Escargots à la bourguignonne

Roman snails indicate that you are in an area rich in calcium. After all, they need lime to build a cottage. If you want (to find or cultivate)them, so do not look elsewhere.

Fresh snails have to fast a week to clean the intestinal canals. Three days they get to eat flour, then nothing. If they are empty, they withdraw and close their house down.
Put them three hours in water with vinegar and 1 tablespoon coarse salt. Wash the snails in clean water until the mucus is gone.

Put them in a kettle of water to 4 cm. above the snails. Add olive oil, oregano, bay leaf, garlic, onion, salt and pepper and simmer on low heat for 2 to 3 hours. They must cook slowly, so they come out of their houses. Foam during cooking regularly.

Remove each snail with a toothpick out of his shell and remove at the end of the body the black part that contains the organs.
Make the "court bouillon" by cooking the snails in a pan with 1 liter of white wine, two glasses of water, bouquet garni (herbs), onion containing 3 cloves, salt, pepper and 2 carrots with the lid on the pan until they are soft.
Make 'farce' by chopped garlic and parsley, salt and pepper mixed with butter.
Put a spoonful of this farce in each cochlea, a snail on it, arrange them in an ovenproof dish and cook for 5 minutes in a hot oven.
There are several other recipes, with brandy, lemon juice, garlic...

The Romans were fond of in milk fattened snails.
Clean the snails and remove the membrane that they seal them with. Put them in a vase with milk and add a few salt. The next day there must be some milk added and dirt removed from the vase. The snails are bold enough when they are no longer able to withdraw in their shell. Fry them in oil and then cover them with garum and wine.

To remove foreign substances from the digestive tract snails were at the Romans fed three days with bran, flour, spices and milk.
Before cooking, they were salted, making the mucus could be (according to Apicius) better washed of.

Garum: Roman fish sauce: waste and entrails of fish salted and fermented for 2 months.
The ancient Greeks called it around 1250 BC “garos', and in the Middle Ages is was called more northern 'garon’.

He ordered escargots and got empty snail shells.”Waiter!?"

"Don’t worry sir, they cannot be far away jet!"