Snail eggs ✦

Œufs d’escargot

What it is

A farmed snail lays fifty to a hundred eggs a year, each a white pearl three or four millimetres across with a real calcium shell that crunches. They taste of mushroom and leaf mould rather than of anything marine — the word caviar on the jar is commerce, not zoology.

In the kitchen

Never cook them: heat hardens the shell and the pearl turns to grit. Set them on something warm rather than in it — a potato, a beurre blanc, a still-warm brioche — and at the last second, at the table.

Goes with

Butter Garlic Parsley Potato Button mushroom Chervil Crème fraîche

Same species

Petit-gris snail

In season alongside

Amethyst deceiver Bay bolete Hind Roe deer Fallow deer Giant puffball

Something wrong here, or missing? Tell us