Snail Salad
It is entertaining to imagine myself at the table with my grandchildren, bargaining with them to finish their snail salad.
The title of this postcard is Snail Salad, which aficionados will recognize as an Italian delicacy called scungilli, made from conch or whelk—that is, giant sea snails. It is straight-up more interesting to use snail salad as a title because scungilli will mean nothing to many people, and it is entertaining to imagine myself at the table with my grandchildren, bargaining with them to finish their snail salad when the odds of them finishing anything other than pretzels and chips is many to one.
“What is this stuff, Granddad?”
“Ocean gummy bears.”
My children read these postcards (maybe), so I acknowledge that the two-and-a-half-year-old is willing to try anything for the first time. He was filmed recently devouring escargot (think, garlic + butter + whatever), but I know how these things change. My oldest grandchild used to devour my scrambled eggs when he was two. Nyet, today. Anyway, snail salad is too much fun to say.
Also, delicious to eat. Last week, I drove to Providence, Rhode Island, for lunch with a friend and longtime business colleague who lives around the corner from several excellent restaurants. He took me to a small, very comfortable Italian place with Jamaican servers who barely spoke English but had big, beautiful smiles.
A specialty of the house at this Italian restaurant is scungilli. I had never had scungilli. Now I plan to learn how to make it at home. It is pretty simple. You can purchase the mollusk in a can. Add celery, salt, pepper, a few other things, maybe olives if you like, some lemony dressing, and there you have it. Delightful.
Driving home from my lunch, the pleasantness of the time washing over me, I thought about the idea of scungilli on the table here in Monadnock. I owned a restaurant in the region, with my wife, for over ten years. Scungilli never entered our frame of culinary reference, despite conch being a reasonably common coastal ingredient in New England. Yet there are plenty of people around with adventurous enough palates that make me think it might be a welcome addition, particularly in the summer months, as something lighter that is not a Caesar salad.
Our restaurant went through a few iterations over the course of our stewardship. Mostly it was about supporting area growers and farmers, which, of course, would not elevate snails to our attention in the ordinary course of business. When we thought of seafood, we defaulted to cod, scallop (a bivalve mollusk, come to think of it), and trout. Never snail, although I suppose escargot may have appeared on a few Monadnock menus over time.
We did try and champion various organ types of meat—offal—as a way to advocate for eating the “whole animal.” We bought half cows across the street at the Market, which we also owned for a while, and they arrived with the heart, kidneys, liver, suet, etc. Offal did not sell well at retail, but we would bring them across the street to the Inn and convert them into pies and meatloaf. Occasionally, we sold more beef liver with onions, apple-smoked bacon and port wine sauce than steak of the day. But it required a couple of beef liver fans to be in the house, who dove at it.
If I get around to writing a book on the innkeeping days, there will be a long chapter on food. I think our food habits have calcified. We are not terribly adventurous. I do not know who ate the first sea mollusk, smashing it with a rock to extract the animal from within, but I posit they were hungry. We are not quite that hungry anymore. If liver is the only thing in the house, someone goes and gets a pizza. It may be a form of progress that we are not limited to food we must cultivate on our own, but ironically, it has not made our diet more diversified. If the only thing we like is boneless chicken breast, it can be boneless chicken breast again for dinner. There is no opportunity to say to the children, sorry, what’s available is the animal's heart and these green beans from the garden. Lean, tender and juicy, along with crisp and delicious. Or you can go to bed. In that respect, we do not savor important cultural connections with the past.
I am reading a book by Clinton Bailey, Bedouin Culture in the Bible. Dr. Bailey lives in Israel and has been an activist for Bedouin rights since 1978. He is an expert. It is a scholarly journal. I read it slowly. But it is fascinating. (To explain, we are planning a trip to Israel in a month, and Dr. Bailey is a lifelong friend of my mother.)
No surprise, the semi-nomadic life of Bedouins over four thousand years has been hard-scrabble. It has made them, as it does of many people leading hard-scrabble lives, fiercely proud. We may wonder why they do not walk to the nearest bus route at the edge of the desert, but they do not. Instead, they regard the rest of us with levels of disdain. Case in point, the food. It turns out that yeast does not travel well by camel. Bedouin bread, therefore, is made with two ingredients, water and flour, and it is typically baked on hot coals in a sand pit, covered by other hot coals and more sand. The result is cracker-like. In Dr. Bailey’s narrative, he offers examples of Bedouin chiefs and poets over the years pouring contempt on the “soft bread” of the “settled life.”
That would point to me, I guess. Soft bread. Settled life. In my defense, it now includes snail salad.