Word: snails
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...France, although the snail is an item on all good menus, Jean Cadart, snail lover and onetime snail merchant, discovered a serious lack: there was no up-to-date book on edible snails. The gap has now been filled by a book by Cadart himself. Les Escargots (Paul Lechevalier; 750 francs) covers the subject with airtight completeness...
Though Author Cadart is concerned professionally with snails as food, he seems to regard them, even uncooked, with affection. His first chapter describes their slow, idyllic lives: how they emerge from the soil in spring after a few days of sunshine; how they cruise through the dewy dawn, laying down roads of silvery slime, in search of tender herbage; how they explore the nearby world with their sensitive tentacles; how they glide over obstacles; how they retire into their shells when wind or heavy rain strikes their tender skins. "The snail is a peaceable creature," says Cadart. "Excesses of nature...
...Alas! says Cadart, life is not so easy. The peaceable snail has a host of enemies: the weather, rats, turtles, crows, foxes, ducks, parasitic insects that lay eggs in its flesh, and picnickers who abandon bits of canned heat, which is death to snails. When Cadart has described all the troubles of les escargots, he is close to tears...
...Dessert and Lent. The snail, surviving all attacks, has interested man since earliest times. Cadart tells of Stone Age people who lived almost exclusively on snails. The Greeks loved snails both gastronomically and scientifically. Aristotle described them in detail; Pliny told how the Romans cultivated them for food. In Roman Gaul, snails were served as dessert, and in medieval Europe they were raised by convents and monasteries as canonical food for Lent...
Having established snails in cultural perspective, Cadart goes into more detail about their anatomy and their slippery lives. As mollusks risen from the sea and hardly adapted to the land, they are dependent on humidity. They prefer to travel and graze only when light rain is falling or when the ground is wet with dew. The rest of the time they sleep safely shut in their shells, sometimes sealed into them with a membrane of dried mucus. Their senses of touch and smell are acute, but the little eyes on the ends of their tentacles are not efficient; they must...