{"id":2583,"date":"2012-10-17T10:14:22","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T17:14:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov\/wordpress\/?p=2583"},"modified":"2012-10-17T10:14:22","modified_gmt":"2012-10-17T17:14:22","slug":"snail-wrangler-york-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/10\/17\/snail-wrangler-york-times\/","title":{"rendered":"The Snail Wrangler – From the New York Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/10\/17\/dining\/raising-sought-after-snails-in-california.html<\/a><\/p>\n

EVEN if you love eating snails, it is possible that you have never given much thought to the way they live.<\/p>\n

Maybe you assume that they are weak and slow, enduring lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau once described the bulk of humanity. If so, Mary Stewart, a snail rancher whose mollusks are sought after by top chefs all over the country (including Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller), will not hesitate to set you straight.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are the loudest, noisiest munchers you\u2019ve ever heard,\u201d she said on a hot Central Valley morning, smoking a cigarette in a small air-conditioned room attached to a farm stand a few steps from her house.<\/p>\n

Chefs at restaurants like Tertulia<\/a> and Vinegar Hill House<\/a> in New York, Moto<\/a> in Chicago and the Walrus and the Carpenter<\/a> in Seattle cook with her snails because of the care she puts into cultivating and cleaning them. That attention to detail fosters tenderness, an absence of grit and a fresh taste with, at times, a very slight note of basil.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s hard to imagine what it actually means to care for snails unless you visit Ms. Stewart, who lives in a mobile home in this agricultural area north of Bakersfield, Calif. To raise delicious snails, you apparently have to know what makes them tick, and Ms. Stewart, who turned 64 a few weeks ago, has spent a couple of decades educating herself.<\/p>\n

She has learned that snails can move a lot faster than their reputation would suggest, especially when they pick up the lure of food. Spray them with mist, give them some crisp lettuce and \u201chere they come, just like cows at feeding time,\u201d she said. \u201cYou can hear them munching and crunching just like cattle. I\u2019m serious. They\u2019re fascinating. And they\u2019re so strong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Strong? \u201cThese puppies can really push,\u201d she said. Don\u2019t expect to contain them in, say, a box with a screen set on top. \u201cIf enough of them get up in the corner, they can actually push that screen loose.\u201d<\/p>\n

They also lead erotic lives of variety and vigor. \u201cThey\u2019re hermaphrodites,\u201d she said. \u201cThey have orgies. I\u2019m serious. When they mate, they\u2019re connecting male and female, female and male.\u201d<\/p>\n

It may often look as if snails aren\u2019t doing anything. Ms. Stewart has learned that they are doing quite a bit. \u201cThat\u2019s all they\u2019re doing, is making love,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

As part of their ritual of copulation, snails shoot each other with something known as a \u201clove dart.\u201d \u201cLove\u201d is certainly a word you could use to describe how Ms. Stewart feels about her gastropod herd, but after years of caring for and harvesting thousands of snails, she has figured out that there\u2019s nothing romantic about letting one of those love darts pierce your skin.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like a splinter,\u201d she said. \u201cIt hurts. I shoved one under my finger one time because I was cleaning the bin. Oh, that sucker was sore for weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although she lives far away from any nexus of fine dining, results of Ms. Stewart\u2019s labor (and suffering) can be found on many ambitious menus.<\/p>\n

Nathan Myhrvold, the man behind the \u201cModernist Cuisine\u201d cookbooks, has cooked with her snails. Harold Dieterle has sporadically served them at Perilla<\/a>, in the West Village, with hand-cut pasta and guanciale<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At Moto, in Chicago, the chef de cuisine, Richie Farina \u2014 using branches that he collects in the nearby woods \u2014 places the snails in a row so that they appear to be crawling up the stick in a tangle of (depending on what arrives from the distributor that week) wild mushrooms, edible flowers, a variety of greens and a garlic-herb \u201cmoss.\u201d In a less theatrical mode, Brian Leth, the chef at Vinegar Hill House in Brooklyn, pairs the snails with olive-oil-poached baby artichokes on flatbread.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s not an ingredient I would ever cook with unless I could get something of this quality,\u201d Mr. Leth said.<\/p>\n

A signature dish at Tertulia, Seamus Mullen\u2019s Asturian-cider-house-style restaurant in the West Village, is arroz a la plancha, a sort of griddle-crisped risotto<\/a> in which Ms. Stewart\u2019s snails emerge as earthy nubs of texture within a mound of rice, mushrooms and jam\u00f3n Ib\u00e9rico. Compared with canned snails, which Mr. Mullen finds \u201cdisgusting,\u201d Ms. Stewart\u2019s impart an herbal undercurrent and a \u201cfunky nuttiness\u201d without the ick factor of interior grit.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re purged really well,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s a big part of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Many chefs catch word about Ms. Stewart\u2019s snails through a distributor, Mikuni Wild Harvest<\/a>, a Seattle-based company that started nine years ago to bring foraged foods to cooks. (Through its Web site, Mikuni sells partly precooked shipments of the snails for $39.75 a pound.) Tyler Gray, one of the company\u2019s founders, said the sales representatives tap into Ms. Stewart\u2019s snail lore to help get chefs intrigued.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe\u2019s a pretty eccentric woman \u2014 and in love with her snails,\u201d he said. \u201cShe is one of these people who are so passionate about what they do that it can\u2019t help but be infectious.\u201d It also doesn\u2019t hurt that she may have cornered the market.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf chefs are not using Mary\u2019s fresh snails, then they are most likely using a canned product from France,\u201d Mr. Gray said. Ms. Stewart is flattered whenever she hears of another chef getting on board (\u201cIt\u2019s gratifying to know that my product is wanted and appreciated,\u201d she said) even if she\u2019s more inclined to heat up her mollusks in Pepperidge Farm pastry shells with some shallots, parsley and sweet butter.<\/p>\n

