Edible Snails

This is a preparation method rather than a finished dish — the step that stands between a live snail and any recipe calling for cooked snails. Oscar assumes a kitchen with a steady supplier and a cook who already knows what comes before and after.

• What the recipe leaves outBefore any of this, snails must be purged: kept in a covered, ventilated container without food for a week to ten days, or fed only flour, cornmeal or lettuce, so the gut empties. The recipe begins at the pot and says nothing about this stage, whether because it was assumed or because the snails arrived already fasted. Skipping the purge is a common cause of bitter, gritty results.
• Never gather your ownWild garden snails may have fed on slug bait, herbicide or ornamental plants, and in warm climates they can carry rat lungworm. Use snails from a food supplier, or buy them already cleaned and canned.
• Wood ashesHardwood ash in water makes a weak lye that helps strip the heavy mucus from the flesh, and the several changes of water that follow are there to rinse it out. Coarse salt with a little vinegar, worked through the snails and rinsed off, is a common modern substitute.
• The quarter of an hourFifteen minutes at a boil is a blanch, not the cooking; it firms the flesh so it will pull cleanly from the shell with a fork or a snail pick. Many modern recipes use a much shorter blanch of a few minutes, on the assumption that the snails will be simmered again before they are dressed.
• Trim after pickingOscar does not mention it, but many cooks pinch off the dark spiral tip — the hepatopancreas — along with the small black cap of the gut, on the grounds that it can taste bitter or gritty; other traditions keep it.
• The soak and the rubbingTwo or three hours in tepid water followed by hand-rubbing in several changes of cold water is what removes the last of the slime. Keep going until the water runs clear; if it still looks cloudy, the snails will taste muddy.
• The shellsScrubbing and drying is the minimum. If the shells are being reused for baking with garlic butter, boil them ten minutes in water with a spoonful of baking soda and dry them in a low oven, since they go back into the dish at high heat.
• QuantityReckon six shells per person for a first course, a dozen for a main. The recipe names no species; Escargots de Bourgogne (Helix pomatia) are the large ones, while petits-gris are smaller and need less blanching.