Comment by 3RTB297
19 hours ago
I know people don't want to hear it, but when cooked correctly, wild-caught African land snails are actually delicious. They do take some work to scrub the foot pad, and you want to cook them for a long time to both soften them up, and obviously to ensure there's no parasites left. But in a Ghanaian spinach soup - amazing.
I say wild caught, because farmed snails are fed wilted lettuce, and taste like wilted, rotten lettuce.
In the south of Spain we eat plenty of snails and they are delicious. Go to Cordoba in May (spring is snail season, in Sevilla and Huelva you'll also find them, but in Córdoba you even have kiosks that in season sell only that) and have some Caracoles with a beer. They're smaller than the French ones and are cooked in minty and gently spiced water. Perfect snack with a very cold beer. As a proper dish or tapa we also eat escargot-like ones (Cabrillas) in a spicy tomato sauce. Also delicious.
Once or twice I’ve enjoyed snails flushed/fed up on green herbs and parsley. They effectively come pre-seasoned. The ones I’ve encountered have been smallish.
I understood it to be more of a finishing feed than a long-term dietary commitment on the part of the snail farmer, but both places I attended have since gone out of business. So maybe the economics are in fact against it…
Good flavor I can buy, but the last time I tried snails it was the texture that had me gagging.
To be honest most of us French only love it for the garlic butter we serve them with.
That's kind of why I don't really like french snails: it's mostly about the butter, and I don't find eating a chunk of butter to be a pleasant experience really! Give me garlic butter on bread any day instead
It's not the only way the french eat snails though, in the south it's eaten in a tomato sauce (catalan-style as they call it, so probs not just a french thing)
Americans eat lobster for the same reason. It was considered trash food until we discovered garlic butter.
https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=was+lobster+considered+peas...
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French escargots are smaller. I can see how the texture would be off-putting in a snail that’s about ten times as big.
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