If there is any place capable of treasuring the secret of the seven seas, that, say those who know them best, is the head of the prawns. And now, right now, at this narrow end of July, is when the head of a good shrimp, one of our excellent Mediterranean shrimps, is fuller than ever with titanic secrets. Of that taste of vice to which many of us give in despite having it prohibited. Not only because of the cholesterol and all that stuff about uric acid (it’s what you have to get older), but also because of the apparently super negative effects of cadmium, an incredibly toxic metal that is concentrated there, in the head of the tastiest crustaceans.
He tells me about how now is the best time for prawns because it is when José Antonio Caparrós, el Capa, an institution in Barceloneta, piles them onto his trawlers (L’Ôstia and Nus) fuller and more beautiful than ever. Everyone in the l’Òstia neighborhood knows him. He is the son of the Child. He was born at number 15 Guitert, in a room at home, and he swears that at the age of eleven he was already on the boats of his legendary father. The first audible memory of him is the hammering of semi-diesel engines. Boom. Boom. Boom. And the first olfactory, that of rotten potatoes from Holland mixed with that of Argentine bovine skins.
“Before there were caulkers, anarchists, black marketeers, chorizos, navigators. People from everywhere. And today there are pakis and foreigners without shirts, well, very well. We all share the spirit of survival”, says Capa, in addition to the taste of the prawns.
He is horrified when in my first attack I go for a fork and knife. And he forbids me, this time emphatically, to rip off the red animal’s head. She instructs me (I assume that I am the most disadvantaged student in this shrimp for twenty that she has summoned in the stevedores’ house on Carrer del Mar) on how to eat it. You pick up the legs (which you then ingest if you want, before going for the abdomen), look her square in the eye, and pull her horn (yes! it looks like a unicorn) up. And so you uncover, without breaking anything at all, those powerful secrets. Don’t think about cadmium. Sip them and enjoy. Tomorrow will be another day.
