English Snails 4 - Snails with pancetta, sage, lemon and rocket
Warning! Behind this cut are scenes of a snail-killing nature!
The general execution plan comes from Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall’s first book. The snaily camp commandant (myself) first places the snails into the colander and shakes them about until they retract into their shells. Then I place them straight into boiling water which kills them nearly instantly. They are boiled for 9 minutes.
By the way, I started with 13 snails, but for various reasons I’m only cooking 12. One was mercifully released back to the garden. Ask me why some time …
This is my trusty tool for removing the snails from their shells.
After boiling:
Using my trusty tool I easily remove the snails from their shells. It’s the same twisting technique that I use after cooking whelks. The snails are a bit mucusy so following Hugh’s advice I leave them in salt for ten minutes.
The main ingredients for tonight’s meal are panchetta, parsley from the garden and lemon juice.
Cooking with sage:
And yes I really did eat them! Pretty delicious actually, but the Ramsey recipe with panchetta was too oily. Next time I’ll stick to garlic and a bit of butter.
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For those of a weak nature, here is a picture of Traditional English Cooking (this is what we ate last night).
August 15th, 2006 at 10:07 pm
Was it nice? fresh from the garden (the snails)
We may go to France or Belgium, so we can eat snails like you
Do you know that you should feed the snails with carrots until poo become red?
August 15th, 2006 at 11:32 pm
Very nice actually. They don’t taste of too much except the sauce that you cook them in, which is why next time I’m going to use a very simple sauce.
It’s really true about the poo. As soon as I fed them with kale, they got bright green poo the next day (their poo was black before).
(If you look after snails you spend a lot of time dealing with poo. It’s a bit like having babies, I imagine.)
Rich.
August 17th, 2006 at 11:24 pm
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