‘You are what you eat’ is no more true than with snails
AT A GLANCE
There was just enough time to wine-purge the kuhol and boil them in wine-spiked water with bay leaves and onions—a merciful death. They were drunk and felt no pain.
One of the most expensive meal starters is escargot, French snails cooked in garlic butter and served in their shells. The snails, raised in grape farms, spend their lives munching on grape leaves, which give them a distinct flavor and tenderness. Kept alive while being fed organically grown vegetables and milk until it is time to cook them, French escargot is very pricy and rare. Away from these farms, escargot meat is sold in cans with their shells in separate packs.
During trips overseas early in our marriage, Vic kept ordering escargot whenever we dined at a European-themed restaurant, inspiring me to serve him the dish in our home. The problem was where to get French snails. I researched and learned how escargot are raised.
Months of experimentation with thousands of native kuhol finally rewarded me with snails that are indistinguishable in taste and texture from the ones raised in France.
Over several decades, I have served escargot-style snails to hundreds of dinner guests who were delightfully surprised to learn that the snails were raised in my kitchen.
What kuhol eat
I loved eating ginataang kuhol just about anywhere until I joined my cousins gathering kuhol from the ricefields one rainy day when I was 10.
The fields were flooded, rousing the hibernating kuhol from slumber and sending them creeping and crawling all over. They climbed stubs of newly harvested rice, crossed rice paddies, clung to stalks which they left leafless. They were eating everything!
Snails voraciously gobble up all plant matter along their path, leaving black thread-like waste matter as they move on. A snail is like a tube: Food comes in, goes through its body, gets digested, and is expelled as waste. The body absorbs the flavor of whatever food it ingests. When one buys kuhol, one never knows where they come from and what they ate.
“You are what you eat” came flashing through my mind as I decided to raise my own clean kuhol, dissatisfied with Grandma’s simple system of leaving snails overnight in a covered basin with a little water.
Observing that Lola’s snails still bore traces of mud and scum after an evening soak, I experimented. I threw out the water they were soaking in, rinsed the snails twice and poured in fresh water. Then they were fed freshly chopped kangkong leaves.
The next day, their water was clearer, although still dotted with dark threads of waste matter. I rinsed them again and sprinkled stale bread crumbs that they readily grabbed. A few hours later their waste secretions were lighter colored and no longer slimy.
I went one step further and rinsed them one more time, scattering more bread crumbs as their last overnight meal. The next morning, there was not a single speck of dirt in their pale beige secretions. Over the family lunch that day, Grandpa noted that my ginataang kuhol tasted very fresh and the gravy was without sand, soil, and foreign matter, unlike the stuff they had gotten used to. My kuhol diskarte became a family secret.
Seventy years later, the wife of my grandson served an excellent bowl of adobong kuhol at the baptism of my first great-grandchild. When guests asked where she got the clean-tasting, grit-free snails, she looked at me, smiled and said, “Secret!”
Deliciously drunk
Our first wedding anniversary dinner with friends at our tiny Hong Kong flat was my first chance to impress our colleagues, all foreign correspondents like Vic and I were at the time. When I found escargot plates and special snail tongs with tiny forks to match, I decided to serve French-style escargot.
It was February 1978 and the nation was preparing to elect delegates to the first Batasang Pambansa or National Assembly. Ninoy Aquino, campaigning behind bars, was heading the opposition ticket. International news agencies sent crews to cover all the press conferences and anti-government rallies. I was commuting between Hong Kong and Manila weekly. On one such trip I brought to Hong Kong a box of snails all purged and ready to be cooked.
They had spent four days purging on veggies and bread and were ready for their last meal—bread soaked in wine.
My early morning flight was perfect. There was just enough time to wine-purge the kuhol and boil them in wine-spiked water with bay leaves and onions—a merciful death. They were drunk and felt no pain. After 15 minutes, they were tender enough to be drained, removed from their shells, and tossed in a garlic-parsley-butter bath.
The last step was to return them to their shells, arrange the shells on the snail plates, fill the shells with more butter mixture, and bake them for five to 10 minutes or until bubbly. They were perfect with crusty bread.
At the end of the meal, a couple of our guests wanted to try their hands at snail farming. I gave them dozens of snails in bamboo baskets lined with lettuce leaves. It was one of the most memorable meals Vic and I hosted.
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