In the lush river valleys of Napa and Sonoma counties, north of San Francisco, one of the ickier and more difficult to irradicate garden pests is the gray snail–”le petit gris” to the French, who consider it the creme de la creme of the escargot world.
California farmers annually spend upward of $37 million on poisons and fancy copper foil barriers to rid their citrus, kiwi, and artichoke groves of the snails.
Home gardeners resort to all sorts of remedies designed to bring on snail armageddon. They ring their lettuce beds and daffodils with pesticides like Deadline! They bait traps with saucers of bran flakes or beer–snails will slime right by the tastiest tomato for a nibble of bran flake, and where beer is concerned they have the appetite and common sense of a college fraternity pledge.
If all else fails, the wrath of gardeners has been known to include paying neighborhood kids a penny apiece to take flashlight and hammer and crawl across lawn and under bush in an all-out snail bash.
Now, Yankee ingenuity has come up with a very simple and much more profitable answer.
Eat `em.
Better, and more Yankee yet, sell `em.
The gourmet foods shops at Macys and Neiman-Marcus now stock California escargot in 7 1/2-ounce cans (three dozen snails) under the tasteful green and white label of the nation`s only snail processor, Enfant Riant. The chefs at elegant restaurants (Chicago`s Mid-America Club, L`Escargot and The Ninety Fifth among them) order them by the case and occasionally on the hoof, as it were.
If all goes well for the grassroots industry, the United States soon will be selling escargot back to the French themselves, who first brought le petit gris to these shores when they came also bearing wine grapes. Gluttonous Frenchmen have so decimated their own country`s supply of le petit gris that there are concerns about extinction, and the importation of some 7,324 tons of snail flesh from Turkey, Eastern Europe and Asia now accounts for fully 1 percent of France`s international trade imbalance–or $12 million in 1984.
When Mike Beyries, 38, learned that the United States was importing about 500 tons annually, he figured he could become wealthy with just 10 per cent of that business. That was three years ago, and so far Beyries and his partner and best friend from high school, Tracy Brash, 36, have yet to see riches; but oh, do they have snails.
At any given time, some 600,000 of the rather endearing little gastropods are going from scientifically designed feast to purposely induced famine in Enfant Riant`s two Quonset-hut greenhouses in this picturesque town, and then from here to the Homestead Ravioli Co. in San Francisco, where they are canned.
Business has been, well, snail-paced (though they are now processing 300,000 snails a month), but the two nascent capitalists have done some impressive market research and recently produced their first subchapter S
(special, high-risk) stock offering.
Their product has inspired many a new and creative recipe by nouveau cuisine restaurants. At places such as Tavern on the Green in New York, Ambria in Chicago and Stars in San Francisco, Enfant Riant`s snails are served in puff pastry, barbecued with artichokes, with fresh salmon in a cream and mustard sauce, in fettuccini or as a stuffing for whole, roasted garlic.
Soon, the proprietors say, an entrepreneurial gleam in their eyes, Enfant Riant–it means ”laughing child” in French and was so-named because Brash`s teenage daughter collapses in giggles at the notion of her dad as a snail rancher–will be laughing all the way to the bank.
The whole thing started in 1981, when Brash was assigned by a San Francisco magazine to do a story on a Frenchman growing snails in the wine country. By the time he had tracked him down, ”the Frenchman was off growing truffles in Texas,” Brash says. But the idea of snails stuck, and now Beyries and Brash run the only commercial snail canning operation in the nation. However, they are hardly alone in their efforts to capitalize on California`s gourmet food boom.
After paying $12.50 for six snails several years ago at a posh Hawaiian restaurant, retired Chicago television sports personality Ralph Tucker told his wife, ”Heck, I just threw a dozen of these out of the garden.” Tucker came home to Fresno and began saving snails in whiskey half barrels.
”My wife picked six and I picked six, and pretty soon we had baby snails. My neighbors couldn`t believe it. One of them said, `Why not just fence off your yard and proclaim it a snail oasis?”`
Tucker went further than that. He founded the Snail Club of America; it currently numbers 800 members. He started a monthly newsletter called The Artichoke Leaf, which runs recipes for such things as Cream of Stilton, Onion and Snail Soup and Corn and Snail Chowder. And he maintains some 50,000 of the critters, from which he fills orders from restaurants as far away as Kansas City. He ships his escargot dressed out, or liberated from the shell, parboiled, and packed on ice, and boasts of getting 50 cents each wholesale.
Fresh snails, Tucker maintains, are as superior in taste and texture to the canned variety as prime filet mignon would be to shoe leather. ”No wonder most restaurants drown them (the canned variety) in garlic and butter; they are like eating rubber.”
Beyreis and Brash blame the Goodyear-UniRoyal consistency of canned escargot–other than their own Enfant Raint, of course–on several things. Some 85 per cent of the imported escargot originate in Turkey or elsewhere and are flash frozen before they are processed. Even many of the cans labeled
”Product of France” contain snails that were harvested in Eastern Europe or Taiwan and flash frozen before shipping to France.
”Freezing twists the protein molecule like a rubber band,” Brash claims, wringing an imaginary towel in his hands. In fact, he adds, the
”snails” from Taiwan are not snails at all, but curliques of muscle taken from a swamp slug ”the size of a man`s fist.”
