What Is Different Between Common Garden Snail And Escargot

Mark Matcho

Is there a difference between regular snails and the snails eaten in France as escargot, or could I head out to the garden and toss the pesky critters into my frying pan?

Feh. That said -- and far be it from AF to judge a fellow harshly simply for eating hermaphroditic, mucus-secreting vermin -- fire up your oven. The common garden snail found here in the U.S. -- Helix aspersa, the European brown snail -- is among those served in gay Paree, and also in the typical uppity-goy American joint.

Note well, however, that you can't just snatch 'em up and scarf 'em down. Snail hunter and escargot chef Victor Yool says you must first "put them through at least a two-week purging cycle, because there's no telling what they ate" -- insecticide, for example, or a plant like foxglove, which is toxic to human beings, though not to the French. Yool maintains his snails in a plastic bin, feeds them cornmeal and water, and waits for them to poop out whatever they've ingested prior to their capture.

When they're good to go, Yool boils his snails for ten to fifteen minutes. "This forms an incredibly disgusting scum that you must keep cleaning off," he says. "When the scum is gone, you know the snails are okay." He then takes them from their shells; dices the meat finely; adds butter, olive oil, garlic, and parsley; restuffs the shells; and bakes "until they're bubbling -- at most fifteen minutes. Or you can put them into puff pastry and avoid the shell altogether."

Yool recommends serving them with a white wine or a mellow red, and, of course, a plain brown vomit bag.

Can it snow on a beach? I know it wouldn't stick, but has snowflake ever met sand anywhere?

It can, it does, and -- like Mrs. Fella's salmon loaf in AF's gullet -- it occasionally sticks. According to Steve Yancho, the chief of natural resources at Michigan's Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, "We've got 65 miles of Lake Michigan beach, and they do get very much buried in snow. Usually it starts around the first of November. Typically, I'd say by Thanksgiving we've got snow on the ground to stay for the season. Sometimes you get a sandwich effect -- several layers of sand and snow through the course of the winter."

Brian Murray, a Popham Beach State Park ranger in Phippsburg, Maine, wishes to inform you that it happens there as well. "We get snow right down to the beach," he says. "But it doesn't last long on the sand, 'cause the sand holds so much warmth. Any sun at all, it melts it right off."

And Kevin Griffin, owner of the Cold Salt Surf Shop in Sitka, Alaska, says, "There's plenty of times when we're hiking out to a break in the snow, hiking back in the snow, and surfing in the snow the whole time -- I can send you pictures if you want."

Answer Fella encouraged Mr. Griffin to send along his pictures, but they turned out to be nude shots of Mrs. Fella taken back in her salad days as a bunny at the Fairbanks Playboy Club.

Why does a fly that buzzes around the same spot for an hour bolt from the room as soon as I roll up a newspaper? Have flies really followed a Darwinian course to such a point that the survivors can recognize the sound of an impending fatal blow?

Not the sound, says Joe Conlon, technical adviser of the American Mosquito Control Association -- and by the way, if you ever get a chance to attend its annual convention, be sure to wear long sleeves and, above all, avoid the zapper -- who tells AF, "It's not that they recognize someone's rolling up a paper and is about to make them see Elvis -- they've got teeny-tiny hairs around their body, which are very sensitive to air currents. They can't hear, so it's the movement and the air currents created by rolling up the newspaper" that alert them.

John Byers, a professor of zoology at the University of Idaho, notes that flies' eyes are crucial to their survival. "If you look at a fly up close, its entire head is made up of two compound eyes, made up of thousands of individual eyes, each looking in a separate direction, which are very good at detecting motion."

As for Darwin's little theory, UC Davis entomology professor Jay Rosenheim explains that "flies, like any animal, live under a relatively constant threat -- it's not that somebody's trying to whack them with a newspaper, but that all animals have to be vigilant all the time for things that want to have them for dinner."

Which is why the interns frequently hawk a loogie in AF's coffee on the walk back from Starbucks, and also why Victor Yool is covered with a thin layer of mucus.

At what distance does electrical current in water no longer pose a danger? If I were somehow able to drop a plugged-in toaster into the water at a beach, how far off would a person need to be in order to be safe?

The short answer, according to Ned Forrester, senior engineer at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on lovely Cape Cod, is, "Don't do that."

The longer answer involves things like "dipole faults," "milliamps," and "fibrillating," which is what the human muscle known as the "heart" does in response to electrical current. And if it does so long enough, you'll die of a heart attack.

"It's not 'undangerous at any distance,'" says Forrester. "And it's not 'dangerous at every distance.' There's a falloff in danger with increased distance. But quantifying that is hard."

And because Mr. Forrester was too kind to add it, Answer Fella will: you twit.

Got a question? Send it to Answer Fella via esquire.com/talk.

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