Helix Pomatia, big daddy of Europe’s snails.
If Brexit hasn’t convinced you that something far more fundamental than water separates Britain and France, the drive from Paris to board the ferry at Calais, then from Dover to London on the other side, will satisfy any doubts.
Take that trip during October and you’ll see scores of people prowling the verges of Picardy, plastic bags in hand. They are scouring the bushes for snails, lured out by the moist warm weather. Back home, they bake them with garlic, parsley and butter for a tasty hors d’oeuvre.
On the British side, however, although its landscape, climate and, presumably, snails are identical, the verges are deserted. Clearly, any snails eaten on their side of the Channel come in cans.
Not that the British alone are unwilling to risk wet feet. If you drive into Germany, Switzerland, Italy or Spain, the roadsides will be equally deserted. It seems that only the French hunt their snails in the wild – perhaps because, while continental Europe has 695 varieties of land-based molluscs, few can compete with the massive brown-shelled Helix pomatia or Escargot de Bourgogne.
Eating snails is not without its complications. A Los Angeles restaurant, persuaded that their fatless additive-free meat was perfect for health-conscious clients, ordered a few hundred - not realising, until a van started off-loading scores of large trays, that snails only become edible after being kept alive for some days on beds of flour to cleanse their digestive tract. Offering fresh snails on the menu is as complicated as keeping a cow to guarantee fresh milk.
As always, canny suppliers – probably the same ones who discovered that discs stamped out of monkfish looked and tasted like more expensive scampi - found a way around the inconvenience. The meat of a cow’s lung has almost the same chewy texture as that of a snail, and a lump of the same size can fool the casual eater, particularly when doused in butter, garlic and parsley. Hence those small cans of “snail meat” sold with a plastic bag of shells attached: DIY escargots.
It goes without saying that, if snails and sex were ever to be considered in the same breath, it would be the French who did so. There have been a few hints. In the 1939 film Ninotchka, the influence of Paris inspires Melvyn Douglas to ask Greta Garbo “Why do doves bill and coo? Why do moths fly hundreds of miles to find their mates? Why do flowers open their petals? Why do snails, coldest of all creatures, circle interminably around each other? Oh, Ninotchka, Ninotchka, surely you feel some slight symptom of the divine passion.”
Nothing prepared me, however, for the story of Jacques Toussaint Benoît, a nineteenth-century savant who suggested that snails possessed a telepathic bond which could be adapted into a form of international communication.
Such theories weren’t rare in the feverish atmosphere of the Enlightenment, when new laws of nature were being discovered almost daily. In the late 1700s, for instance, a gentleman named Clement de Lafaille in the coastal town of La Rochelle noticed, strolling along the foreshore, how the sea, eroding the rocks, exposed thin veins of white stone running through the black basalt. Some looked surprisingly like letters. Is this how primitive man discovered writing, Lafaille speculated; by imitating the stones? A museum in his former residence celebrates this theory with a collection of pebbles, the veins in which resemble letters of the alphabet as elegantly cursive as in the copybook of some assiduous lycéen.
Examples of “stone writing” from the museum of Clement de Lafaille.
With so much crackpottery around, Benoît’s ideas about snails didn’t seem particularly bizarre. He claimed to have discovered that snails mated for life, and that each couple shared a “sympathetic fluid,” so that, if you did something to one, its partner, however far away, would react with what he called an “escargotic commotion.” It followed that, if you placed a letter next to such a snail and gave it an electric shock, the other would respond. Messages could then be spelled out and sent by, literally, “snail mail.”
Satirist Honore Daumier found the idea of the Snail Telegraph amusing. Their shells spell out “Progress.”
Working with an American named Biat-Chrétien, Benoît built a prototype of his Pasilalinic-Sympathetic Compass, or Snail Telegraph, and rounded up some potential investors. For its first test, twenty-four pairs of mated escargots, each representing a letter, were placed in zinc bowls nailed to ten-foot wooden beams, and the beams separated by a curtain. In theory, if a snail representing letter A was jabbed with electricity on one side of the curtain, its partner on the other would react. Using this system, Benoît was able to transmit the words “gymnase” as “gymoate” and “lumiere divine” as “lumhere divine” – results promising enough to raise financing for further development.
Investors, however, noticed that Benoît and Biat-Chrétien frequently slipped back and forth through the curtain while the experiment was in progress. For the second test, they demanded controlled conditions and more stringent invigilation. On the day of the experiment, Benoît failed to show. He died two years later in Paris, penniless, and his Pasilalinic-Sympathetic compass was never heard of again.
Well, not quite. In 1871, when the Prussians laid siege to Paris, all sorts of methods were tried to keep in touch with the outside world. Carrier pigeons worked until the Prussians brought in hawks, after which hot- air balloons launched from the heights of Montmartre carried photographically reduced mail south over the Prussian lines until their air cooled and they descend at Orléans or Tours. The Marquis de Rochefort, president of the Barricades Commission, remembered Benoît and built a version of his contraption but was still fiddling with it when the war expired in the chaos of the Commune.
I realise that, in bringing up this unsavoury episode, I’m not doing the gastronomes of today any favours. Thinking that snails possess even this smidgen of intelligence can make one much less inclined to order them in a restaurant. Who wants to feel that their lunch is looking back at them? Waiter, there’s an eye in my soup!