”It`s a swamp dwelling omnivore of decaying plant or animal sources,”
Beyreis interjects. ”Whatever they`ve been eating is what they`ll taste like.”
Escargot, on the other hand, is an herbivore. Most recipes strongly advise starving snails for two days before harvesting them in order to flush out their digestive systems.
If Beyreis is disdainful of the imported imposter, it`s because he and his pregnant wife, Vi, a college teacher, have eaten a lot of high quality escargot lately. In fact, as he speaks, she is in the kitchen of the 18-foot Traveleze mobile home that serves as world headquarters for Enfant Raint, preparing a little escargot hors d`oeuvre for lunch. ”We took our first salaries this past January,” Beyreis says. ”That`s 22 months of escargot.” ”Next week we`ll have meat in the chili,” Brash adds.
”I even had a snail omelette for breakfast,” Beyreis claims.
Beyreis` sense of humor has stood him and Brash in good stead as they have negotiated the Scylla and Charybdis of governmental red tape involved in setting up a snail cannery.
”It was like trying to get canned duck-billed platypus past the California Department of Public Health,” Beyreis says. ”One agency said the definition of meat is tissue removed from the bone. Snails have no bones. Another said fish is defined as an aquatic creature; snails live on land
–though they are mollusks. Meat is lifestock on the hoof. Well, snails have one foot . . . . So we are ranch, until we`ve killed the little devils, then we are regulated by the Department of Fisheries.”
Because there were few publications on growing snails, Brash accessed the Library of Congress index with his personal computer and found 2,100 listings. All but four dealt with snail erradication.
Everything they did was an experiment. Because snails like to slither uphill, and will keep going upward if not stopped (”They have the IQ of mud,” Brash explains), they first tried to grow them on hanging sheets of clear plastic. It was as if 600,000 snails were crawling up your shower curtain. ”The little devils walked themselves to death,” Beyreis moans.
Before they learned to isolate the critters in five-gallon buckets, strung by the hundreds from the greenhouse ceiling, they attempted several sorts of cages, with very limited success. In fact, one chilly day, they went into the greenhouse and the mere opening of the door triggered the heating system, which over the weekend had become infested with some 25,000 snails. It hailed snails. ”Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out,” Brash says.
Originally their suppliers–large citrus, artichoke and kiwi farmers
–shipped the gastropods to them in large cardboard containers via United Parcel. That ended after one truck broke down, stranding the cargo for two days; by the time the ton or more of snails reached Petaluma, they had munched their way out of their boxs and had stripped a consignment of brake linings bare of packaging and instructions. The snails now travel in plastic.
Just convincing farmers that someone was willing to pay them to collect snails live was a problem. ”`Oh, sure. You`re an Odd Fellow, aren`t you?”`
Beyreis swears one farmer reacted. ”`Boys down at the lodge sent you didn`t they? What sorta damn fool do you take me for?` The next time I called him back he said, `Hey, isn`t this getting to be an awful expensive joke for you?` I honestly think that on his 25th anniversary he thinks he`s going to get all his snails back.”
Farmers are paid 55 cents a pound. That`s about 100 snails. They retail at around $8 a can of three dozen.
Although Enfant Riant does sell snails live on the hoof, or freshly cleaned and packed on ice, they feel their canned product is going to be their strong suit–until they work out the kinks, or kinkiness, involved in their next product–snail cavier. An imported French variety, one of the hits of a recent gourmet trade show, will be available in the U.S. in a few months, and Enfant Riant will be on the shelves with a domestic cavier soon afterward.
”Snail caviar has a very neutral flavor–not salty, not fishy, and it looks like the best Beluga,” Brash claims.
Obtaining snail cavier is not much of a problem. Enfant Riant tricks the snails, which usually burrow into the ground to lay their eggs, into nesting in layers of foam rubber. ”Forgive me for not being more specific. It`s a trade secret,” Beyries says.
Concerning the actual reproductive cycle of the snail, he`s delighted to be more graphic. Snails are hemaphroditic. Every snail, once fertilized, can and will lay eggs. One grower notes, ”Everybody`s mother is somebody`s father.”
Furthermore, a snail`s sex organ is located on the right side of his/her head–it`s a kind of a dimple just above the mouth. It has one upper tooth and 14,000 lower teeth. When aroused, the escargot flashes his or her dimple and fires a series of microscopic darts called spiculum amoris to attract the attention of the prospective mate. Within seconds, the couple are standing pseudopod to pseudopod, locked via their 28,002 teeth in passionate embrace.
So entwined, they throb back and fourth for some three hours like punk rockers in a trance. Each leaves the assignation pregnant. Each lays eggs. And three weeks later, each is the proud single parent of some 40 to 120 hatchlings, every one of them a tiny version of a full-grown, 25-cents-piece- size snail. Within six months, the babies are ready to mate.
”About all snails do is eat and breed,” Beyries explains. ”Having been a college professor, I`m adept at handling such behavior.”
All of which bodes well for a growing concern. In the 10 months Enfant was in business last year, sales were $42,000, and, says the aptly named Brash, ”We`re projecting sales of $500,000 this year and $1.4 million in 1987.” That`s anything but sluggish; in fact its a real escargot-go market.
Neither the gray snail nor any of the gourmet species of snail are native to the Chicago area. Some gastropods here are edible, but, says Allan Solem of the Field Museum of Natural History, they are too small to be worth the trouble.
