The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1902-08-19
AMERICAN EPIcUREs ARE
EATING SNAlLS
Look Like Cellar MolIusk, But Re-
quire Much Preparation.


Snails are not eaten in France alone
In large quantities they are imported
into America, and at the Hotel Belle
vue, in Philadelphia; at the Waldorf
Astoria and MonquinS, in New York;
at the Richelieu, in Chicago, as we'll as
at many other fashionable restaurants
throughout the country, they are serv-
ed as an entree, to Frenchmen, to
Italians, and to many Americans. With
Americans, indeed, they bid fair to be-
come popular dish.
The Latin name of the edible snail
is helix pomatia, and the French name
is escargot. The creature is about two
inches long, gray, horned, and with a
convoluted, dark brown shell. In
America, usually, 1T is eaten roasted.
To prepare it, the cook first gets 1t
out of it's shell by boiling it. Then he
washes the shell, replaces the snail in
side and fills UP the opening or en-
trance with lump of escargot butter
of the size of a chestnut. (Escargot
butter, a highly seasoned, pale-green
compound, is made by churning cream,
watercress and garlic together, and
is only used in the cooking of snails.)
Over this butter, then, a little Par
meSan cheese is grated, and the snail,
with eight of his fellows, is laid on
the bed of salt in a porcelain dish.
The dish is put in a hot oven for ten
minutes, and it's contents are served
Immediately thereafter in the platter
in which they were cooked.
Nine snails make a portion, which
costs 81 or $1.25. They are served as
an entree, before the roast, and are
eaten with the escargot fork, a silver
instrument, about ten inches long, that
somewhat resembles a hoe in shape.
The fork is held in the right hand, and
the hot shell in the left; the snail,
curled up within, is dug out with the
hoelike instrument much as a nut is
dug out with a nutpick.
A roasted snail is of a light brown
color, a little soft cylinder an inch long.
1t tastes as it is with the appetiZing
escargot butter rather like a roasted
clam. 1t tastes, in fact, rather good.
But to the average American, famil-
lar with the snail that creeps slowly
along it's cellar wall, an unholy, horned
thing, erect in a little pool of slime,
the thought of snail eating is intolera-
bic. With the American gourmet, how
ever, it is another story.
The edible snail in France, the oscar
gots, differ in appearance in no wise
from the cellar snails of America; only
they are very carefully prepared for
the table.
They feed in the French vine coun-
try by millions on the vine leaves, and
children take them home and throw
them into casks that are set in cool,
shady places. Here they are kept,
without food, for two and sometimes
for three and four months, and salt is
sprinkled over them every fortnight.
The effect Of the salt is to destroy the
disgusting slime that they so plenti-
full exude; the salt "cures'' them, max
ing their flesh as clean and as firm as
the flesh of a crab or of a lobster. The
effect Of their long fast is to destroy
the risk of any poisonous quality in
them. For snails will often feed on
belladonna leaves, and cases have been
known where men, eating such snails
Immediately after their capture, have
died of belladonna poisoning. In
France, therefore, it is not until the
vine snails have been thoroughly
cleansed and purified by fasts and by
dry baths of salt that they are put
upon the market.
In the Tyrol there are innumerable
small neutrality-suspicious., foored
with mass, and channeled With-little
streams (for snails thrive best amid
moiSture), where the escargots are
reared. They are fed on cabbage leaves
and the little streams, at their en-
frances to and exits from the gardens,
are grated with the finest wire grating,
so that any snails that tumble into
the autumn the TyroIean snails retire
into their shells to hibernate, they are
packed away together in dark cellars,
and in the spring are shipped to mar
ket in wooden boxes lined with straw,
Snails have been for over 1000 years
delicacy abroad, as much a delicacy
as truff1es or as pate de foie gras. The
Romans ate them. Pliny says the Ro-
man mobiles preferred them to the Eng
fish oyster. And Varro says they were
raised on certain allotted farms upon
bran soaked in wine, food which gave
them a delicate flavor, and on which
they grew to immense size-to such a
size, indeed, wrote the veracious Var
no, that one snail shell would often be
big enough to hold ten quarts of LIQUOR.
AplcluS gives the sauce with which
the Roman mobiles liked them best-a
sauce of sweet herbs, milk butter,
cheese, wine, flour and saffron In
Italy to this day the snail is a popular
article of food.
1t is eaten in certain sections of
England. The glassworkers of New
castle have an annual snail feast in
the forest on the outskirts of the town.
and in the Worcestershire markets
snails are always to be bought during
the winter months. Robert May, in a
cookbook that was issued in London
in 1860, says that snails are very good
to eat. "Stew them," he bids, "in
claret, vinegar and spice, and serve
them on bread, with a minced egg
hard boiled, and with slices of lemon;
or fried in butter, with minced onions
they are Savory dish"
In the SnaiPs natural history vitality
is the dominant note This little crea-
ture is almost immortal. Chop off it's
tail and a new tail will grow on
Break its shell, and it will mend the
f-n0 It'd
(some naturaliStS Say), and in a little
while new head will appear. Fast
ing has no effect on it. Specimens,
thought to be dead, have been glued to
paSteboard, or mounted upon glass for
fifteen years, and on the accidental ap-
plication Of moist heat have come to
life again.
The snail lives a long time-thirty,
forty, even fifty years. It's slime
serves it, first, as a defense-for birds
that would otherwise eat it cannot toll
| crate this sticky, Silvery paste; second,
as weapon, for, exuded upon insects
and small creatures, it throws them
| into a helpless Stupor-seems, in fact,
| to hypnotic them.
The snail travels with it's house on
Its back. 1t moves with incredible
| slowness, it's horned head erect, it's
| neck arched like the neck of a swan;
| and from the sac in the corrugated
| disc or foot, on which it crawls, it vents
| Its slime as 1t goes. The slime smooths
| and makes easy it's path for it, as oil
smooths ships path over a troubled
| sea.
| The fashionable American restau-
rants that serve snails have them ship
| ped from Paris alive. But they may
also be bought, preserved in glass jars,
in many fashionable grocery stores.
| ASK the grocer for jar of snails, and
| he would hardly understand YOU but