The Land Snails. Helices 



largest consumption being reached during Lent. A Parisian 

 takes fifteen or twenty snails for breakfast. These are usually 

 boiled in their shells, and seasoned with fresh butter, mixed 

 with parsley and a little garlic. 



This farm was visited in 1896. It then had sixty to eighty 

 thousand snails, all alike, except that some were slightly darker 

 than others. 



The farm consists of a large meadow fenced in from the 

 road by boards a foot high. The owner employs people to collect 

 snails from the neighbouring woods and meadows. They bring 

 in from one to two thousand daily, commencing about April. 



The snails are placed at once on one-half of the meadow 

 and left to graze until July, when they are removed to the other 

 half of the field. This is all divided up into squares like a gigantic 

 chess-board by boards a foot high. Each square has a thick 

 bed of moss on which the snails are placed, to be fed on cabbages 

 for three months. They become very fat and large, and of a 

 greenish colour, like the cabbage. Toward the end of September 

 the snails begin to burrow down through the moss so that they 

 are completely hidden. They lie there with the openings up- 

 ward until they have completely closed themselves for the winter, 

 forming a hard cover over the mouth of the shell. It is in this 

 condition that they are exported, as they can now be kept till 

 required. 



The price the farmer gets for the sealed shells is seventeen 

 francs ($3.40) per thousand, and ten francs ($2) for the open 

 ones, which have to be used at once. All have to be dispatched 

 to Troyes by the first of October, by which time all that were 



ping to close will have done so. Some always remain open. 



>om Troyes they are sent to Paris, where they come into season 

 with the first frost. 



The size of their snails was a matter of great pride to the 

 Romans owning snail preserves, called cochlearia. Meal and new 

 wine fattened them for market. On this diet, the snails of Hir- 

 pinus reached such size that a single shell held eighty-six penny 

 pieces. Varro recommended that a ditch be dug around the 

 snaileries to save the expense of a special slave to catch the 

 runaways which scaled the walls. 



Pliny the Younger reproaches his friend Septicius Clarus 

 for breaking a dinner engagement with him, at which the menu 

 was to have been a lettuce, three snails and two eggs apiece, 

 barley water, mead and snow, oHves, beet roots, gourds and 

 truffles, and going off somewhere else where he got oysters, scal- 

 lops and sea urchins. — Cooke. 



260 



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