“Gourmet /n./ Anyone whom, when you fail to finish something strange or revolting, remarks that it’s an acquired taste and that you’re leaving the best part.” – Anonymous
Welcome back to The Land of Desire, a French history podcast dedicated to exploring all the weird adventures, mysteries and surprising backstories behind French cultural icons. This week’s episode continues my new series which I’m really excited about: La Belle Époque, the Golden Age of Paris. This week I’ll focus on one of the weirdest, most recognizable symbols of French cuisine: the escargot. Escargot is a funny little contradiction: disgusting to think about, delicious to eat. The lowest life form imaginable, served at gourmet prices. An iconic emblem of French identity – only famous thanks to hardworking immigrants. This week, explore the curious history of the edible snail, while learning about the dark storm clouds starting to form over Golden Age France, in today’s episode, “A Long Way to Escargot”. P.S. Check out the rest of this blog post for restaurant recommendations in Paris next time you’re craving escargot!
Episode 7: “A Long Way To Escargot”
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Where to Eat Escargot in Paris:
L’Escargot Montorgueil
38 Rue Montorgueil, 75001 Paris, France
Near the Centre Pompidou, another blast from escargot’s past is thriving: L’Escargot Montorgueil. L’escargot Montorgueil represents snail splendor: burning candelabras, , etched glass, winding staircases, even the ceiling was a gift from the great actress Sarah Bernhardt. Here, you can experience escargot at the height of its sophistication and decadence. Yet, as we’ve seen, escargot is for everyone. More often than not, snails have actually been the food of the working class – and a bit of that history is left to us as well.
La Maison de l’Escargot
79 Rue Fondary, 75015 Paris, France
Next time you’re walking around the 15th arrondissement of Paris, just south of the Eiffel Tower, duck down Rue Fondary. Here in 1894, amidst all the new brasseries of the age, a small shop opened up offering one specialty: La Maison de l’Escargot featured fresh snails, and only the best. You could purchase the petit-gris or little greys, or the famous escargot de Bourgogne, just as Talleyrand himself consumed. Back when the shop first opened, competitors all over town offered the same fare, and snails could be had for pennies. Now, of course, in a Europe flooded with snails from Poland, Greece, and even Ireland, these snail shops have all closed their doors. All of them, that is, except this one. Today, you can still enter La Maison de l’Escargot and purchase fresh French snails, raised no further away than Burgundy.
Le Comptoir de La Gastronomie
34 Rue Montmartre, 75001 Paris, France
Oh, okay, I’m fudging this one. Le Comptoir isn’t historic – just delicious! If you want to eat the same escargot in the picture above, don’t miss it. They have foie gras ravioli. Foie gras ravioli.
Transcript
Bienvenue, and welcome back to the Land of Desire, a podcast about the weird, wacky and wonderful stories from French history. I’m your host, Diana, and before we get started with this week’s episode, I want to thank all of you who have reached out with emails and comments in the last few weeks. It’s been a pleasure getting to know you! This week, I want to ask all of you a favor – if you’re enjoying the show, could you please spread the word this week? Like The Land of Desire on Facebook, and post about it to your News Feed. Tweet about the show. Rate and review the show on iTunes. Mention it on Reddit. The only way people find out about The Land of Desire is through word of mouth, so if you enjoy the program, please help spread the word. Thank you so much – back to the show!
