Two Questions,

what is it?

 and would you eat it?

or I should say would you eat them? they being likened to the truffles of the sea, they are Lucifer’s Fingers, or percebes, and at a cost of some 100 euros a plate they do not come cheap! and here is why, percebes cannot be farmed and only thrive on the on rocks in the ocean intertidal zone, where crashing waves provide them with plankton, this makes them notoriously dangerous to harvest, with hunters risking getting crushed against the rocks by crashing waves, or being rendered unconscious by the impact and drowning, the lucky ones escape with broken limbs or severe abrasions,

 “Never turn your back on God when you dive for Lucifer’s fingers,” commercial diver João Rosário told BBC last year. “When you dive for percebes and you turn your back on the unpredictability of the ocean, you will most likely be injured or killed. There are many cases of divers being knocked unconscious and drowning. The ‘lucky ones’ get away with breaking an arm or leg or suffering abrasions where the rocks cut through their wetsuits.”

percebes hunters basically have to options; either swing down from 100-meter-high-cliffs with a rope and chiseling off at Lucifer’s Fingers during low tide, but risk getting crushed by breaking waves, or approach the rocks by boat, anchor at a safe distance and swim towards the cliff face, timing their chiseling to match the rhythm of the sea, each option has its risks and hunters have yet to agree on which one is the safest,

so how to cook these delicacies of the sea? there’s an overwhelming consensus among the Portuguese that there’s only one way to cook percebes properly: in boiling salted water for no longer than it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer. “Even if you pray slowly, it should never take more than a minute,” said Adriano Lemes, Marisqueira Azul’s chef, “Then spoon it onto ice to terminate the cooking process. Don’t add any spices and especially not any sauce,” he stressed, and do not dare mention the fact that British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay once served percebes in a creamy sauce, the locals within earshot will throw their arms in the air and shout out sayings such as ‘falando como um verdadeiro idiota’, which is loosely translated as, “what an idiot!”

as an aside commercially viable gooseneck barnacles are also being harvested on the coast of Vancouver Island, in Canada, but it’s a small scale operation compared to Spain and Portugal.