I'm seriously beginning to wonder . . .

I have only eaten a snail once - it was served as one of the courses at a local restaurant when they did a special menu for something. It was wrapped in puff pastry and it was like eating garlic flavoured rubber!!! A never again thing for me. I described it as garlic rubber to a French neighbour and he agreed with me. Mind you I don't like octopus or calamari for the same reason - it is only what they are cooked with giving any real flavour. Another thing you can get here frozen are baby octopi and their little legs are just like buds. We were given them at a friends in a mushroom sauce once - I managed enough not to be rude but have managed to steer clear since.

They're not bad actually, less chewy than whelks and taste a bit like liver to my mind. I prefer them in the rich red sauce ( ? Name) rather than the classic garlic butter one.

I can't imagine why anyone would want to eat a snail! I bet they're really...chewy

I may have posted before how a French friend was bemoaning the lack of nice big edible snails in her garden. She blamed it on the strange softhearted English, who wouldn't kill and eat thrushes, so the thrushes ate all the snails. If we ate the thrushes, she said, we would then be able to eat the snails too.

That was an excerpt from 'mother earth'

After years of battling snails in my garden while cooking up escargots purchased at a premium from a local import shop, I finally got wise. As long as I was gathering garden snails, why not harvest them for dinner? One bite told me I was onto something: those fresh snails from my garden, though smaller, tasted far superior to the pricey escargots from cans.

This revelation came to me back in the days when most folks didn't want to know that snails and escargots are one and the same. When I served garden snails to my friends, their invariable reaction was "yuk!" But when those same friends thought they were eating escargots from France, I got rave reviews. Since then, our American appetite for continental cuisine has created an ever-growing market for escargots. At the same time, ecological awareness encourages creative approaches to ridding our yards and gardens of plant predators. What could be more creative than turning the tables on garden pests while, quite literally, putting meat on the table at virtually no expense? Those creatures once considered a garden plague are now being avidly sought for their slightly chewy texture and subtle, earthy flavor.

Species of Backyard Snails

The common garden snail, Helix aspersa, is a close relative of France's commercially harvested Helix pomatia. Both can be found on French dinner plates, where the former goes by the affectionate "petit gris" (little gray) to distinguish it from its cousin gros blanc (large white). No one can say for certain how the French mollusk managed to cross the ocean into North America. Some folks claim that a mid-1800s French immigrant, craving this epicurean delight, imported snails and turned them loose to proliferate in a central California orchard. Others believe Helix came as a stowaway in grapevine cuttings brought by the Spanish missionaries who established the now famous California vineyards.

Whatever the case, Helix now ravages orchards and gardens throughout Western and Southern coastal areas. While it is the best known of the edible snails, plenty of others are suitable for harvesting. Second in gourmet popularity is Cepaea, which ranges from the maritime provides of Canada to as far south as Tennessee. Known as the grove or garden snail, Cepaea can be identified by its prettily banded shell. Although few snails rival the flavors of Helix and Cepaea, any land snail large enough and abundant enough to gather is a potential candidate for the table.

I'm pretty sure the snails round here are the edible variety. I've heard it said they were introduced by the Romans! Bloody pests ( snails not Romans!)

My French pen friend's grandfather used to gather snails for eating but you have to keep them for a while just feeding them lettuce to cleanse their innards as they are believed to eat disgusting things.we used to have thrushes sitting on our roof outside our bedroom window chucking the snails off to smash the shells. We learned never to lean out.

Ellie my lab had a penchant for snails with or with shells unfortunately they gave her lungworm

The local weekly newspaper for English speakers has a full page article about the health benefits of eating snails. I will read it if anyone really wants to know.

Don't know. I can't understand how anyone could contemplate eating them anyway! I can't watch him do it. They certainly look exactly the same shells.

Are these the same species of snail though, Jane10?

I don't think our common-or-garden variety of snail is quite the same sort of thing, Jane10!

absent - much the same as standing in cold cat-sick during the night !!

Snails/Escargots? Just a suggestion but fry with garlic and butter? A million Frenchmen can't be wrong! Our GS was most impressed when he heard that Grandad ate snails!

Years ago, I bought a birthday card for a friend who was a caravanner. The picture was a cartoon of a narrow road, with a long 'traffic jam' of slugs. At the front of the queue, holding up the slugs, was a snail. The caption read, "Bloody caravans!"

Nematodes! I've used them ( or more accurately Gary does) for the last two years and I've seen no slugs and only one snail since! We used to have giant snails and slugs the size of the Queen Mary mooring lines!

Apparently throwing a snail or slug over the fence isn't enough. They have a homing instinct and will come back. You have to take them at least 65ft away to confuse them.

Marelli There is something particularly loathsome about treading on a slug with bare feet in the middle of the night.

We sometimes get slugs creeping about the kitchen floor during the night, if it's been damp weather. They make me shudder [ugh emoticon], and have to get DH to lift them and put them outside (I deal with the cat-sick - that's the bargain we have)!
Like absent, I rescue earthworms, though. Lifted one from a sunny paving slab in the garden the other day and laid it on the soil, only for one of our tame (ish) blackbirds to come running along and immediately gobble it up !

I apologise to worms if I dig them up while weeding and lovingly re-cover them to prevent death from ultra-violet light.

We have blackbirds, but rarely see mistlethrushes or redwings. We clearly don't have enough blackbirds, though, because we are overrun with slugs and snails .
And what is more, the man next door has chopped down a tree, before I had a chance to ask him, nicely, if he could leave it until the end of summer in case there were nesting birds there. It was the tree that the blackbirds always built their nests in

Blackbirds, mistlethrushes and redwings also eat slugs and snails. we have lots of blackbirds round here.

Serious question.....are slugs/snails more prevalent in England than Scotland? We have them here but can't say they've ever been in sufficient numbers to cause problems. Not something I see very often.

Snails consume pansies and violas. Rapidly. #scrunchsquish