This week, we’ll continue our series on the Belle Époque, focusing on the massive waves of immigration pouring into Paris, especially from the rest of the French countryside. The era in which our ideas about true Parisian identity were being formed was precisely the same time in which that identity was being threatened by outsiders. What was the result? A cosmopolitan city, a multicultural hodge-podge in which immigrants could become titans, and the snobbiest aristocratic French nationalists could spend their nights out eating a bunch of grub trucked in from the middle of nowhere and cooked up the way they do in the old country. Right as France teetered on the brink of cultural warfare, as voices rose up to reject all that was new and foreign and different and scary, the most unlikeliest of dishes found its way to the spotlight: escargot. I love escargots for being weird little contradictions: they’re absolutely revolting to think about, but delicious to eat. They’re considered fancy, snobby food, when they’re the lowest life form on the menu. Finally, escargot is right up there with frogs legs and brie when it comes to iconic French food – but the only reason the French eat escargot today is because some desperate refugees from the Germany border hitched their way into Paris with a snail and a dream. Please enjoy this week’s episode, “A Long Way To Escargot”
Like everything else, eating snails was invented by the Romans. Back then, Romans cooked snails the same way they cook most things today: a little oil, a little vinegar, a little time on the grill. They were pretty popular. One ancient Roman farmer even had a ferry service, sailing up and down the Italian coast to deliver big fat snails to hungry rich people. He wasn’t the only one spreading the good word: Julius Caesar probably introduced the French to their first proper eatin’ snails while he was trying to conquer the Gauls. The snails were a big hit in ancient France – too big. Everybody was eating them, and if there’s one food rich people hate eating, it’s a food that poor people are eating. Snails may have begun as a food for Roman elites, but by the Middle Ages, snails were a food for the grubby lower classes. The lower classes loved snails. And who can blame them – if your other options are bread or more carrots, you’ll take any protein that’s offered to you, thank you very much. Meat you can grow yourself, basically for free? Yes, please! But remember, snails are only cool if rich people are eating them. Poor people kept right on eating them because, you know, cheap dinner, but it was no longer the snack of the rich. By the 1600s, all of a sudden the idea of eating snails is gross, and seriously uncool. Cookbooks which were tacky enough to include recipes for snails basically apologized for including the equivalent of a mail-order cheese log in its pages. “Ugh,” the cookbooks seemed to say, “if you must.” Fancy Paris turned up its nose at the humble snail. By the end of the 1600s, one French courtier wrote of his astonishment that anyone had created “this depraved dish in order to satisfy the extravagance of gluttony.” Sorry, lil guys. Your day will come again.
So, for about three hundred years, snails were out of fashion. But you know what? So are mail-order cheese logs and Hickory Farms stills sells a million billion of them every year. So maybe you couldn’t eat snails at court, but if you trekked out to the countryside, farmers were still eating them regularly. Folks out in the boonies figured out that if you cover anything in garlic butter, it’s going to taste good. At some point in history, some undiscovered genius cooked his snails in garlic, butter, parsley, white wine, and cognac and then served the snails inside their own shells. Seasons changed, kings were born and died, centuries passed one to the next, and the countryside kept the dream of s nail dinners alive.
For hundreds of years, the only people in Paris who already knew about these garlic butter bombs were the wine salesmen, who would travel out to Burgundy every few years to check out the grapes. While they were talking shop, the salesmen would be served the same dish of escargots bourginonne, only these snails had been picked off the grapevines days ago. Back in Paris, I’m assuming those wine sellers sat around grumpy, unable to satisfy their craving for snails without looking like a lunatic. Luckily for this small group of snail-lovers, it was about to get a lot easier to send snails cross-country. By the middle of the 18th century, Paris welcomed a technological wonder: the train.
For about twenty years, France had experimented with the train, building short rail lines here and there, but it wasn’t until the 1840s and 50s that the iconic train stations of Paris finally opened. Six railway stations circling the city limits brought the world to Paris’s doorstep with incredible speed. In addition to the exotic goods arriving from every corner of the globe, the trains also brought to Paris all the treasures of France, including those big, fat, juicy snails which had always been the pride of the countryside. Trains moved so fast, the snails could be packed inside little crates stuffed with cabbage leaves and arrive fattened up in Paris just a few days later. Now the trick was to find someone in Paris who knew the right way to prepare these new additions to the marketplace. As it turned out, the trains didn’t just bring in foods and art and treasure from around the world. They also brought people.
On the border between France and Germany lives a hotly contested little strip of land named Alsace-Lorraine. If that name rings a bell, it’s only because France and Germany have used that little strip of land as an excuse to go to war, oh, 100 or 200 times. Since Alsace changed countries every 100 years or so, the locals adopted a curious mixture of both cultures, eating German-sounding dishes like sauerkraut alongside foie gras, speaking a local dialect which sounds just as Franco-German as you’d expect. Yet the Alsatians had participated enthusiastically in the French revolution, inspired by the revolution’s ideas about freedom – especially freedom of religion. Alsace had one of the largest and oldest Jewish populations in Europe. During the first half of the 1800s, Alsace found itself constantly hosting various parts of the French army – after all, they were the first line of defense against the Germans. But having an extra million soldiers in your neck of the woods was not exactly a picnic for the locals. As the military population grew and grew, jobs for unskilled, uneducated young men who weren’t soldiers shrank and shrank, until finally it made more sense to find leave home altogether in search of better money. It was time to get out of dodge, and here’s where Alsace being part of France came in handy: Paris was just a short train ride away! Better yet, Paris was getting fun! As we’ve discussed in previous episodes, after the wars and remodeling of the middle of the 19th century, Paris transformed into a pleasure palace. New shops and restaurants were popping up out of the rubble just in time to serve a new middle class of Parisians with money burning holes in their pockets. The new railway line taking Alsatians directly into Paris had opened in 1852, and you could make the journey in an afternoon. If you were a twenty-something growing up in a miserable, overcrowded and underemployed village, wouldn’t you hop the train to gay Paree? Better yet, what if you had a trick up your sleeve – a trick Parisians couldn’t resist, a trick that you were convinced would make your fortune? What if you had a trick called… beer?
