A supper that’s worth its salt

If you happened to be strolling along the shore of what we now know as Happisburgh, Norfolk, over 800,000 years ago, along the estuary of what might have been the original course of the Thames, your eye might have been caught by a few windswept figures, no doubt armed with sapling-based basket nets and poles. These hunter-gatherers were most likely Homo antecessor, perhaps on their way back from a coastal forage to the predator-safe haven of their estuary-island settlement. Fast forward the best part of a million years and their footprints are discovered, neatly preserved in the silty mudflats, by a group of excitable scientists. They would have been gathering shellfish, molluscs and seaweeds of the same sort we dine on to this day, and the thought of gathering these delights now, in an almost identical fashion to those hungry hominids of yore, brings out a sense of primal well-being that is nigh on unsurpassable. It gives the clever flex of the rod an uncouth air, and makes the ease of trigger-pulling positively vulgar.

At the end of a