She owes her induction into the snail realm to an epiphany. It came one December day in 1981 when she picked up the food section of The Bakersfield Californian and saw a headline: \u201cEscargot … Watch Them Go!\u201d Other readers might have tittered or recoiled, but Ms. Stewart read the accompanying recipes, and something clicked.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said, \u2018I want to make some of these dishes,\u2019 \u201d said Ms. Stewart, who has saved a copy of the section for more than 30 years.<\/p>\n

The idea of eating snails did not seem unusual to a woman whose childhood was spent in the bayous of Arkansas. \u201cI was raised in the South, honey, and let me tell you, we grew up on red squirrel, venison, frog\u2019s legs,\u201d she said. \u201cWe were dirt poor. The one thing I\u2019ve never eaten is possum. When I saw the article, to me the recipes sounded good. I\u2019d never eaten snails, but I wanted to try them.\u201d<\/p>\n

After a while, she realized that she was surrounded by the very bumper crop she longed for: the garden snails known as Helix aspersa<\/a> roamed free throughout the orchards of the Central Valley, and were viewed as leaf-munching pests.<\/p>\n

European settlers are believed to have originally brought this invasive species to America as food \u2014 so couldn\u2019t Ms. Stewart make use of them? She sought the advice of experts, including an entomology professor at the University of California, Riverside, and in 1989 began a career as a snail rancher.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt took at least, I\u2019d say, 15 years to learn how to raise them and grow them and get the job done right,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause there were really no books on it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Snails may come across as barely sentient, but over time Ms. Stewart learned that they are highly sensitive. They get claustrophobic. Pen up too many in a tight space, and they start to slide into panic-induced die-offs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen they get overcrowded, they put off an odor,\u201d she said. \u201cMany of them drop dead and the rest of them stay alive. It took me a long, long time to figure that all out.\u201d<\/p>\n

How to purge them so that \u201ctheir bellies are clean,\u201d how to maintain the right temperature so they don\u2019t freeze up or freak out, what to feed them (they go crazy for watermelon): it took Ms. Stewart a long time to become an expert on those matters, too.<\/p>\n

Which is why she resists letting visitors know many of her trade secrets, including the precise location of the herd.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s certain things I\u2019m not going to tell you,\u201d she said. (Her distributors advertise her product as \u201cbasil-fed snails,\u201d but basil is by no means the only thing she feeds them, and a faint trace of herb probably comes from a different part of the process.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe secret of raising snails?\u201d she went on. \u201cSnails do what they want to do when they want to do it. As soon as I feel like I really know snails well, they\u2019ll turn around and do something I\u2019ve never seen them do before.\u201d<\/p>\n

After holding court for a while, Ms. Stewart got up from her chair and walked over to a refrigerator. She opened it, grabbed a glass jar, opened that and poured its shiny, slithering contents into a bowl.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re welcome to taste some, if you want,\u201d she said. \u201cEscargot caviar!\u201d<\/p>\n

Who knew? Snails lay eggs, and Ms. Stewart has dreams of selling their pearl-like pellets to chefs who keep up a constant quest for odd new ingredients. (When the eggs pop in the mouth, they release a liquid that tastes milder than the briny fluid inside salmon roe.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe snail caviar is really cool,\u201d said Mr. Gray of Mikuni. \u201cThere is no one else in North America who\u2019s doing that. I think it\u2019s going to be one of those exceptional products, and chefs are going to be fighting over it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then again, it\u2019s hard to say how much longer Ms. Stewart, whose husband, Vernon, died in February, will remain committed to the careful shepherding of mollusks. The snail trade has its downside.<\/p>\n

\u201cHarvesting snails is one of the dirtiest jobs in the world,\u201d she said. Which is why, not long ago, she found herself mulling the idea of retirement \u2014 and wondering how she might spend her days.<\/p>\n

\u201cGuess what I was going to do?\u201d she said. \u201cI was going to raise butterflies.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Maybe you assume that they are weak and slow, enduring lives of quiet desperation, as Thoreau once described … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\r\nThe Snail Wrangler - From the New York Times - CDFA's Planting Seeds Blog<\/title>\r\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\r\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov\/wordpress\/index.php\/2012\/10\/17\/snail-wrangler-york-times\/\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Snail Wrangler - From the New York Times - CDFA's Planting Seeds Blog\" \/>\r\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2012\/10\/17\/dining\/raising-sought-after-snails-in-california.html EVEN if you love eating snails, it is possible that you have never given much thought to the way they live. 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