The Snail

Snails are molluscs or gastropods and they have only one foot. In my house in the country I had not only mice but snails perambulating around. Of course, with only one foot one can’t really say they walk. They creep or crawl. Maybe even slither. Which they do of course.  There have even been snail races. Authors like Penelope Lively wrote on ammonites, which are ancient relatives of our snails, and snail and shell fossils can be found in the sandy banks along the road leading out of Orvieto, bearing witness to the sea that once covered the valley.

Irises with their silky violet and golden blossoms were flaunting their beauty on my balcony. The earlier ones had been blue. (foto iris) Problem was that the blossoms as well as the spikey leaves appealed to the snails. By waiting until dark, I could take a flashlight and go outside and pluck the snails off the leaves and flowers, and put them into a container, from which they would immediately start to climb out unless I kept them securely imprisoned under a heavy lid. At the end of the evening I might have as many as 40 of the little critters ready to be transported elsewhere.  So, each morning I would traipse down to the road and release them. However, I soon found that they had no intention of staying on the other side of the road and had to catch them again as they made their way back up the slope to my balcony. I put red nail polish marks on a few so I could track them and, sure enough, the ones I had moved were soon on their way back to what, I suppose, they considered their home. The next day I took the container and the snails a bit further away, down to the bottom of the valley, where I left them in the Etruscan dig.

While snails would feast on my irises, we would sometimes also feast on them. After a rain, you would find people wandering along the stone walls on either side the road leading out of the village, harvesting tomorrow’s dinner. Or at least that of the day after.

My husband was quite fond of snails as his main course and once he had enough, they would be relegated to the cellar and purged for a day or two.  Despite all our efforts to make sure the pail was tightly covered, once the lid fell off during the night, and the snails soon made their way into every corner of the cellar. You have no idea how skillful they are at escaping.

Once cooked, It was not a simple matter to pull the meat out of the snail shell. Or perhaps I should call them by their more elegant French name, escargot? I can only suppose that France, or at least the Renaissance, was when small picks, sometimes in silver, were invented for that purpose. You can now purchase sets on the web, if you intend to surprise your friends with an unusual aperitif.

When I was in Brussels, I noted that large snails or escargots cooked in cauldrons of herby broth were being offered to passersby in all the piazzas. I bravely decided to try one of these big snails or escargots. After all, at Easter I also ate coratella, the intestines of a lamb simmered in wine, and in Florence I had tried tripe sandwiches, also sold in the market square, and actually quite tasty.  I figured I could be courageous enough to eat a snail. They weren’t all that bad, but it was not my favorite dish.

A snail can also be cute unless it is eating your flowers. There is something fascinating about that perfect geometric spiral. Not sure how I happened on a book with the unlikely title, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, written in 2010 by Elisabeth Tova Bailey. She was bedridden and could not even get up by herself.  A friend brought her a pot of violets, and as she was lying in her bed she heard a strange sound and discovered that it was a small snail in the pot chewing away on a leaf. Observing the life of this creature, which she then fed with lettuce leaves, gave her the courage to continue her struggle as she documented its life day by day and researched the history of snails (She eventually recovered.).

After reading of her love affair with the snail, and watching it reproduce, the question arises, can I ever eat another snail? Familiarity changes one’s approach to an animate creature but also to the world around us.