The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  At about that same time, snails were decimating one of my protein sources: peas. We didn’t have the problem in the backyard, where Sunny the duck kept the area pretty much snail-free. But in the front yard, snails were living the good life in the cannas, sealed up in their shells amid the long damp leaves during the day like vampires in a high-rise complex for the undead, then emerging into the evening to suck the life out of the Quarter-Acre flora.

  Sam and I did not give up without a fight. We collected the mollusks and then tossed them to Sunny, who waddled at high duck speed toward the tell-tale plop of a snail’s landing. Sunny swallowed the snails whole if she couldn’t break the shells with her beak. This was alarming because the snails bulged in her feathered neck like pop-it beads, even as she energetically ratcheted her head trying to work the snails to her belly. Sam and I worried we might need to provide serial episodes of the Heimlich maneuver.

  Watching Sunny pork-out on her duck escargot, I wondered if there was a difference between these garden snails and the snails that humans paid top dollar for at fancy restaurants.

  As it turned out, there was nary a one. Our snails were the very same Helix aspersa, or petit gris snail, that is served as escargot throughout Europe and the United States. So how did they get here?

  Most stories say that Helix aspersa was brought to the states by “the French,” as though each French citizen arriving in the country tumbled ashore with a pocketful of snails. Other stories narrow it down to the ominous singular: “a Frenchman.” There is, however, one story that actually seems to have some backbone to it. In an article titled “Exotic Mollusca in California,” which appeared in the April 27, 1900, issue of the journal Science, author Robert E. C. Stearns wrote that Helix aspersa was “intentionally planted” in California in the 1850’s by a Mr. A. Delmas of San Jose. The introduction was “made for edible purposes, or in common parlance, ‘with an eye to the pot.’ Mrs. Bush of San Jose informs (Mr. Stearns) that the snails have thriven . . . and have multiplied to such an extent, that, in some instances, they are troublesome in the gardens.”

  Thriven, indeed. Today it is nearly impossible to garden without having to do battle with the pests. Of course, if Mr. Delmas had been successful in turning the tastes of Californians to the flavor of snails (I imagine that skewering them on sticks and deep frying them at the state fair might have been one solution), we wouldn’t have such a problem now. Unfortunately, San Franciscans, when presented with the slimy mollusks, pretty much said, “Ewwww, I’m not eating that.” Which is exactly what Louis said when I told him we could eat our garden snails. Then he added, “You can’t be thinking of eating them either. It’s crazy; you’ll get sick.”

  Crazy? Snails have been on the human menu since prehistoric days, and ancient Romans prized the things, making “cochlear gardens” in which to fatten them (and season them as well in a stunning example of early modern multi-tasking) on meal, wine, and herbs. In 1885, in his impassioned plea “Why Not Eat Insects?” British writer Vincent Holst called snails, slugs, and insects “clean meat” because their diet consists of wholesome garden greens rather than unpalatable combinations of muck and slop that pigs and fish thrive on. Further, he was perplexed about why we didn’t all see snails as a means to end hunger. “Anathematized by every person who possesses the smallest patch of garden, lying in abundance around our feet, a wholesome food, and at the same time a pest to be destroyed, they are still almost entirely neglected by rich and poor alike, though the rich long for new dishes to tempt their faded palates, and the poor starve.” A great idea I must say, and if he hadn’t gone on to speak in the voice of moths that fly into the candle flame, “Does not the sweet scent of our cooked bodies tempt you? Fry us with butter; we are delicious. Boil us, grill us, stew us; we are good in all ways!” I would have considered him reasonable, indeed.

  However, even though I didn’t share the bit about moths with Louis, he remained unimpressed. I began soliciting other opinions and found that there was no middle ground to the question of eating snails from the garden. Lots of people were as horrified as Louis, but there were many who said, “Oh sure I’d eat them; I love escargot.” Two of my friends were such avid helix-philes (helix-o-philes are collectors of corkscrews) they asked which day they should come by to sample my garden livestock.

  To tell the truth, I hadn’t actually made up my mind to eat the garden snails. I merely hoped to win the argument over whether or not the snails were edible. But now it seemed I was going to have to put my mollusks where my mouth was.

