Once a Week (magazine)/Series 1/Volume 3/A snail supper
A SNAIL SUPPER.
It was one cold night in December last, when the mercury was almost frozen in the bulb of the thermometer, and when only repeated applications of the mittened hand to the nose could save that valuable organ from the fate of an exposed carrot on a greengrocer’s stall, that I found myself in the company of my friend Wagstaff on the Boulevard Poissonnière, on our return from the Theatre of the Porte St. Martin, whither some novelty had tempted us to spend the evening. There is nothing like cold to stimulate the appetite, unless it may be a drama of horrors and a rattling farce afterwards. Sorrow and mirth are both exhaustive, and there is something in the very atmosphere of a theatre that disposes the gastric juice to flow into the stomach. In England we have known a person to commence an attack on a packet of ham-sandwiches as soon as the curtain was raised,—to feed through a five-act tragedy, and to retire, when the curtain was dropped, unsatisfied by additional apples, oranges, and ginger-beer.
By one of those instincts which Edgar Poe attributes to one of his characters, I knew what my friend Wagstaff’s thoughts were running upon. He was thinking of the Adelphi, the Olympic, and a lobster supper. Not that he is either a fast man or a gourmand, by any means; but he has lived long enough to associate the stomach of the brain with the stomach lodged under the ribs, and is alive to the fact that, when the former is full the latter is fasting. Of a sudden I felt that the current of his thoughts had entered a particular channel, but all my prescience did not prepare me for the proposition he placed before me suddenly:
“What say you to a snail supper?”
“With all my heart,” I replied; which, on my part, was a piece of unsophisticated bounce, as my heart rather heaved at the notion; but my vanity of knowingness would not allow me to appear ignorant, and I should have made the same answer, probably, had he proposed a dish of grilled Salamander.
“Here we are, then, at the Faubourg St. Martin, and no one serves the dainty dish better than the rotisseur on the left.”
We entered; he boldly and as one knowing the world and its contents; I timidly, as one on the point of making a doubtful experiment in gastronomies.
“A la poulette, or à la bourguignonne, shall it be?” inquired Wagstaff of me.
“By all means à la poulette,” I answered. The gods help me; I did not know the drift of the question, but the one word was easier to pronounce than the other.
The dish was ordered. There was some preliminary deglutition, and I did not dislike the Chablis.
Not long had I enjoyed the prologue of the feast, which was intelligible enough, especially the fancy roll of bread, when the waiter placed the dishes before us.
“Now settle to!” said Wagstaff, in a manner which, then and there, I thought especially cold-blooded.
“Capital; now for it!” I rejoined, as one to whom the dish was perfectly familiar; but I played with my fork and made various little delays, in order to see how Wagstaff commenced his snail supper. Certainly the dish looked very tempting. Wagstaff went to work with what is termed a hearty good will. I watched him for a few seconds. He evidently enjoyed, and no doubt with a heart grateful to Providence, the dainty placed before him. He did not turn black in the face, his hand did not tremble from the effects of a limaceous poison; his eye perhaps was a little brighter; but then that might be owing to the Chablis. I took heart of grace, and for the first time in my life a limace found its way into my stomach.
“Capital!” said Wagstaff, wiping his moustache, “done to the millimètre of a turn.”
“Excellent!” I added, hypocritically.
Mouthful number one had done me no harm, and I used my fork bravely to consign another snail into the human laboratory. Strange to tell I enjoyed the repast, and when my plate was empty, felt myself in the condition of one Oliver, wishing for more.
He must have been a man in desperate plight who first swallowed an oyster—no doubt a shipwrecked mariner on a desert island, who made the bold experiment in ostraphagy before attempting anthropophagy on the person of the black cook or cabin-boy who had been wrecked along with him. But a more desperate man must have been he who first swallowed a snail,—a frozen-out gardener, perhaps.
“Strange are the prejudices in food!” remarked Wagstaff, and thereupon he commenced an oral disquisition on the merits of mule-flesh, edible birds’ nests, hedgehogs, guinea-pigs and toadstools. “How we suffer through our ignorance and unreasonable dislike,” he continued. “How often has the world proclaimed famine in the very presence of dainty abundance! Locusts, for instance. They destroy square leagues of herbage; but they remain famous morsels for distressed agriculturists; and, dipped in wild honey, are luscious. Snails prey on our vines and cabbages. Why should we not prey upon the snail? Now you have been eating escargots. You don’t find them amiss, do you?”
“Never better fare,” I assented.
“Escargot is his French name; naturalists call him Helix pomatia, and now,” pursued Wagstaff, pouring out another tumbler of Chablis, and warming with his subject, “and now I shall tell you all about him, over a cigar and demi-tasse at the next café.”
