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Snails, Bourguignonne
Procure five dozen large, gray French snails, break chalk which holds them in shells, and place in a vessel. Add a handful salt and gill vinegar, turn well in seasoning for five minutes, then let them disgorge for an hour, turning once in a while. Wash in plenty cold water, lift up, place in a saucepan, pour in cold water enough to cover, season with a teaspoon salt, cover pan and let boil for ten minutes. Drain on a colander, then with a needle pick them out from shells, pull off tails, place in a small earthen pot, add a small carrot cut in quarters and an onion with a clove stuck in it. Tie in a bunch tow branches parsley, a branch chervil, small branch celery, small sprig thyme, bay leaf, and add to snails with a bean garlic. Pour in just enough white wine to nearly cover snails, a pint broth, season with heaping teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, cover pan, boil on fire for five minutes, set in oven for two hours, remove, lay pan on table and let slightly cool off. Thoroughly clean shells and wipe dry, place a snail in each shell and arrange in a baking dish with open side up. Strain snail broth through cheesecloth into a bowl, and with teaspoon pour a very little broth into each shell. Fill them up with Bourguignonne butter, set in oven for eight minutes, remove and serve in same dish with two-tong forks or oyster forks.
A full escargot preparation from the shell up, written when live snails were bought by the dozen from a French grocer. The hinge is the two-hour braise: the snails must be tender before they go back into the shells, because the final eight minutes in the oven is only to melt the butter and heat it through.
- Sourcing the snailsFive dozen live petit-gris or Helix pomatia are a specialist order today; most cooks buy canned Burgundy snails with a bag of cleaned shells, which arrive already purged and cooked and can go straight into the wine braise. Do not gather garden snails: wild snails can carry rat lungworm and may have fed on treated or toxic plants, and Helix pomatia is legally protected in parts of Europe.
- The chalk sealThe "chalk which holds them in shells" is the epiphragm, the calcified lid a dormant snail secretes over its opening. Breaking it wakes the animal so it will purge with the salt and vinegar.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces.
- "A bean garlic" and "tow branches"A bean of garlic is a single clove; "tow branches parsley" is a typesetter's slip for two sprigs. The onion stuck with a clove, carrot and tied herbs are a standard court-bouillon garnish and are discarded with the strained broth.
- Oven temperature for the braiseThe book gives no temperature. The two-hour oven stage is a slow braise, covered, with the liquid barely moving; something in the region of 300-325F suits that. The final eight minutes, only long enough to melt the butter and heat the snail through, wants a hot oven.
- The earthen potAny small heavy covered pot that goes from burner to oven — an enamelled cast-iron cocotte or a lidded Dutch oven. It should be just big enough that a pint of broth and the wine nearly cover the snails.
- Bourguignonne butterNot given on this page: butter creamed with finely chopped garlic, shallot and parsley, salt and pepper, sometimes a little ground almond or breadcrumb to help it hold. Allow roughly a pound of butter for five dozen shells, and chill it firm so it can be packed in rather than poured.
- Don't overfill with broth"A very little broth" means a scant teaspoon or less. Too much and the butter floats out and burns on the dish instead of basting the snail.
- Yield and serviceFive dozen is a dozen each for five as a first course. Set the shells opening-up in a dimpled escargot dish or on a bed of coarse salt so they cannot tip, and serve with bread — the garlic butter in the bottom of the shell is the point of the dish.
Snails cooked à la bourguignonne — pulled from the shell, simmered in white wine and aromatics, then returned to the shell under a plug of garlic-parsley butter — are firmly associated with Burgundy, where the large vineyard snail Helix pomatia is still called the Burgundy snail. The preparation is generally traced to Parisian restaurant cooking of the nineteenth century, when escargots moved from country food to something served with narrow two-tined forks, which this recipe assumes the household owns, offering oyster forks as the alternative. Its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book is part of the point: snails were reliable shorthand for French sophistication, and a reader's table could be shown to be cosmopolitan. The careful instructions on breaking the epiphragm and purging with salt and vinegar tell you the author expected live snails, sold by the dozen at a city grocer's, rather than the tins that dominate the trade now.