Can anything not be faster than the legendary speeding snail? The common garden snail Helix aspera can cover a metre an hour. This is actually faster than the recorded speed that certain nations’ mail services at times operate, Canada and Britain amongst them.
More to gardening interests, this turn of speed means that snails, and their slimy relatives slugs, can travel the length of an average urban garden in a single night.
Those who study such low life of gastropods are officially termed malacologists. They also attract the interest of gastronomists and have done from the very earliest of times. Archaeologists recently revealed that it was not the French who first enjoyed snail snacks but their compatriots across
La Manche. Excavations in Wiltshire, England unearthed substantial hoards of ancient snail shells.
Snail species from southwestern Europe have been discovered in Ireland but not in neighbouring Britain. Dated by genetic studies to 8,000 years ago they prove immigrants from took these snails with them as food on the hoof, so as to speak, as they sailed to Hibernian shores.
The Romans enjoyed snails and are suspected of spreading them wherever their legions marched. Since that time
Helix aspera, the common garden snail has circled the globe to the delight of gourmets and the despair of gardeners.
And not only the European species: the giant African snail, the size of a man’s fist and with an appetite to match, has overrun South Florida. In Nigeria it is disparagingly called ‘Congo chop,’ ‘chop’ being food of any form. They have also been discovered in such far-off places as Hawaii and Australia, fortunately before their populations exploded.
Back in Britain, celebrity chef Heston Blumenthal operates the Fat Duck restaurant in the village of Bray. There he is renown for creating such delicious delicacies as snail porridge. Then there are the delights of snail caviar. Recently rediscovered after a lapse from ancient Egyptian, Greek and Roman times the eggs of the North African Great Grey Snail, a domesticated form of
Cornu aspersum.
Raised by helioculturists, or snail farmers, the tiny eggs are preserved in brine and rosemary to be sold as “Pears of Aphrodite’ for their alleged aphrodisiac qualities. Served on toast or a sage leaf accompanied by champagne, a kilo retails for over $2,000.
The snail’s own love life is if anything even more unusual. In fact they would doubtlessly have thrown Giovanni Casanova into throes of admiration. Determined to enjoy life to the full, each and every gastropod is hermaphrodite. By way of encouragement, they tickle each other’s fancy with love-darts, hard spikes jabbed into each other during mating. Some can go at it for twice a second over periods of up to an hour, as in the case of
Euhadra subnimbosa.
Not content to leave all the fun to snails, Tokyo’s Clinical Salon promotes an anti-ageing beauty treatment via its Celebrity Escargot Course. This involves live snails crawling over recipients’ faces. The mucus they leave behind is claimed to contain hyularonic acid, powerful proteins and antioxidants, all of which can help repair and revitalize skin. Similar salons have opened in the U.S., U.K. and Australia. Unconvinced? Take a gander at Katie Holmes, 34, who uses a snail mucus face cream after surviving a marriage to Tom Cruise.
It’s probably better nowadays to rely on your family physician, but back in 19th- and early 20th-century England, snails were used as a tuberculosis cure, taken dissolved in salt and mixed with cream and sugar.
A more modern and less destructive use will please all supporters of PETA. Snails and slugs have been touted as excellent removers of baked-on residue of pots and pans. Left out in a moist garden area overnight the critters tongues, which are coated with thousands of teeth, go to work it has been claimed leaving all # and span. Was this what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote in
A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act II sc ii): “Worm nor snail do no offence.” We’ll probably never know.