  It would be a party, I decided, with a lot of wine served beforehand. Those who refused to eat snails (including my pal Lisa who, in a version of the not-naming-meat rule, said that putting the snails into a terrarium and feeding them made them pets and she couldn’t eat pets) would get cheese-stuffed mushroom caps instead.

  The first step, one that was by far the easiest, was capturing the snails. I plucked them out of the cannas and from under logs, pulled them like suction cups off step-stones, and when I found them fisted into groups of ten or fifteen in the spaces between dirt and the edges of the raised beds, I collected them like I’d hit, well, pay dirt.

  I put my future meal into the escargotierre, the aforementioned terrarium. Along with the snails, I also placed several half rounds of four-inch-long PVC pipe inside the terrarium. One held chicken feed, a supposed favorite of snails that I imagine they seldom get to indulge in (the possibility of a hungry chicken showing up just too likely). The other half rounds were piled on each other to provide shelter. The only other amenities were a very shallow water dish and a pile of greens (both of which I changed daily).

  Right away there were problems. Who knew how much snails “evacuated?” I had to rinse out the unwieldy glass-sided terrarium every day and even that didn’t seem quite enough. So then I put dirt in the aquarium, and worms, because worms eat snail poop. (Remind me not to eat worms.) That was better, but then came the problem of escape.

  A snail can wedge itself into position, then push with a force equal to ten or more times its own weight. Get an entire snail crew that desire freedom (singing snail chanteys most likely), and their combined efforts can loosen nails and pop lids from their moorings.

  The first time I noticed the lid askew and half the aquarium denizens AWOL, I figured I’d failed to push the metal lid—which had in other times kept proportionally giant geckos, tortoises, and mice successfully jailed—all the way down. The second time, I realized it was the snails. No wonder commercial snail farmers use electric fences to keep their livestock contained.

  I went through the house rounding up the escaped doggies, which had left silver trails (not so easy to clean, by the way) up the walls, across the linoleum, along the countertops, and meandering around the appliances. While I spent a good amount of time on the hunt, I did not find them all. I knew there were snails lurking out of my sight because every morning I found cellulose-rich items such as mail, book pages, and newspapers, covered with large chew holes. Actually, the paper was not so much chewed as licked.

  Snails eat by running what looks like a tongue (to the tongued, anyway) around the surface of its meal. The tongue is actually a radula—a muscular protuberance with teeth on it, worthy of a horror flick, that grinds away the snail’s meal.

  Constantly finding snail slicks across my appliances and having to explain my shredded checkbook to grocery checkers was bad enough. When I squashed a snail in my bare feet during a 2:00 a.m. visit to the bathroom, I decided I couldn’t keep the snails inside any longer.

  Out in the goose yard, I stacked two raised wooden beds to make a tall box and planted chard and lettuce plants inside, salted the place with earthworms, and sunk a shallow dish for water. I moved all the snails into this new housing and bent a sheet of heavy wire mesh into a lid and weighted the top with several bricks, each of which I could hardly lift. Every day, I misted the produce and the snails with the hose, and Sunny patrolled the escargotierre with a hungry quacking, which see
med to dissuade any attempts at escape. By this time I had noticed that there were more snails in my escargotierre than there had been before; teeny tiny ones. My snails had procreated! Snails are as skilled at multiplying as they are at escape. While it does take two snails to do their reproductive tango, it can be any two snails. Snails are hermaphrodites, schlepping the equipment for both teams inside those shells of theirs. Mating ensues when there is at least eight hours of daylight and continues until days begin to get shorter. Five days to three weeks after mating, the designated “female” snail crawls partway into her nest (hole in the ground) and shoots out about eighty eggs (which hatch in two to four weeks) through the genital opening behind “her” head. The placement of the genital opening doesn’t seem very well thought out, if you ask me, but then to a snail, the human situation may seem rather awkward as well.

  For those with a great deal of patience, or a lot more snails, snail caviar flavored with a tincture of rosemary is supposed to be as much of a treat as escargot. Keep in mind that it takes 260 snails to lay enough caviar to make up a single kilogram.

