I was actually getting into this endeavor by now, but here I ran into a problem in my exploration of the snail-cooking art. Fifteen minutes before my encounter with Jean-Charles, I had promised to go shopping with the others. No one seemed very understanding of the fact that I didn’t want to go anymore because I wanted to stay in the garden and watch snails vomit.

“It’ll take a while,” Jean-Charles said. “I have to keep splashing them with salt and water every half hour or so, for a couple of hours. You go on.”

Naturally we got stuck in Paris traffic, and by the time we returned, the snails had finished vomiting and sat cold and dead, a sickly gray-brown, in the refrigerator. Jean-Charles had washed them off without me and boiled them for half an hour. He gave me well-relished descriptions of the white and yellowish mess that had covered them and that he had washed off under repeated doses of running water. Living in Paris I must have devel-

oped a sado-masochistic streak, because I felt aggrieved to have missed it.

Fortunately, even an American in Paris could be satisfied with the exquisite unpleasantness of the next step. The snails might be washed and cooked, but they were still in their shells. We had to get them out, in the process separating the part we wanted to eat (I use the “we” loosely here) from the part we didn’t.

Jean-Charles brought out the equipment to do this, making me feel culturally underprivileged. Never, in not a single American kitchen, had I ever seen little two-pronged forks designed exclusively for popping snails out of their shells. “Don’t watch too closely,” Jean-Charles said as he demonstrated this instrument. “It’s never nice to get a face full of dead snail juice.” He stabbed his fork into the dead snail flesh, forced it halfway out, and just when things were looking too easy, pressed his thumb down on the second half of the snail and ripped the two halves apart. “Hepatho-pancreas,” he said. “Don’t want to eat it.”

I stared at this, then at the bucket of nearly a hundred snails, feeling queasy. Jean-Charles paused and raised an eyebrow at me: “You asked how snails were prepared.” I had? I couldn’t remember this at all. “So you’re going to help, right? There’s a lot to do.”

I took a deep breath and plunged my tiny fork into a snail corpse. Popping it out was easy enough, but it took me a long moment before I could squish my thumb down on the hepathopancreas and rip away. I quickly rid myself of the hope of a clean break. The two parts separated easily enough, but bits of innards and stringy things dangled and curled.

“You’ve got the cutest expression on your face, crevette,” Sébastien said from well out of snail juice range.