Ja jedli šneci!

You may have read in an earlier entry that Geo and I had an adventure in home-made escargot. By popular demand (which means that at least one person has lodged a request) I shall relate the story of snail consumption.

[For photos, see the album labelled "Escargot" on the sidebar.]

The question about using snails for a culinary delight is not whether or not they will serve in such a capacity. The real question at hand is how best to move them from the form in which we are used to finding them—squishy, slimy things creeping on the ground in a trail of mucus—to a form in which, with a little stretch of the imagination, we might find them palatable. Certainly you will quote to me the common refrain, “Use a good sauce!” It is true that good escargot requires a good sauce. Snails served in even the finest restaurants are slathered in some sort of butter or cream sauce, for good reason: cooked snails, if left to their own devices, have the taste and consistency of vulcanized rubber. But, again, this is beside the point. When standing in an open field, in the morning just after heavy rains, with hundreds of these lethargic mollusks inching around you, the question stands: How do you get them to the point where they taste like vulcanized rubber?

In answer to this question I consulted two sources. The first was an employee and student in Prague who had prepared snails with a Greek Orthodox priest here a couple of years ago. He harvested the snails, rinsed them off, threw them in a pot, brought the water to a boil, and boiled them for three hours while continually scraping the foam off the pot with a spoon. (“Scraping the foam off the pot,” you ask? Yes—more on that later.)

The other source, which I don’t recommend to the casual user, was of course the internet. After some digging I found a consensus among restaurant and recipe websites that the best (i.e. gourmet) way to prepare snails is to harvest them, purge them, rinse them, boil them, salt them, rinse them again, give them a foot massage, boil them some more, salt them, ask for last requests, rinse them again, then boil the heck out of them. This process—recommended by all the experts Google could find—takes anywhere from three to five days.

I started out with good intentions to try it the gourmet way. On Sunday morning I went out before 8:00, when the grass was still wet from last night’s rain, and collected 25 snails in a plastic grocery bag. I brought them in and placed them in a basket with a quarter-head of lettuce and a few pieces of wet bread. The bread keeps them moist and the lettuce gives them something clean to eat. This is the “purging” phase, intended to “fast” the snails until their little GI tracts are empty. (It’s akin to “deveining” shrimp, but kindler and gentler. It’s good to be kind and gentle to animals you’re about to boil to death.) I covered the basket with a towel, after returning those snails that were already about to escape, and set them aside.

While the snails were fasting I found the translation for “I ate snails” in Czech: Já jedli šneci. Sara insisted that I know how to say it, in case I had to explain to the paramedics why I had stomach pains later that night.

Then I talked to Geo. It turned out our travel plans made three days of purging impossible. So I compressed the process. (Sorry, Emeril. I tried.) That afternoon I took the snails out of the basket, rinsed them in cold water and vinegar, then put them in a large pot of cold water on the stove. Over about thirty minutes I brought it to a rolling boil. It was only about two hours until we had to eat, but it would have to do.

Snails are animals that spend sixty percent of their lives perambulating on a moving sidewalk of slime. Whence does this slime come? Snails produce it themselves, excreting mucus from the bottom of their feet. Next time you see a snail, notice the shimmering trail behind it. Since snails (like all animals) have to be on the move constantly to find food, they produce a lot of slime.

Even when they’re dead they produce a lot of slime. Especially when they’re being boiled. Hence the foam.

The most labour-intensive part of preparing snails is standing next to the boiling pot, scraping off the foam that immediately develops on the surface of the water. Scoop some off, and it’s quickly replaced by another rising mountain of light brown fluff. For about two hours I scraped and sloughed, scooped and lifted. At long last, when the water boiled (relatively) clear, I rinsed the snails in cold water and pulled them out of their shells with a fork.

Our sauce was a basic garlic and butter sauce—you can probably make used tires taste good with enough garlic and butter—with some dill. I set the snails in sautéed mushroom caps, just for effect. Then Geo and I dug in, with our wives sitting at a conspicuous distance and making disparaging remarks about our choice of appetizer.

How was it? Much like vulcanized rubber with garlic and butter. But as anyone who’s eaten snails knows, it’s not about the taste of the snails; it’s about being able to say, Já jedli šneci!

~emrys

[One note is in order for those adventurous souls out there. The restaurant websites I found refer to two kinds of snails: gros gris and petit gris. (“Gris” is grey, in French, and seems to refer to the internal organs—the tripe—of the snails.) They say to cut off the body (the “gris”) of the gros gris variety, but you can leave the body on the petit gris. Well, Prague doesn’t have gros gris or petit gris snails. Here live Burgundy snails. Hence I didn’t know whether to cut off the tripe or leave it on. Having now chewed on the gritty tripe of Burgundy snails I can offer an educated recommendation that you cut off the gris. Just eat the muscle of the foot.]