No. 1014

Edible Snails, Bordelaise and Saintonge

Escargots a la Bordelaise et a la Saintonge

Bordelaise.—Cook the snails as explained in No. 1013; fry in butter some onions, carrots and celery root; cut in three-eights of an inch squares, sprinkle over some flour, and moisten with white wine and fish stock (No. 195), add the cooked snails without the shells, and when hot, thicken with kneaded butter and finish with fine herbs and lemon juice.

A la Saintonge.—(Small snails.) After they are cooked as above, put them back into their shells, and fry them in butter, shells and all, adding a crushed and chopped clove of garlic, salt and pepper; moisten with white wine, thicken with an allemande sauce (No. 407), bread-crumbs, butter and parsley.

← No. 1013 Edible Snails, to Prepare Edible Snails No. 1015 Edible Snails a la Bourguignonne →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer writes for a professional brigade with stock pots already on the stove, so the two variations here are shorthand rather than full recipes. The quantities are left entirely to the cook; what follows fills in the gaps.

Start with prepared snailsBoth versions begin "cook the snails as explained in No. 1013," the book's separate entry for preparing edible snails, which the cook is expected to have followed first. Canned Helix pomatia or Helix lucorum, drained and rinsed, is the ordinary modern substitute. Do not use snails gathered from a garden or roadside: they need long purging and may have fed on molluscicide bait.
The cross-referenced saucesNo. 195 is the book's fish stock. No. 407, allemande, is a velouté finished with an egg-yolk liaison and lemon; a well-reduced chicken velouté will stand in. Neither is difficult, but you must have them before you begin, since the snails go together in minutes.
Vegetables in three-eighths-inch diceJust under 1 cm, a small dice rather than a fine brunoise. Sweat the onion, carrot and celery root in butter until tender but not coloured before the flour goes in.
Kneaded butterBeurre mani , worked cold into a smooth paste, equal weights butter and flour. Whisk it in off a hard boil in small pieces and let the sauce come back to a bare simmer to cook out the raw flour taste. It is a finishing thickener, on top of the flour already sprinkled over the vegetables, so add it a little at a time.
"Fine herbs"Fines herbes in this period means chopped parsley with some combination of chervil, tarragon and chives, added at the last moment so they stay green. Parsley alone is acceptable.
Frying the shells in the Saintonge versionThe snails go back into their shells and the whole thing is tossed in butter, so the shells must be scrubbed and dried first. Use a wide pan over moderate heat and shake rather than stir; the point is to heat the shells through so the butter and garlic run into them, not to brown anything.
GarlicThe recipe calls for a single crushed and chopped clove, though it gives no yield to measure that against; cooks who want a more pronounced garlic note will want more.
Quantity and servingReckon a dozen snails per person as a first course, half that as part of a larger meal. The Bordelaise version is a ragout, served in a shallow dish or on toast; the Saintonge version comes to the table in the shells with the pan butter poured over and breadcrumbs scattered on top.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer, chef of Delmonico's, included snail preparations in The Epicurean (1894) at a time when few Americans ate them at all. Both names here are regional: Bordelaise for Bordeaux, where the snail is traditionally cooked with a wine-moistened vegetable base rather than the garlic butter of Burgundy; Saintonge for the old province north of the Gironde, around Saintes, whose cagouilles gave the locals their nickname of cagouillards and are still eaten small, in the shell, with garlic and white wine. The distinction Ranhofer draws is real and still holds in France: Burgundy stuffs the shell with butter, the southwest builds a sauce. That he directs the reader to two other numbered entries for the stock and the allemande is characteristic of the book, which is less a collection of recipes than a cross-indexed manual for a kitchen where the foundation sauces were already made each morning.