In praise of the snail

I may have published this piece before. But it is always good to recycle!

The picture is of my grandmother, Luisa, grandfather, Mario, and mother, Libushka. It was taken on 3 Feb 1925.

My mother was born in 1924 on the shores of Lake Como, Italy. She grew up in a household of widows – a widowed grandmother, a widowed mother, a widowed aunt (zia Caterian - the childless matriarch), a widowed cousin and her daughters. The ladies lived in a large house perched on the hillside above the village of Tremezzo. Their world was untouched by fridges and supermarkets so shopping was a daily event. The variety of their meals depended on their imaginations and what was in season, not on the selection on the supermarket shelves.

Now and again my mother talks of those days, like edible snapshots of times gone by.

Fast Food
Nonna (grandma) was sitting in front of the fire in the kitchen watching the flames die down. A young cousin came in offering her a large snail like a special treasure. Nonna took it and popped it into the embers. After a few minutes, she retrieved it, drew the snail from out of its shell and ate it with relish. ‘What a delicious snail’ she said ‘ where did you get it?’ The young cousin (who was rather simple), replied ‘The cemetery.’ Somehow it took the edge off nonna’s appetite.

Health Food
The mystery about this story, is what happened to the egg yolks. It’s also best to have your own hens for the recipe. Take 4 eggs (from hens you know and love), place them in a china bowl. Cover the eggs with freshly-squeezed lemon juice and set aside for a day or two until the egg shells have completely dissolved. Pour the liquid off into a bottle and add sugar and a big dollop of brandy. Shake well before pouring and partaking. It’s chocabloc with calcium. But my mother can’t remember what happened to those discarded jellified egg whites with their yolks inside.

Special Treats
The ladies in the house on the hill got their daily milk supply from a nephew in exchange for a piece of land. Every day my mother would go and collect the milk from where it was left in the hollow in a chestnut tree. The milk was in a tin with a handle to carry it. As a treat for La Befana (6th January, Epiphany) the aunt would skim the cream off the milk for a whole week and store it in a jug. At the end of the week the cream would be whipped until it was thick and white. Then she would make chestnut purée. Each child would get a tiny mountain of beige purée with a dollop of the snowy whipped cream on top.

When I hear these stories, I wonder what memories our children will have. Will the ping of the microwave conjure up a raft of such rich images? Or will the smell of Macdonald’s take them back to some far-off family feast?

We need to slow everything down. Spend time making pancakes, peeling vegetables, tasting the flavours of freshly picked herbs. Otherwise we our depriving our children of such a wonderful part of life.

The symbol of the Slow Food Movement is the snail. And when I think of this it reminds me of my nonna and the snail from the cemetery and the rich cycle of life.