The first professional Alsatian brewery opened in the 1200s, and by the turn of the 19th century there were over 250 breweries in Strasbourg alone. Those miserable twentysomethings hitching a ride to Paris picked a great time to introduce their talents: Paris was young, flush with cash, and ready to drink. In 1864, one of these Alsatian refugees, Frederic Bofinger, stepped off the train. Bofinger made his way to the Place de la Bastille. Last time we checked in with the Bastille, it was a steaming pile of rubble, soon to be replaced by a guillotine. Well, that was the Paris of the past. This was the new Paris! In the new Paris, the Bastille neighborhood had just gaineda new train station, which would ferry Parisians out of the city and into the suburbs. This was a big deal, because back then, weird French taxes meant it was cheaper to drink in the suburbs. It should come as no surprise that the train station became a pretty popular place on Saturday nights. Bofinger saw his opportunity – all around him were homesick Alsatian refugees and working class party people, all in need of a drink. Bofinger opened up a little one-room shack, and inside he offered something new and exciting: fresh beer on draft! To accompany this beer, Bofinger offered, what else, Alsatian food: sauerkraut (or as they call it, choucroute), sausages, oysters, onion soup and, you guessed it, escargots. Alsatians had been cooking escargots out in the countryside for centuries, but their recipe isn’t the familiar one we know today. In fact, the famous garlic, butter, parsley and wine recipe was developed in the region of Burgundy. In the new Paris, however, full of newcomers pouring in from every corner of the country, Bofinger would have had the opportunity to taste what they’d been doing on the other side of the nation. He knew a hit when he tasted one. So onto the menu they went. Bofinger had created a whole new kind of dining experience: the brasserie, or brewery. Brasseries are very similar to the classic American diner: they’re casual, fun, affordable, and – how exciting – always open! Parisians were bored of their traditional restaurants and cafes, and the new working class went nuts for this new type of destination. Bofinger’s luck was about to get even better: the same year he opened his brasserie, a nasty insect invaded the vineyards of France. Over 40% of the grapes in France were ruined, and for the next decade, wine was extraordinarily expensive. Now that wine was out of the picture, it was beer’s time to shine. For the first time, Paris was beer-crazy. In 1830, the French brewed 135,482 gallons of beer. By 1880, a mere 50 years, that amount doubled to 373,954 gallons.
As if the wine crisis wasn’t enough, Bofinger was about to capitalize on another French disaster. In 1870, France lost its war against the Prussians. Remember our earlier episodes about the siege, and how France was forced to pay ridiculous amounts of gold to the Prussians as punishment, and let the Prussians march through Paris? Well, there was one more term of France’s surrender that I haven’t mentioned in this podcast yet: once again, France handed Alsace back to Germany. Forced to declare their allegiance to either France or Germany, massive numbers of Alsatians hopped on the train to Paris. Alsatian refugees were no longer bored young men in search of better jobs – they were entire families, seizing the opportunity to stay French, especially Jewish families desperate to maintain their religious freedoms. By 1872, 48% of Jewish men and 36% of Jewish women in Paris were from Alsace-Lorraine. Many of them arrived at the Bastille station, and the first sight they saw? Parisians lining up around the block, waiting to hand money over to an Alsatian man just like them, in exchange for exactly the kind of food they ate back home. For some of these refugees, the brasseries were a place for them to spend the new paychecks they were able to earn in the big city. For other refugees, the brasseries were the place where they intended to earn those paychecks, and they opened up brasseries of their own all over the city. As Paris tried to recover from the devastating blow to its wine industry, an exciting new law opened up a world of possibilities for drinkers around town. Before, anyone wishing to sell alcohol needed to open up a specialized shop and apply for a specific permit from the authorities. Now, though, all anyone needed to do to sell alcohol was post up a little written declaration. Basically a little Post-It in the window that says “My shop sells beer. Signed, Pierre.” What a time to be alive! Brasseries became an institution of daily life in Paris, and with them, the Alsatian foods they served became a staple element of French cuisine.