  I was not patient, but I did know how to procrastinate. Weeks were passing and I was getting worried my snails were going to be tired old retirees before I found the guts to cook ’em up. But snails actually have a pretty long life span, living up to five years. Snails don’t even get the “lip” on their shell that signifies maturity for about nine months, so a few weeks was not going to push a snail past its prime. Even so, I needed to push ahead. It was time to eat the snails.

  I dreaded killing the snails almost as much as I dreaded eating them. I tried not to think about it, but it was weighing on my mind. This was evident when I threw a party later that week for my friend Shawna Ryan and her novel debut of Water Ghosts. I made a special cookie cutter and cookies in her honor. The cookie was supposed to look like a moaning ghost rising from a coiling wave.

  After I had made and frosted fifty of the ghost/wave cookies, Sam came in and pointed out that the cookies did not actually look like water ghosts, but crying snails instead. He was right—sobbing sugar-cookie snails with blue-frosted shells, to be exact. The prospect of doing the snails in was certainly weighing on me. I know it seems odd to worry about snail death considering that I made a practice of tossing them to the duck to gobble down. But in the duck’s case, I figured any of the snail’s discomfort at being swallowed by a duck was nature’s responsibility. My killing them was a different situation altogether.

  Perhaps Carl Jung was right in proposing that snails represented the self, with the soft subconscious encased in the hard outer shell of conscious thought; so perhaps I was identifying with the little guys. In that case, I decided to do them in by drowning the snails in beer. Snails, understandably, love beer. If you do not have ducks to keep your snail population in check in the garden, you might fill a shallow pan with even the cheapest beer (we call unpalatable beer “slug beer” at our house). Snails and slugs are drawn to the smell of yeast like frat boys to a keg party. They (and here I’m referring to snails and slugs) will plunge into beer with the abandon of pearl divers, never to crawl out again. (Unfortunately, snails and slugs love beer so much that it is possible this method could backfire, drawing these creatures instead from yards up and down your street with the scent of yeasty deliciousness.)

  In any case, I hope that my snails’ demise was easy. Whether it was, or especially if it wasn’t, they got their revenge in the hours to come. After dunking them in the beer initially, I had to put the snails through another two washes because they “voided” when immersed in liquid. This would seem to be an indication that their end wasn’t so good, but then again, maybe voiding in public was not a faux pas for snails like it is for even a horrendously drunk sports bar denizen.

  Once I finished the three washes, I made another bath for the now dead snails, to which I added three tablespoons of salt and a half cup of vinegar. Now things really got bad—emanating from the dead snails were sounds like tiny snail flatulence or the mollusk equivalent of banshee wails. The water clouded, and when I changed it I clearly understood why we weren’t all eating snails out of our gardens.

  The amount of slime was unbelievable. Where was it all coming from? The mucilaginous glop draped across the surface of the water, adhered to the buckets and pans, and gloved onto my hands; I couldn’t wash it off. I was revolted, and the last thing I could imagine doing at this point was putting any part of this mess into my mouth. I wondered if I could beg off the party; claim to suffer a migraine, the flu. But then, I fretted; I would be expected to reschedule.

  I then feverishly imagined ways I could appear to eat snails but not really do so. Of course, I had the feeling my guests would all be watching me far too closely when I took the first bite of my homegrown escargot to successfully fake it.

  So I pushed on, changing the water every fifteen minutes. Each time the slime was a little less voluminous, if still overwhelming. When the snails had been put through three water changes, the last rendering the water virtually slime-free, it was time to boil the snails.

  To my chagrin, boiling the snails produced still more slime, and I tell you, cooked slime is no better than raw. What was this stuff issuing from the snails in such horrifying volume? How could one little snail produce so much glop? I was quite certain the volume of slime I was handling was larger than the volume of snails I was working with.

  Snail (and slug) slime is a particularly intriguing substance once one gets past the shuddering. The reason there suddenly seemed like there was so much of it was because there was suddenly so much of it, even, just as I had fathomed, more slime than snail. Snails make their mucus out of dry granules of mucin that they carry around inside of them. When the dry granules come into contact with water and a small amount of calcium, they expand six-hundred fold into what we call slime in just forty milliseconds (which is the general amount of time it takes for a car’s airbag to deploy).

