The Hungarian manner of cooking snails is, after the boiling and cleaning, to cut them small, mix them with chopped-up anchovies, and to serve them hot on hot toast, a squeeze of lemon and a dash of red pepper giving the dish its final touches. The curiosity of the Hungarian method of cooking and serving the snails is that no man, unless he was told, would know what he was eating.
Francatelli, in his “Modern Cook,” strongly recommends snails, and gives a method of cooking them, nearly akin to the usual French way. In fact, nearly all foreign cookery books give one or more recipes, either as broth, stew, or à la Bourgignon.
The “London Gazette” of 23 March, 1739, tells us that “Mrs. Joanna Stephens received from the Government five thousand pounds for revealing the secret of her famous cure for stone in the bladder. This consisted chiefly of egg shells and Snails, mixed with Soap, Honey, and Herbs.” Rather earlier than this date “Lady Honeywood’s Snail Water” was much used for complaints of the chest.
Defoe, writing in 1722, described a cookshop “where you may bespeak a dinner for four or five shillings a head up to a guinea or what sum you will”; one of the items being “a ragout of fatted snails.”
Has any literary critic ever noticed the curious similarity between a verse of Sir John Suckling and Robert Herrick, who were, of course, contemporaries? I am reminded of it because Snails are used by the latter where Mice are referred to by the former.
In Sir John Suckling’s “Ballad upon a Wedding,” everybody knows the lines:—
Her feet beneath her petticoat
Like little mice stole in and out.
In Robert Herrick’s poem, “On Her Feet,” occurs this verse:—
Her pretty feet like snails, did creep