.

 

Percebes as Canadian Exports

Briefly Canadian gooseneck barnacles were exported to Spain, as the Spanish fishery declined. Then the government of Canada halted the gooseneck barnacle fishery. Local Atlantic and Pacific fishermen are campaigning to have that fishery reintroduced. At the same time, loyal Spanish gourmets, particularly los gallegos, attest that Canadian barnacles are not equivalent in taste and suppleness of flesh to true Spanish percebes.

¡Por supuesto que no!

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