Re: CHAT gasteropodophagy (was: Att. Ray -- of snails and slugs)

Ray Brown wrote:
>I found a site yesterday devoted to 'helicoculture' (snail-rearing -
>Wouldn't _cocleiculture_ be a better formed word?) and I noticed several US
>snail rearers who reared the little critters so that they could be eaten.
>So cochliophagy in the US doesn't seem just confined to where I encountered
>it in Maine.

Good Heavens, no.  Since at least post-WW II escargots have been available
in _French_ restaurants (which really only existed in numbers on the East
coast, and a few other cities, until the 50s or 60s). I think I ate my first
one around 1954/5, in Boston.
 Julia Child's "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" (1961) probably can be
held responsible for spreading the gospel to the rest of the country.
Nowadays, even here in Tiny Town, they're on the menu of any restaurant with
pretensions to being Continental-- bourguignonne, or out of the shell in
cream or wine sauce etc.  But it's a brave, or foolish, menu-writer who
would call them "snails".

Offhand, I should think slugs, properly purged and prepared, could be just
as palatable, albeit much more of a mouthful. (At least the ones I've seen
in Florida, about 4-5 inches long.  Up north, they're more escargot size.)
But I haven't checked those websites-- so perhaps there's something I don't
know. (And I'm not going to go hunting in the garden tonight, either.)

In Indonesia, I saw snails larger than a man's fist.  They were said to be
poisonous, but somehow I suspect they're just not _halal_. (JOOC, are they
Kosher?)

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