All About Snails

In France, although the snail is an item on all good menus, Jean Cadart, snail lover and onetime snail merchant, discovered a serious lack: there was no up-to-date book on edible snails. The gap has now been filled by a book by Cadart himself. Les Escargots (Paul Lechevalier; 750 francs) covers the subject with airtight completeness.

Though Author Cadart is concerned professionally with snails as food, he seems to regard them, even uncooked, with affection. His first chapter describes their slow, idyllic lives: how they emerge from the soil in spring after a few days of sunshine; how they cruise through the dewy dawn, laying down roads of silvery slime, in search of tender herbage; how they explore the nearby world with their sensitive tentacles; how they glide over obstacles; how they retire into their shells when wind or heavy rain strikes their tender skins. "The snail is a peaceable creature," says Cadart. "Excesses of nature do not please him." Patiently in his shell he waits until trouble is over. "What animal seems more free and happy than the escargot?"

But Alas! says Cadart, life is not so easy. The peaceable snail has a host of enemies: the weather, rats, turtles, crows, foxes, ducks, parasitic insects that lay eggs in its flesh, and picnickers who abandon bits of canned heat, which is death to snails. When Cadart has described all the troubles of les escargots, he is close to tears.

For Dessert and Lent. The snail, surviving all attacks, has interested man since earliest times. Cadart tells of Stone Age people who lived almost exclusively on snails. The Greeks loved snails both gastronomically and scientifically. Aristotle described them in detail; Pliny told how the Romans cultivated them for food. In Roman Gaul, snails were served as dessert, and in medieval Europe they were raised by convents and monasteries as canonical food for Lent.

Having established snails in cultural perspective, Cadart goes into more detail about their anatomy and their slippery lives. As mollusks risen from the sea and hardly adapted to the land, they are dependent on humidity. They prefer to travel and graze only when light rain is falling or when the ground is wet with dew. The rest of the time they sleep safely shut in their shells, sometimes sealed into them with a membrane of dried mucus. Their senses of touch and smell are acute, but the little eyes on the ends of their tentacles are not efficient; they must be moved very close to an object before the snail really sees it.

The locomotion of the snail is explained in detail. The long flat "foot" lays down a roadway of sticky mucus; then parts of the foot grip the ground while other parts move forward. When the snail is crawling on glass, the action of its foot can be seen as a series of slow waves. The speed averages 2 1/2 in. per minute, and the snail makes about 35 foot-waves to cover this distance. The tractive force is considerable. A snail can lift five times its weight up a vertical surface, and on the horizontal it can pull a toy wagon loaded with 200 times its weight. If 25 snails could be induced to crawl in the same direction at the same time, they could pull the weight of a good-sized man.

When snails mate, they turn blue in the face, and the operation takes so long that if it starts when rain is falling it may not be completed until hot sunshine endangers the lives of both snails. But the effort is notably productive. Since snails are hermaphrodites, each of the participants becomes both a father and a mother. They lay their eggs (more than one-third of their total weight) in small hollows dug in loose soil. This slow-motion action may take about two days.

A Door of Lime. Snails may live five years, but they reach maturity in a year. When autumn comes, it brings the crisis of their lives: they must prepare for the winter by burying themselves in the soil and secreting a door of lime to cover the opening of their shell. Only strong and healthy snails completely accomplish this process. Those that omit any detail die during the winter.

The subject of the snail's bouchage (stopping up) is dear to the professional heart of Author Cadart. Before snails hibernate, their flesh is full of small, hard particles of lime that make them less desirable in the eyes of gourmets. The lime is a reserve for building the winter door, so when a snail is dug from his refuge, his flesh is in top condition, free of shelly sand.

On this central fact is built the snail merchandising profession. Cadart tells how snails are collected in the wild or raised in breeding establishments. In summer they are placed in "parks" (which date back to Roman times) and provided with shade and moisture. They are fed cabbage or other nourishing food and given loose soil to dig in. The idea is to bring them to bouchage in top condition. Fat and healthy, they dig their nests and seal themselves in for the winter. Then the snail breeders dig them up and ship them to buyers. When snails are broiled, the mucus in which they are sealed reaches the boiling point. Then the snails "sing," says Cadart. Enough snails sang their death songs in France during 1952 to reach in a slowly crawling line all the way around the earth.

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