By the end of the 19th century, Parisians couldn’t get enough escargots. If you weren’t making money running your own brasserie, maybe you were raking it in as a snail shell collector, digging through the trash of fine restaurants to find the leftover shells with leftover garlic butter sauce inside, to sell back to cheap restaurants. Back in the countryside, wrote Scientific American in 1875, “Throngs of women and children scour the country, collecting the snails in immense numbers and depositing them in little tracts of land, enclosed with simply a trail of sawdust.” By that time, Parisians were consuming nearly 60 to 80 million snails each year, with some restaurants serving up 12,000 escargots per day. Escargots had moved beyond a passing fad, or an fancy delicacy: it was truly a classic French dish, as much a part of a Frenchman’s diet as a baguette or roasted chicken. At a time in which foreign people, foods, ideas and inventions were being introduced in overwhelming numbers, escargots were the perfect assimilators: once unfamiliar and exotic and a little scary, the humble escargot arrived to Paris by train and instantly wove itself into the thread of daily life.
Unfortunately, the Alsatians themselves were not so lucky. The Belle Époque had so far been an age of unstoppable innovation, radical ideas, and a full-speed ahead charge towards modernity. Paris was now a sophisticated, cosmopolitan city, whose medieval history had been erased from the ground up. The construction of modern Paris had attracted massive waves of immigrants, who stayed on afterwards to find work in the new factories of the Industrial Revolution, living in the new working-class apartments now filling up the edges of the city. But the old guard of Paris wasn’t giving up without a fight. The same conservative, Catholic population which had fled Paris during the Commune now wanted back in. The Paris they found was unrecognizable: soaring rents, scandalous nightclubs, abstract art, and, worst of all, empty churches. France was about to experience one of the greatest culture clashes it had ever known, and the consequences would shape not only the Belle Époque, but the entire 20th century. At the center of it all would be the world’s unluckiest Alsatian. Please join me in two weeks for my next episode: The Dreyfus Affair.
Thanks for listening to The Land of Desire. My name’s Diana, and this is a one-woman show: I write, research and produce every episode. For each episode, I’ll post extra content at www.thelandofdesire.com – this week, I’ll be sharing some historical photographs as well as some restaurant recommendations for anybody who wants to take a trip down memory lane next time they’re in Paris. While you’re there, you can leave a comment or send me a message. Thanks to all of you who did so this week, I hope I’ve gotten caught up! If you have a moment, please rate and review the show on iTunes. You can also subscribe to this show through Stitcher or the Google Play store. Like the show on Facebook to get episode updates and news about the show. Thanks so much for your support, and I hope you’ll all join me again in two weeks for another episode. Until then, au revoir!
Further Reading:
As some confused students of French already know, Parisians often refer to their city as L’Escargot. This is because the city of Paris is laid out in a unique spiral shape, with the oldest arrondissements (or districts) closest to the center, and the newest arrondissements flung out on the shell.
Want to try an escargot recipe from the history books? This blog on 19th century French cuisine includes a number of different historical preparations from different parts of the world.
In 2008, an unlucky Parisian attempted to bring their snails on board a high-speed train. Non! Apparently, snails need their own train ticket.
The Guardian revisits Bofinger.
For more information on the relationship between 19th century immigration to Paris (especially from the suburbs), check out Anne-Caroline Sieffert’s terrific essay: Paris and Its Province: Building A Nation and Its Capital.
Sources:
Dawn of the Belle Époque (Mary McAuliffe, 2011)
Barker, Michael. “Brasseries, Restaurants and Cafés in Paris, and a Gazetteer of Establishments of Decorative Interest.” The Journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850 – the Present 22 (1998): 82-89. Web.
Zeyl, Robert. “La Culture du Houblon en Alsace.” Annales De Géographie 39.222 (1930): 569-78. Web.
La Culture du Houblon en Alsace (Robert Zeyl, Annales de Géographie, 1930.)
Dictionnaire de Cuisine Pratique (Joseph Favre, 1905.)
Beer consumption figures taken from the August 1881 issue of The Brewers’ Guardian, a British trade publication.
Yvernes, E. “The Consumption of Alcohol in Various Countries.” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 53.1 (1890): 113-27. Web.