6 Garlic Butter and Ginger Beer

Desmond Morris has a salutary tale about the consequences of eating too many snails. He was once persuaded by J.P.H. Haldane, the eminent scientist, to eat several dozen of them for lunch. It was the first time he had tried snails but so insistent was his companion and so convinced of their merits that he over-indulged. That same evening he was required to attend a formal dinner in Paris. Arriving at the dinner venue, he was immediately struck by his host’s immaculate blue blazer, though by now he had become more preoccupied with his stomach and its wish to be emptied before the next meal:

My host, leading the way down an interminable corridor . . . seemed to be walking in slow motion. I felt three dozen snails about to explode from inside me and quickly clapped my hand to my mouth. But the pressure was too great. Between my straining fingers, machine-gun bursts of snails fanned out and festooned that creaseless blue cloth. I plunged past the startled man and disappeared in a heaving wreck into the sanctuary of the lavatory. Looking up after a few consummatory moments, I saw the retreating figure of my elegant host disappearing back in the direction of the dining salon. He was obviously unaware of the state of his snail-clad back. I tried to shout a warning, but all that came out was a cracked moan. I envisaged him sitting down, amidst the gilt and the Buhl and the silver and the crystal, and taking up again his polite conversations, as if nothing had happened, while at the same time he slowly squelched a sea of snails on to the satin back-rest of his ornate dinner chair . . . I swore never again to undertake a solo attempt at decimating the world’s snail population.1

The French have always been partial to snail meat, as this poster shows.

Land snails, as an item of our diet, can elicit unexpected responses. Not only can individuals suffer idiosyncratic reactions to snail meat, but there is also a high likelihood of being poisoned unless the snails have been properly starved of food and cleansed of impurities. What may be harmless in the snail’s diet can be poisonous to man. That doesn’t prevent millions of snails being consumed annually, particularly on the Continent, though the cynic in me says it is because of the garlic butter, mopped up by crusty French bread. The snails themselves are rather peripheral to the meal. The French, in particular, enthuse about their gros Bourgogne (Helix pomatia) and their petit gris (Helix aspersa), some extolling the virtues of the former, others the latter species of land snail.

Snails have been served in the Restaurant L’Escargot Montorgueil in Paris since it opened in 1832.

Escargots à la bourguignonne; served on plates with indentations and held with special tongs, the snails are extracted from their shells using a long fork.

Escargotieres, small snail farms, supply Paris and the larger French conurbations as they have done for hundreds of years. There is no doubt that the French are wedded to the animal. When it comes to preparing them for the table, Jane Grigson argues strongly that Burgundian cooks have the answer: ‘They send them to table on specially dimpled dishes of pottery, Pyrex or metal, sizzling by the dozen in garlic and parsley butter. A great treat.’2 But this isn’t the only way to serve land snails. Recipes abound (a few, from reliable sources, can be sampled in the Recipes section of this book), though I haven’t had the courage to try many myself. Sautéed snails on chorizo mash seems superficially appealing, if only for the spicy sausages, but like many inhabitants of this island, I remain wary.

The habit of eating snails is not new to the British, though our passion for the animal has never matched that of our European neighbours. Helix aspersa was being sold in Bristol markets at the beginning of the twentieth century under the name ‘wall fish’. Today you are more likely to come across land snails tinned on the shelf of a delicatessen, accompanied by a bag of empty shells. Not uncommonly, the shell and the creature are of a different species, the larger pomatia shell being favoured, since it holds more butter, while the packaged animal is Helix aspersa. For the British the snail’s appeal is mainly to those who have holidayed abroad and who have been introduced to the creature in the context of garlic butter. For the more adventurous, the Fat Duck in Bray, where Heston Blumenthal is chef, has ‘snail porridge’ as a signature dish. Apart from chopped snails, the recipe boasts no fewer than 25 other ingredients (see Recipes section).

