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(No. 2) (Take fine Bourgogne snails)
Take fine Bourgogne snails; disgorge them well by salt for two or three days, wash several times in cold water, strain, and put them to stew, covering with water, add a bouquet, cloves and whole pepper tied in a cloth, and enough salt; cook them until they fall from their shells, and empty, and clip the tails; next clean shells thoroughly. Mix butter, shallots, parsley, and chervil together, chopping very fine; put it in bowl with equal quantity of fresh bread crumbs, and a small glass of white wine. Season this with salt and pepper, and knead thoroughly. Put a little of this mixture into each shell, put back the snails, and place another layer of the mixture on top. Put into the oven until brown, not over four minutes, and serve on folded napkin.
This is escargots \full, form, starting with live snails rather than a tin. Almost everything in it still works; the two places to pay attention are the purging and the very short time in the oven.
- Live snails are optional nowTinned Helix pomatia or H. lucorum, already purged and cooked, are sold packed in brine with a bag of empty shells, and they pick up the recipe at the buttering stage. A tin of two dozen large snails serves four as a first course, six snails each.
- If you do start liveIf you do start live — Buy farmed snails from a supplier, never gathered ones; wild snails may have fed on treated plants or garden baits. The salt and the two or three days without food together clear the snails out, and the repeated cold rinses are not optional — the mucus has to be gone before they go in the pot.
- "Clip the tails"After the snails are pulled from their shells, the dark spiral tip is cut away. That is the hepatopancreas and it is bitter; the firm grey-white body is what goes back into the shell.
- BouquetBouquet — A bouquet garni: thyme, bay and parsley stalks tied with string. The cloves and peppercorns are tied separately in cloth so they can be lifted out whole. Simmer, do not boil hard, until the meat is tender — usually an hour and a half or more.
- ShellsBoil the emptied shells ten minutes in water with a spoonful of baking soda, then dry them. Reused shells that have not been scoured will taste of the last batch.
- The snail butter, in proportionsThe snail butter, in proportions — The original gives none. For two dozen snails: 8 oz softened butter, 4 shallots, a small handful of parsley, a smaller one of chervil, all chopped to a paste, then fresh crumbs to roughly the same bulk as the butter, as the original directs (about 2 oz by weight), and the "small glass" of white wine — probably about 1/4 cup. Mash it until it is a single stiff paste; loose butter runs straight out of the shell.
- Oven heatNothing here needs cooking, only browning and melting, so use a hot oven, 450F, or a broiler. Four minutes is right; longer and the snails tighten to rubber and the butter separates and pours off.
- Keeping them uprightKeeping them upright — A dimpled escargot dish, or a bed of coarse salt in a shallow pan, holds the shells mouth-up. The folded napkin in the original is most likely what the hot dish is set on at table.
Snails cooked in butter with shallot, parsley and garlic are associated above all with Burgundy, where the vineyard snail Helix pomatia — the "Bourgogne" of this recipe — was gathered off the vines and long treated as a country food before Parisian restaurants of the nineteenth century made it a luxury course. The addition of breadcrumbs to the butter, as here, appears in a number of period recipes and helps the stuffing hold its shape in the shell; classical beurre d'escargot leaves them out. That the entry sits in a chapter headed Oysters and Shellfish may reflect no more than that snails were unfamiliar and were filed with the other things served in a shell on a folded napkin; the long instructions for purging and cleaning suggest the compiler did not expect readers to have seen it done.