Snails - a dish best eaten slowly

May 20 2008 by Mike Chapple, Liverpool Daily Post

THERE’S now a National Day for just about everything. But, pun intended, people in this country may be forgiven for being slow on the uptake to celebrate the latest one: the first National Escargot Day.

That’s snails to the uninitiated.

While our cousins across the Channel and indeed the wise old Romans before them consider the likes of the Helix aspersa (small grey snail) or Helix pomatia (Roman snail) to be a delicacy as either an appetiser or entree we still tend to treat them as garden pests which leave a trail of icky ooze behind them.

Cafe Rouge, the popular French restaurant in Liverpool’s MetQuarter shopping complex, is aiming to change all that. Its manager Paul Walker is giving Liverpudlians the rest of this week to get used to the taste of the much maligned creature with a special menu in the run-up to the day itself, May 24.

For £4.95 customers can have their snails cooked with a combination including garlic butter, goat’s cheese, spinach and wild mushrooms to be mopped up with a wedge of fresh French bread.

“There are so many different types of food which the British are prepared to experiment with now so why not develop a taste for snails,” said Mr Walker who takes deliveries of 300 a go from France, where snail farms are commonplace.

His snails arrive freshly dead with their shells already removed before being baked in an oven of 280C.

The French diner, however, traditionally like to extricate the snails themselves using tongs to extract the flesh from the shell along with a small two tined forks before dipping it into the sauce.

The plus side for the diet conscious is that snails are highly nutritious without a sliver of fat on them.

The minus, for the squeamish, is they are killed in hot water and also their texture can be an acquired taste.

When the Liverpool Daily Post was asked along to an impromptu testing the verdict was that the potent, if delicious sauce, masked whatever essence there was of the somewhat chewy snails themselves.

According to Paul Askew, chef patron at London Carriageworks, on Hope Street, herein lay the rub.

“The snail is a bit overrated in that it tastes of what you add to it rather than what you get from the snail itself.

“In my opinion, there’s nothing really notable about them although Gordon Ramsay may have thought otherwise in the F Word,” said Mr Askew.

“You can get excited about the first asparagus of the season but in the case of snails I’d say, oops, that’s the first one I’ve stepped on this year.

“And leave it at that.”

mikechapple@dailypost.co.uk

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