In the western Mediterranean, another land snail, Helix aperta, is considered an even greater delicacy. It is a smaller snail than the other two mentioned, has a thin, translucent shell and inhabits vineyards, where it spends much of the year underground. Patience Gray describes four ways in which it can be eaten: directly from the shell (which has already been cracked open), cooked in olive oil and consumed hot with a little salt, rescued from the hot ashes of a wood fire, or grilled over the same and served with garlic sauce.3 At snail feasts, vineyard snails are starved and then clumped together on straw, which is set alight. The snails are extracted from the ashes by impaling them with sharply pointed sticks, dipped into vinaigrette and eaten hot with fresh bread. The residents of the Catalan town of Lleida are said to consume not less than 12 tons of snails at their annual festival held over three days in May. Cooked on outdoor grills, they are served with mayonnaise and garlic for the enjoyment of thousands of visitors as well as the locals.

Our forebears appear to have enjoyed snails a lot. The shells of land snails are a feature of archaeological sites throughout the Mediterranean. They represent the remains of prehistoric meals, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, the food historian, has suggested that land snails were the first truly domesticated animals. The reasons why snails might have been chosen are persuasive:

Snails are relatively easy to cultivate . . . they are an efficient food, self-packaged in a shell which serves at table as a receptacle . . . the waste is small, the nutrition excellent. Compared with the large and intractable quadrupeds which are usually claimed as the first domesticated animal food source, snails are easily managed . . . they can be isolated in a designated breeding ground by enclosing a snail-rich spot with a ditch . . . by culling small or un-favoured types by hand, the primitive snail farmer would soon enjoy the benefits of selective breeding . . . they can also be raised in abundance and herded without the use of fire, without any special equipment, without personal danger and without the need to select and train lead animals or dogs to help . . . they are close to being a complete food!4

Outside the Mediterranean region, collections of land snails in archaeological sites are less common, though the remains of snail meals have been reported in places as far apart as Peru, the Caribbean, East Africa and the Philippines. We know too that freshwater snails were used as food by the Maya and the Chinese, and world-wide, whelks, winkles, top-shells, ear-shells and limpets remain an important source of protein for those living by the coast. Huge shell middens on the coastlines of the United States, Australia and parts of Europe, dating from the end of the last Ice Age, suggest that sea snails were a necessity food rather than a luxury item. As with land snails, sea snails can be flavoured with a little butter and garlic, but more usually the salty flavour of the sea is preferred and many are eaten raw with a simple dressing of lemon juice or vinegar.

Land snails are sold in markets like this one in Fes, Morocco, where they are made into snail soup.

Limpets used to be staple seafood in many Scottish islands and when kelp was stripped from the shoreline, depriving these snails of their shade, numbers fell and the inhabitants of the Orkneys rose up in protest. The ‘Kelp riots of Stronsay’ in 1761 was the result. Lindsey Bareham, the food writer, remembers cooking them on a metal sheet on the rocks at Mousehole, Cornwall. The experience was for her memorable: ‘They didn’t taste particularly good, being both rubbery and salty, but they were edible and the thrill of knocking these clinging, conical molluscs off the rock and cooking them over a fire by the sea more than compensated.’5 Limpets need tenderizing to make them properly edible. They aren’t popular seafood though they are still eaten in Madeira and on the islands of Hawaii. An old Welsh recipe, Pastai Brenig, incorporates limpets into a pie with bacon, eggs and onions.

Winkles certainly have the edge over limpets. Their operculum at the aperture of the shell needs to be removed and the body of the snail teased out with a pin. Dipped in vinegar and served with bread and butter, they make a pleasant meal. They were probably the most eaten snail in Britain in the nineteenth century. It is estimated that 76,000 baskets weighing 1,900 tons were consumed in London alone. Peter Lund Simmonds in 1859 said this of the trade in winkles between Oban and London:

The cockneys and their visitors are deeply indebted to the industrious inhabitants of Kerara near Oban for a plenteous treat of this rather vulgar luxury; and the Kerarans too are no less obliged to the Londoners for a never-failing market, for what now appears to be their general staple article . . . Every week there are probably 30 tons or more of this insignificant edible sent up to London, from Glasgow, all of which are collected near Oban . . . In London they sell at 3d. a pint.⁶

