Like reheated escargot, here’s a blog post from seven years ago.
Morelia‘s a fairly sophisticated city, as far as cities of its size in Mexico go. And its culinary offerings just keep on amazing me. One Moreliana, twenty years my junior, tells me that she can remember the time when there was no Comercial Mexicana, when everyone shopped at the Mercado Independencia, and when broccoli was considered exotic fare, available only by driving to San Miguel de Allende.
Between Costco, Comercial Mega, and Superama, Belgian endive,yellow tomatoes, frozen ostrich, white eggplant,dried seaweed, Arborio rice, wasabi in a tube, anguilas (baby eel), giant fish eggs, and cannedescargot can be had on any day of the week. But one thing’s missing.
But first I must digress.
Growing up in Southern California in the late 1950’s and 1960’s, I developed a broad range of tastes, in large part to my mother’s belief in Sunset magazine as the Bible for…
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Red Shoes are Better than Bacon 
I remember those days. I don’t remember if it was Sunset Magazine, but I sent my kids to the garden in search of snails. I think I paid them a penny per snail. I put them in a basket with the cornmeal to graze and assure myself they could live for a week (proving they had not been poisoned in someone else’s yard). The results after cleaning, boiling & stuffing them into the shells with lots of butter and garlic (butter, garlic and excellent French bread to dip into are the only thing that make snails worth eating). Anyway the results were very close to what you would imagine rubber bands sauteed in garlic butter might taste like. A one time event for sure. And as I recall no one shared either my enthusiasm or the fruits??? of my labors.
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silly girl! One gathers the snails without hurting them, places them in a box with cornmeal in the bottom, and after a day or two of stuffing themselves, you remove the shell, roll in cornmeal, and deep-fat fry. (more healthy if in olive-oil)
Mrs. Mose, an italian neighbor in Santa Cruz, Calif. used to come to my garden
to gather them when I was a kid, because we couldn’t affort pestacide.
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Any deep-fat fried is good! The grease adds balance to the putatively healthy aspects of a free protein source.
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Another Santa Cruz – Watsonville and Sunset victim and I remember the snails but I’ve never seen one in Mexico …. or a Slug. First one I ever ate was in Sasebo Japan in the early ’60’s. Texture was terrible.
Luckily my dad was a Franco-American spaghetti fan so no way would my mom try something like that
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We have slugs here, too. Want me to send you some?
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I have more snail bait for you here when you come.
Suzan Apaydin
Sent from my iPad
>
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That would be great! The snails love the giant red mustard (who would’ve thought?), and that bait really makes them get outta Dodge.
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Haven’t seen any in the garden yet, but would be willing to cultivate some if they weren’t so inexpensive already done and stuffed in a can.
Anything with garlic and butter is good!
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Hmmm. That gives me idea for something that could be made with that bag of empty snail shells I saw the other day at Trico.
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It is a source of eternal amusement for my parents and siblings that in high school, I (a budding francophile at the time) decided to do the snail thing myself. They were OK, but let’s just say that the experiment was never repeated. And no one else in the family dared try them.
Since then, I’ve found far tastier weird things to eat than snails. In fact, I think snails were to the 60’s and 70’s what sushi became to the 80’s and 90’s before it became totally mainstream. And don’t even get me going on the presence of cream cheese in Mexican “sushi.” Gaaack!
Saludos,
Kim G
Tehuacán, Puebla
Where it’s near-impossible to order sushi without cream cheese.
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P.S. For a spell as small kids, we lived a couple of blocks from Sunset’s headquarters in Menlo Park, CA. The building had a particularly impressive, large, carved door, at least to a six-year-old, so we always imagined a king lived there.
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just enjoyed your humorous blog on snails—comments were closed—good writing—wish I knew why your mom backed off–bill
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