Food
& Other Important Things
In Search of the Perfect Snail (Fun with Fried Chicken, Snails and Muskrats)
- Don Curto
At one point in my food/cooking
life I entered the school of "Fresh/Simple/Local,"
via James Beard, probably. That approach was later brought to the
pinnacle of perfection by Alice Waters at her justifiably renowned
Chez Panisse in Berkeley. It was only much later that I discovered
that Italian cooking has been following that rule forever. It now
seems clear to me that any national or regional cooking of quality
follows the same path. It took a long time to get past jumbled "continental
cooking" with sauce upon sauce and plates that look artful but
are tasteless. In the past forty years of course, there has been a
food and technical revolution (we are still in it) and the boundaries
for seeking "local" and fresh have been extended via the
Internet, around the world.
Below is a short story about fresh/simple/local in the
old days, gone awry.
Many years ago in an old city on the Middle Atlantic seaboard
I was introduced to escargot. Those plump gastropod mollusks were
served to me in an unusually fine restaurant—one that I could
afford only as a guest. My host was the owner and publisher of a newspaper.
I had recently joined the staff as a writer and copy editor with considerable
promise of being named managing editor, though it had been made clear
that this was by no means assured as the decision was subject to some
intense interviewing. I had left Korean conflict duty as general manager
of Leatherneck magazine in Washington, D.C. While my Marine Corps
and management credentials were very good, my newspaper editorial
credentials still were marginal, mostly reflecting work on much smaller
newspapers.
The publisher, now deceased, was a remarkable man. He
was a scion of a very prominent family with national recognition.
We later became friends (he was seven years older than I) and over
a fifteen-year period I learned of the advantages that come with great
wealth and a prominent family history going back to France and England,
and the stringent behavioral standards that went with that history.
My friend was a Princeton graduate, spoke Latin, Greek, Italian and
Spanish (and had travelled and studied in the parent countries) not
because he wanted to, but because it was expected of him. He was an
attorney, non-practicing, but spent most of his energy on politics.
He had read the classics, knew his opera, had a prodigious memory
for poetry, particularly liked limericks, all of which were obscene,
and could pack his bourbon away, as could I at that time. It was the
Marine Corps and alcohol that brought us close. He had never served
in the military and thought the Marines were just dandy. We both thought
that Jack Daniels Kentucky bourbon (black label, of course) was just
dandy, too.
The "food testing" began I think because he
thought that I was probably a little more than rough around the cultural
edges and if I was going to represent him on his newspaper I needed
some "education." We went one night to eat in a small restaurant
in South Philadelphia which was clearly on the shabby side but he
said had the best fried chicken in the East. When the order came it
did, indeed, look really good—just the right light brown color,
crisp, very thin breading, no grease on the plate. My friend waited
before starting to eat, watching me. The question, of course, was
simple: pick it up by hand or cut the meat off with a knife? I took
a knife and fork and severed the leg from the thigh and was about
to cut the meat from the thigh when he picked up his chicken leg entire
and saved me from committing a déclassé act.
Here's what he said: the manner in which one eats fried
chicken indicates class. Cul-turally poor people use a knife and fork,
as though that inherently clumsy act searches for a certain delicacy.
The only "right" way to eat fried chicken is with the fingers—pick
it up, tear the meat off with the teeth, suck the residue off your
fingers and enjoy the chicken. If one is from a culturally rich family,
he said, there is no reason to pretend to be delicate with an inherently
messy food. I'm still ambivalent as to whether I should cut my chicken
and demonstrate that I was in fact raised in a culturally poor family
or pick up the chicken and appear to know what is "correct."
Sometimes, knowing that those others in the restaurant trying to be
so delicate with knife and fork are just products of culturally poor
backgrounds gives one a feeling of great freedom. Fried chicken eat-en
out of hand does indeed seem to taste better. So, the rich are not
only different than you and I, as Fitzgerald said, but by simple acts
such as this they demonstrate that they are more free.
The escargot came some months after the chicken and after
I became editor. At a much more formal, business dinner in a quite
elegant restaurant near Rittenhouse Square I ordered the snails because
they were highly recommended and others were ordering them. I admitted
that I had never eaten snails and I was asked if I liked mushrooms.
I said that I did so they said that I would like snails, too, as there
is a similarity in both texture and taste. The escargot came tucked
into their original shells, soaking in an incredibly intoxicating
simple sauce of butter simmered with minced garlic and chopped parsley.
How could anything so simple be so good!
At this point it seemed logical for me to decide that
if the canned snails from France were this good, fresh snails, prepared
just before eating, would be even better. This was a really stupid
idea, as you will soon see.
Snails, first off, don't become escargot until they are
prepared for eating. Then the lowly, slow moving snail becomes an
escargot, a French term dating back to only the early 1890s. Not all
snails are edible. Most of what was available at that time came from
France where the snails were raised and fed special food to make them
fat for us to enjoy. Once I accepted this mission to find the perfect
fresh snail and turn him/her into wonderful escargot I found the task
harder than I had at first thought. After much telephoning and a lot
of talking to local market people I did find out that there was a
farmer in New Jersey who was trying to get into the escargot market
in New York City and was growing a French-type snail. So, in my ignorance
I decided to get a bushel of these, alive and kicking, so to speak,
and prepare some really fresh, local escargot. At that time there
was a wonderful local market with great fresh foods. I contacted an
Italian merchant who said that he was sure that with his "connections"
he could get a bushel for me. This was the beginning of my foray into
acquiring the very best local, fresh foods. I had read how the French
prepare the snails and was sure, in my ignorance, that I could do
it. The big day came and I went to pick up my snails. There they were,
the cute little devils, snuggled up together in their comfortable
bushel basket, with a top securely fastened. The top had small holes
in it so that air could get to the snails.
I took the basket home, put it on the kitchen floor, in
a corner, out of the way. Of course, I had later to show others what
real, live snails looked like. No one had the same amount of interest
that I did, so I carefully put the cover back on, had more than a
few cocktails in celebration of the morrow and went to bed. By now
you probably have guessed that I did not put the cover on securely.
Early in the morning, not feeling all that well, I came to the kitchen
to make the coffee and where there were once smooth, off-white walls
were knobby looking walls now almost totally covered with snails.
The little darlings had climbed out, most of them anyway, and in their
snail-like pace had climbed both walls and ceiling. Do you have any
idea how many snails there are in a bushel? Do you have any idea how
difficult it is to pry them from a smooth wall? Their ability to stick
is almost beyond belief. When I prepare escargots now they are from
a can. Local and fresh can go too far.
There is one more story from that period about the use
of local foods. There are a lot of muskrats in the marshes along the
Delaware River and trapping them was a local sport. Several Italian
families were famous for their muskrat spaghetti sauce, so I had to
try it. I did and that is enough of that story. One can carry fresh
and local too far.
—Don Curto
