h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I thought I'd post this here better than there; I don't want to scare squeamish people away Here is what we used to do with (or to) snails:

We keep them in flower pots (one on top of the other, so that they couldn't escape), without food, for two weeks or so. That's to, um, empty them. Then we put them in salty water to lose their drool stuff and find out which ones were still alive. Then we boil them, take them out of their shell, and you can cook them in a number of more or less easy ways (I think my father put them in some sort of a garlic stew, so it was really easy and quite nice).

I never tried to prepare them with the garlic butter in the shell as they do in restaurants, so I don't know how hard that would be. In any case, it would mean you can make as many as you like instead of having too few!

(As for frog legs, I can't remember when I ate them last time - long, long ago. I thing you'd just fry them in the pan. Tastes a bit like chicken wings, if I remember well.)

>I don't want to scare squeamish people away< I think I do that all the time...

Yes I read about the salting thing for getting rid of mucus, and the starving bit. I know that's traditional in France. But it's said to be unneccessary technically. So they say. But that may just be appealing to softie anglo saxons...

I read a funny thing, that you can go into any French food shop and see tins and tins of snails on display, but they actually sell very few...

It was quite strange for me when I was collecting them and cleaning them out every evening; I found it difficult to disengage from that memory when I was actually eating them.. It's so much easier when they are just already prepared and presented to you. But that might be because it's not a tradition we grow up with here, ie preparing and eating wild snails I've eaten fish in the past I've caught, like brown trout; killing, gutting and preparing them, only seemed to add to the pleasure of eating *them*.

I think that snails are increasingly less popular in France. The ick factor is taking over, seemingly. What a shame! (Oh, I went to Paris for the week and and managed to eat steak tartare, snails *and* frog legs!)

I can imagine that gutting and cleaning fish you freshly caught might add to the eating experience (on a purely theoretical level - I never really did it myself). Probably it gets better in time, and also if you start early in life. Freshly caught snails is not the same. For one thing, it is much less of an accomplishment

See, I'm not the only typical English eccentric. This woman turned her bedroom into a snail farm.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/kent/7568138.stm

From above link,

"They are quite endearing - they don't bite, or smell unpleasant or make a lot of noise and they are really quite friendly....'

How English is that statement? She makes them sound like nice convenient pets..

Well, I have to agree with her, apart from the 'friendly' bit which I cannot really judge. Quite endearing indeed