The amount of Wagstaff’s conchological information respecting the escargot, I sum up in what follows:
The escargot feeds principally upon the vine, and it is those only which feed upon this plant which are brought to market. The animal, however has a whim occasionally, and feeds upon hemlock, which does not disagree with it, but which renders it prudent to place him in quarantine before he is admitted into the kitchen. The escargots when gathered are put into casks, and these are put into a cool place, where they fast two months at least, to cleanse themselves before they are brought to market. In the Halles, at the commencement of the season, heaps of them may be seen upon the stalls, all alive, gliding over one another, and sometimes falling inadvertently upon the claws of craw-fish and lobsters, when they find it judicious to retreat into the spiral of their shells. The vine-growers have a double interest in the escargot. They would rather he did not make selection of this plant for his meals, which he injures, but since Nature will have it so, they avenge themselves on the animal, and capture them in hosts to send to market. For many years the escargot has been an article of commerce for food. In former times it was only herbalists and druggists who dealt in snails, or escargots. The snail pounded in a mortar, and then boiled with milk, was regarded as a remedy in phthisical diseases. Now, as already said, the escargot has its place in the Halles, along with craw-fish and fresh-water fish, and there are few restaurateurs upon whose bill of fare they do not figure. In 1854, the consumption of this mollusc was valued at half a million francs in Paris. The consumption since then has considerably augmented. In the market of Dijon there is sold, monthly, 6000 francs’ worth of escargots, at the rate of 1f 50c. the hundred.
Dr. Ebrard has calculated that these helices, each of which weighs about 20 to 22 grammes (two-thirds of an ounce), lose in cooking some aqueous elements, and contain only, deprived of the shell, about ten grammes (or rather better than a quarter of an ounce) of alimentary substance. The shell weighs from four to four and a-half grammes. It follows that the escargots sold in the Dijon market represent more than 16,000 lbs. weight of alimentary food, equivalent to that furnished by the flesh of 150 ordinary calves.
In Algiers may be seen in the markets enormous heaps of these snails, which are sold by the bushel and the hundred, and which are consumed chiefly by the Spaniards and the Provençals. In several countries the cultivators eat no other food than escargots, which is considered the contrary of fattening. Fisher states that this particularity has given rise, near Bordeaux, to a singular custom. Every Ash-Wednesday, the people go out to the commune of Canderan to eat escargots, to terminate the Carnival gaily, and have a foretaste of Lent. Formerly the town of Ulm, famous for its escargotières, furnished annually more than ten millions of vine escargots, to be consumed during Lent in the monasteries of Austria. Pliny informs us, that escargots formed a dainty dish to the inhabitants of Rome. We know to what pitch the culinary art rose amongst the conquerors of the world. We know how they relished the oysters of Albion. Apicius, in his treatise on cookery, mentions no less than three principal sauces for snails, one of which, composed of sweet herbs, milk, butter, cheese, boiled wine, flour, and saffron, deserves to be mentioned.
In Paris, at the present day, we are not quite so fastidious. We eat them in general cooked on the gridiron or in the oven. Escargots à la poulette, of which I have partaken on the sly, and licked my lips after, since my memorable introduction to a snail supper by Wagstaff, are thus prepared:
It is premised that the escargots have been fasting for at least two months, to rid themselves of impurities. We boil them in a pint of water, with wood-ashes and salt, until they can be drawn easily out of the shell. To proceed to this operation they are placed in fresh water, and as fast as they are untwined from the shell they are thrown into tepid water. When we have the required number together, we boil them for ten minutes, and then strain them. Next, we place them in a saucepan, with a piece of butter, and toss them well about, and afterwards add a tablespoonful of flour, and moisten them with half white-wine and half beef-soup, not forgetting to flavour the cookery with a judicious proportion of sweet herbs. In this state they are allowed to stew for two hours longer, and then they are tender; and then would the sight of them bring water into the mouth of a Roman Emperor, especially when thickened with the yolk of eggs, and farther flavoured with citron and verjuice. In Paris they may be bought all ready for cooking at a sou a piece. The doctors consider the escargot, properly cooked, very nutritious and digestible; but care must be had that they have been properly purged, for, as already stated, the escargot takes a fancy to feed sometimes on the hemlock plant, and sometimes on belladonna; and cases of poisoning have been known through ignorance of this fact, and cooking them too soon after being gathered.
“But,” said Wagstaff, in conclusion, “if the escargot has its merits as an aliment, it has its demerits in another respect. It causes great damage to the vine crop. In 1856 the escargot committed more ravages than oïdium among the vines of Charente Inférieure. Up to the present time, there is no other way of getting rid of the escargot, as a scourge, than by catching him alive with the hand during or after the warm rains of spring. Don’t squash him under your foot. Put him into a cask, and at the end of a term you will know how to love your enemy, first killing him with kindness.”
By this time Wagstaff had finished his cigar. I had finished my second demi-tasse, and (why need I blush to tell it, as almost every one in a café does the same?) pocketed the remaining lumps of sugar brought with the tray. Midnight had sounded at various intervals during twenty minutes, as the manner is with the clocks of Paris; and, thanking Wagstaff for his snail-supper and discourse on conchology, varied with hints on cookery, I bade him good night near the Madeleine, and retired to my den in the seventh floor of the Rue du Rocher.