This is an extract from a short book I wrote some time ago. I have had various parts of it published in various places, but never the entire thing:
On Escargot
Arthur Day went through a phase of snail addiction – Raising them himself, like a true Roman decadent, on bay, wine, and a spicy chiffonnade. He naturally preferred the Burgundy snail, or Helix pomatia over its slightly more coarse cousin, the Petit-Gris, or Helix aspersa, but at first did not so much as consider the challenge of cultivating it. And, as far as he was concerned, the Gros-Gris, or Helix aspersa maxima, was absolutely out of the question, with its dark mantle and generally uncouth persona. This snail might do for the commercial growing houses and those counterfeit gourmets whose faces appear like peruked balls of suet on the TV screen, but for him it held no more charm than a Van Gough painting reproduced on a coffee mug.
As he applied his little trident to a plate of well-prepared escargots à la bourguignonne, he would dream of his service to the world: A new breed of snail, one with all the nicety of the Burgundy, but as easy to cultivate as the Gros-Gris. He set himself to heliciculture with an admirable vigour. One March, he personally went to France, to the forests around Brive, and captured two hundred prime specimens of the Burgundy. He flew them home in a series of specially prepared, climate-controlled boxes. He was up to the challenge. The snails were put in cages containing a beautiful, black soil he had trucked in from his brother’s ranch. He watched the creatures with great interest as they slithered over the moist dirt, feeling a strange kinship to their hermaphroditic state. By May he had two thousand five hundred delightful little Burgundies, each one as delicate as a dew drop and as precious as a jewel. These he put in a ten square meter greenhouse, within which grew rows of young lettuce, chicory and basil interspersed with finger bowls of a very raw Slovenian wine called Terrain. Read the rest of this entry »