  The reason I couldn’t wash the slime easily off my hands is because the thickness of the pedal mucus (as it comes from the “foot” of the snail) increases with the application of water. As I energetically tried to rinse the mucus from my skin, I was actually making the problem worse. The best thing to do if you are ever covered with snail mucus, say as a result of being pelted with slugs as a practical joke, or if you fall asleep nude in a snail-friendly garden one night, is to wipe it off with a dry paper towel or with a bit of vinegar. If, more likely, you find yourself with pedal mucus only on your hands, rub your hands together. The mucus will ball up as if it were rubber cement.

  Then again, it might be wiser to revel in the mucus instead of fight it. Dab it onto your skin, massage it on your face. The many elements of snail slime (technically Helix aspersa Müller glycoconjugates) include glycoproteins, enzymes, and copper peptides that are said to improve skin texture and carry wound-healing abilities. Indeed, they found snail slime to be an effective treatment in the repair of radiodermatitis, or the skin damage that followed the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

  If the thought of letting a snail slime you “pedo-a-mano” makes you feel squeamish, you can purchase commercial snail-slime products including the lovely sounding facial lotion, Crema de Caracal (snail cream) or, following in the footsteps of eighteenth-century folk medicine—practicers who would swallow snails and slugs raw as a remedy for a weak chest—you can purchase Karacoflu, a snail-slime-based cough syrup that comes in either strawberry or avocado flavors.

  Another potentially useful characteristic of snail slime is that it acts as both glue and lubricant. As such, it allows a snail to both crawl up walls and ceilings without toppling off, giving rise to one of the British terms for snails, “wall fish.” Scientists are trying to create a synthetic version of snail slime for robots so they can climb walls and not topple off as well.

  Once the snails were de-slimed, boiled, and cooled, I used a toothpick to jimmy the snail from its shell. This was not as easy as one would think, and I quickly found tha
t it was easier to merely crush the shell and pull the meat from the shards. After I had a (somewhat soberingly) small pile of snail meat I—feeling like a colossus operating on a microbe—found and removed the teensy inedible parts of each tiny snail corpse. These parts I would describe as a “hard thing” and a “black thing.” In scientific terms, that’s cartilage and the intestinal tube. Once those were removed (and my pile of snail meat was that much smaller), I minced the meat and separated the snails into two piles. To one pile I added a mixture of parsley, butter, and garlic. To the other, a tomato-based mix of onion, anchovy, and cayenne. I took a small scooper and placed a perfect sphere of French snail or Spanish snail into the hollowed tops of mushrooms, which I placed on a divotted steel escargot dish ready to be set under the broiler when the guests had all arrived.

  While Louis hunted and gathered the alcoholic beverages before everyone arrived, I had just enough time to put together the rest of the meal. With lots of wine and lots of non-snail food, as well as the two types of escargot, we were ready. I had a generous glass of red wine and sat down to wait for the friends I hoped would leave our house at the end of the evening feeling more like cherished guests than guinea pigs, or worse, victims. The guests included, at one end of the spectrum, three people who feel eating is, at its best, an adventure. They might be disappointed in the dinner, but they would avidly try it, and would unlikely be disgusted. At the other end of the spectrum were two people who had already said they would not be eating pets or pests that evening. The rest of us were cautious, but game enough that with the right lubrication (beer or wine), trying my snails wouldn’t be an intolerable experience.

  How was it? I have a photo Louis took that night that says everything. In it, two friends (one of the adventurers and one who had refused to eat snails) and I are caught mid chew. We are all eating the escargot. We all look giggly, slightly tipsy, slightly trepidatious, but happy; we look like we are having a great time. Moreover, everyone ate them. Including Louis. Sam even put two of the last snail-stuffed mushroom caps aside to take to school the next day (likely taking the prize for the fourteen-year-old with the most unusual lunch). That made all the slime wrangling worthwhile.