Whelks were another favourite dish in Victorian London. At ‘a penny a saucer’ they were sold in street stalls, either boiled or pickled, and favoured by the poor. Simmonds records large quantities being sent to London from the Isle of Mull, steamers bringing 6 or 7 tons at a time to the metropolis.7

In the Channel Islands a much great delicacy was the ormer, Haliotis tuberculata. Known in America as abalone, in South Africa as perlemoen, in New Zealand as paua and in Japan as awabi, the white meat of this sea snail is described as ‘very sweet and luscious’. Its shell is also a source of mother-of-pearl. The term ‘ormer’ is derived from the French oreille de mer, because of its resemblance to an ear. Because of over-collecting in the nineteenth century, restrictions were placed on collecting ormers and today ‘ormering’ is confined to certain tides in the Channel Islands. On a full or new moon and for two days afterwards during the first four months of the year, people are allowed to collect ormers of a certain size from the icy waters of the Channel Island coast, but only if they desist from using diving equipment. The animal tends to be found under rocks at the lowest tidal point. Since the seventeenth century ormers have been enjoyed in casseroles with belly of pork, carrots and shallots, though sampled little on mainland Britain.

From the Haliotis family of sea snail comes the ormer. Its shell has a mother-of-pearl lining and a row of respiratory holes.

Today it isn’t so much snails (marine or land ones) that have achieved culinary prominence as other forms of molluscan meat – oysters, mussels, cockles, clams, scallops, squid and octopus – but in the nineteenth century it was sea snails, in particular whelks and winkles, that found favour, partly because they were so accessible and cheap. We tend to think that our own tastes are catholic but in comparison to the Victorian age, as far as molluscs are concerned, they are narrow. In 1884 M. S. Lovell produced a book, The Edible Mollusks of Great Britain and Ireland, which listed no fewer than 40 different species of snail available for consumption.8

While to eat snail meat intentionally is one thing, to ingest a snail accidentally is quite another. In 1932 in a café in Paisley Mrs Donoghue was ordered a ginger beer float by her friend. When it arrived, she poured the ginger beer from the dark, opaque bottle into a tumbler containing the ice cream and took a few gulps. Later, on pouring the remainder of the drink into the glass, she was horrified to discover she had also poured out the decomposed body of a snail. This understandably upset her and she became unwell. Later, she sued the manufacturer of the drink. Her lawyer claimed that the manufacturer owed Mrs Donoghue a duty of care in ensuring the ginger beer wasn’t contaminated. What followed was to change the course of legal history. ‘The case of the snail in the bottle’ established the modern law of negligence in Britain.⁹ Twice the court ruled that there was no merit in the case, since it wasn’t Mrs Donoghue who had ordered the drink but her friend and no contract existed between her and the café owner or the supplier. Also, the manufacturer wasn’t to blame because the ginger beer wasn’t a ‘dangerous product’ and the manufacturer hadn’t ‘fraudulently represented it’. Neither Mrs Donoghue nor her advocate was satisfied with the judgement and it went to appeal. Curiously, the facts of the case were never established in a court of law – whether, for example, the snail actually existed or whether it was in fact a slug (more likely, given the bottle’s narrow aperture). Instead, the case was heard in front of six Law Lords who could not agree. It was Lord Atkin who put forward the clinching argument that led to a majority verdict in favour of Mrs Donoghue. He argued that the manufacturer did have a legal duty to the consumer (Mrs Donoghue) and that he had failed to take reasonable steps to ensure that the ginger beer was free from any defect likely to cause injury to health. As for the factory where the ginger beer was bottled in Glen Lane, Paisley, the building has since been demolished after two fires occurring within days of one another gutted the premises. The Scotsman commented that to the world’s compensation-claim lawyer this amounted to ‘the loss of a shrine’.¹⁰

‘Donoghue vs. Stevenson’ – the 1932 case of the snail in the gingerbeer bottle – is one of the most famous in legal history.

Whether a snail is inadvertently swallowed with a ‘slug’ of ginger beer, or deliberately eaten in a restaurant, the consequences can be difficult to foresee. It reinforces, once again, how the body of the snail is not to be trusted and should be approached circumspectly.