Cooking with the Mamas: Escargot! Escargot!

In honor of Thanksgiving I asked the Mamas to cook up some escargot. One by one they recoiled in disgust. It turns out our gardener Mathieu was the only one brave enough to show me. You can find snails the size of kittens all over Congo, but it's really just people from the province of Équateur who eat them. And the French.

I had escargot on the brain because the girls have been singing non-stop their favorite prématernelle song entitled -what else- Escargot. Here are the words:

Escargot! Escargot!

Montre moi tes cornes

Ou sinon, je te mets 

Dans la casserole

Translation: Snail, snail. Show me your horns. Or I'll put you in the pot.

Yep. And that's exactly what we did. Here's the recipe for Papa Mathieu's Escargot.

Escargot 

Serves 40 squeamish people or 1 hungry gardener

20 large snails
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon oil 
1 tomato
1 onion
a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter

Place 20 snails freshly plucked from the ground, walls or tree trunks in a pot of boiling water.

Let them boil until they start to come out of their shells.

Drain. Then scoop them out with a fork and separate the nasty stuff from the rest of the body. (I was a little unclear about the difference here.)

Wash them and put back in the pot with salt and oil.

Cook for 5 minutes.

Then add onion, tomato, peanut butter (!) and a bit of water.

Let cook for 10 minutes. Serve to your children.

Who will immediately drop it on the floor.

Force them to eat it anyway.

Guilt them into eating it by explaining the cultural importance. They will eventually enjoy it.

But not as much as this guy...

Next up, Mathieu asks if he can cook us some frog. "Oh frog legs?" I asked. Nope, the whole thing.