I gave him a dirty look. “Why aren’t you helping? And I am not a crevette.”

“Do you see anybody else in the family crazy enough to do this? I was raised by Jean-Charles; I’ve had all the experience with snails I need for a lifetime, thank you.”

“Not easy, snails,” Jean-Charles admitted. “That’s why they’re so expensive in restaurants. Plus, anybody who’s willing to prepare them has to be well paid.”

“No,” I said. “You’re kidding me.”

He grinned. “Normally,” he admitted, “the person who prepares the snails never eats them.”

“Really? I wonder why.”

“But I’m not going to do all this work and not enjoy them. They’re delicious.”

As I settled into a rhythm with the snail-innards-ripping part, I could focus on the question that had been needling me ever since I had watched snails vomit the day before: what could possibly have inspired the first Frenchman to think, “Look at all those snails ruining my garden. You know, I bet if I starved them for two weeks, made them vomit for a few hours, washed them repeated times, boiled them, ripped them out of their shells, and cooked them again in the right ingredients, they’d be delicious.”

“Probably the siege of Paris in ’70–71,” Jean-Charles responded promptly. “They ate anything that winter, even rats, even the two elephants they had in the Jardin des Plantes!”

Although I later did some research and found references to snail recipes at least a hundred years older than 1870, I still think he had the right idea: famine. Perhaps the main reason the great Paris siege famines of 1870 and 1590 get so much attention from casual historians is that they reduced the bourgeois and aristocrats to eating rats, too. The average French peasant underwent extreme famines regularly. Someone had to try snails at some point; what awed me was that they had figured out how to make them taste good. I had to hand it to my prospective culture-in-law. Other regions have gone through famines, and possibly other people have eaten snails out of desperation over the course of history; but only French peasants could turn them into an internationally known delicacy.

The rest of the snail preparation was comparatively easy: we had to wash them again several times and then simmer them for an hour and a half in water, garlic, herbs, cloves, and white wine. Next we had to squeeze them back into their shells, which Jean-Charles had boiled clean as a surprise for me. Normally he just stuffed the snails into little white pots à escargots, yet another thing you don’t often find in American kitchens. We smothered them with enough garlic-parsley butter to make anyone but a Frenchman gain weight, popped them into the oven long enough to heat them through and let the butter melt, and then . . . à table.