“That would be good to eat,” my neighbour and principal source of local lore, Jacques, said as a particularly fine escargot de Bourgogne slimed its way across my garden.
It turns out he goes snail-hunting from time to time, armed with a special ring to make sure he isn’t breaking the ban on taking molluscs under a certain size.
It’s hard to believe in my garden on a damp evening, but some snails are at risk of disappearance, in particular the most culinarily prized snail, helix pomatia – the kind Jacques was admiring – partly due to the voracity of French gourmets but principally because of pesticides and urban sprawl gobbling up its natural habitat.
So there are French and European rules protecting them.
Since 1979 collecting them has been illegal in France from 1 April to 30 June – their mating season, which, like everything else to do with snails, takes some time. Unfortunately, the measure was not backed up by the establishment of a snail inspectorate, so it is unclear how effective it has been. In 2016 the Paris Natural History Museum appealed to gardeners to take part in a snail census. It appears to have been paused and relaunched on more than one occasion since.
Snacking on snails in the provinces
Beside a road near the Jura hamlet of Domblans is a small field covered in nets. It’s a snail farm and you can buy its produce, to take away or enjoy sur place with a glass of white wine, at a nearby market during the sunny months.
There were no fewer than three stalls selling snails at Sellières’ annual fête de la pomme this year and frozen ones are available, ready to cook, at the local supermarket.
Like frogs’ legs, snails seem to be more popular here than in Paris. That was not always the case. In 1900, 500 snail merchants petitioned the Paris city council for more space in the Les Halles markets (before municipal vandals destroyed Baltard’s beautiful structures), pointing out that they sold 1,200,000 kilogrammes a year. Old photos show a number of restaurants in the area leading with their snail offer, advertised with seductive snail statues, one of which still survives, and catchy slogans like “Venez gouter mes limaces”.
The Burgundy city of Dijon, 68 km up the road from here, was one of the main suppliers with one company selling three million snails a year.
Demand may have declined but there are still at least 20 farms in this region. It’s not exactly a capital-intensive business, I suppose, given the limited amount of space and personnel needed, but it’s apparently not easy to domesticate helix pomatia, which is the biggest French variety and sports a handsome cream or pale brown shell,so other less glamorous species are more widely available for sale – the petit-gris (helix aspersa aspersa), the gros-gris (helix aspersa maxima) and the helix lucorum, which doesn’t have a French name and is imported from Turkey and the Balkans.
It turns out that we should all be eating snails. Their meat is a source of protein, low in calories and fats, and rich in organic nutrients such as magnesium, iron and selenium, although I’m not sure how many you have to eat a day to get the full benefit.
The classic French recipe is à la bourguignonne, cooked in butter, parsley and garlic and served sizzling hot in the shell to be extracted with the aid of specially designed tongs and a little fork. Jacques prefers them cooked straight on a hot slate, “like the gipsies”.
“It keeps their earthy taste,” he says.
Remember to purge your snails
Before eating them, you must purge your snails by keeping them for several days in straw and feeding them flour, so that any toxins they may have consumed are evacuated. It also used to be common to deslime them by immersing them in salt for about an hour.
Chef Daniel Zenner says his father used to do this, “you could hear them oozing”, but, quite apart from how the snails might feel about the process, he finds it makes them lose flavour and become tough. After they have had their week in detox, he keeps them in the cold for at least a week, then boils them, takes them out of their shells and puts them in jars with their stock.
“With time their flavour is enriched,” he says.
You don’t have to eat your snails à la bourguignonne. Other French recipes include in pastry, in salad, à la franc-comtoise (with cheese, mushrooms and sausage, although I have never seen this around here) à la Provençale, aka cargolade catalane, grilled in their shells with herbs and served with aïoli.
From Cro-magnons to the tsars
Who eats snails? Just about everybody except the English-speaking peoples, according to the experts, although I’m not sure that they are equally highly regarded everywhere.
In many countries they’re seen as poor people’s food but the Italians and the Spanish are pretty enthusiastic.
“My husband loves them,” Concha, our Spanish neighbour, told us when we found her collecting them in the courtyard where we lived in Champigny. Gourmet detective Pepe Carvalho prepares a particularly exciting rabbit with snails and chilli in Manuel Vasquez Montalban’s El balneario (The Spa). Feel free to post other recipes in comments.
Archaeologists have found evidence that humans were eating land snails 20,000 years ago. A 2014 dig in Spain uncovered 1,500 shells at a site inhabited by Cro-magnons, who appear to have raised them for consumption (they seem to have discounted the possibility that it was a race course).
The earliest debris has been found in the Mediterranean region but remains have been found in the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Snails as a feature of fine dining appear date back to the Roman era, when a certain Quintus Fulvius Lippinus, started farming them. He’s known as the “father of heliciculture”, which seems a bit unfair on those Iberian Cro-magnons. When the Romans invaded Gaul, they were delighted to find that snails who lived in vineyards or hopfields were especially tasty, an opinion that some modern French chefs still share.
After being considered food for peasants for centuries, they found their place in French gastronomy in the 19th century, supposedly when the chef Antoine Carême had nothing else to hand to feed Tsar Alexander I and whipped up what is now known as the Bourgignonne sauce to make them fancy. His Majesty was apparently impressed and that was enough to convince the aspirational bourgeoisie to order them in restaurants. And now you can bung a pack in your freezer. That’s progress for you!
Fun facts about snails:
- Most species are hermaphrodites (As a nature studies-keen child I told my grandmother this. Looking back, I think that must have been quite embarrassing for her, not the sort of thing her generation discussed);
- They have sperm banks in their bodies, ensuring that several different individuals’ sperm fertilise their eggs (I didn’t know this, so my grannie was spared some blushes);
- Pre-intercourse courtship can last between two and 12 hours;
- They stab each other with a calcium spike called a love dart during the mating process (for more on the sex lives of snails click here;
- They hibernate, burying themselves underground and growing a calcium cover over the opening in their shells;
- They usually live five to seven years but can reach 30-years-old in captivity;
- Some snails “sing”, emitting a sort of fart that sounds like a kiss or a plaintive cry when caught;
- There are some 200,000 kinds of snail, terrestrial, fresh-water and marine, the latter including whelks, winkles, abalone and conch;
- Colonialists introduced giant African land snails to some islands to provide food, leading to significant damage to their ecosystems.
