China Musings

Alright, I have eaten some pretty suspicious things while living and travelling in China. One thing that I had managed to avoid was snails. We came close in Yangshou, but Alison foung a hair in the dish and we lost our nerve.

Here in Guangzhou snails are a large part of the “xiao ye” menu. Xiao ye is loosely translated to midnight snack. If you travel through GZ at night, you’ll see hordes of people sitting on sidewalk tables at 2AM, happily munching on noodles, barbecued kebabs, rice porrige, and most commonly - snails. They come in a big heap, boiled and stir-fried with some herbs and flavoring agents. If you look closely you’ll see that many tables have small heaps of snail shells off to the side. You see, there is not much in a snail, so you tend to eat a lot of them. Cantonese folks can sit for hours, sipping beer, swapping stories and picking snails out of their shells with a toothpick, one tiny tongue-foot at a time.

Last night, I couldn’t avoid it any longer. We were invited to my cousin’s house to spend Mid-Autumn festival together over a meal. My cousin (once-removed? twice-reserved-grand-uncle?) is my grandfather’s brother’s grandson, so he is in te same generation. However, he is all of 56, married, with a 17 year old daughter. They are a very cute family, warm and friendly, and we enjoy eating at their house despite the fact that they are also very Cantonese, and have a very different style of food from what we are used to. Anyway, last night my cousin-in-law went all out. She made deep fried won-tons, stuffed peppers, boiled chicken, steamed dumplings, roast pork, wintermelon soup, and it was all delicious. Alison and I stuffed ourselves, and when we were done, they made us eat more because, “We don’t like to eat leftovers.” So here we are bloated and drinking tea, I actually had to stand up to give the food space to digest, and she comes out with one more dish - snails.

It was just a small bowl. My neice was excited, and our course, our host urged us to try. I gave Alison a look, she replied with one of her own “I’ll do it if you do it too.” So we dug in. Toothpick in one hand, small snail shell in the other. The trick is to spear the foot at an angle so you can pull the whole thing out in one piece, since there is quite a bit of animal curled up inside the shell. It was easy to get the hang of, but being - uh - full, limited me to a small sample. Alison got into it, saying “It’s like eating sunflower seeds!”

So, the big question, how does it taste? Well, we have all eaten molluscs before. Gastropods in a shell. And you know what - these freshwater, snails are not much different from their seafaring cousins. It reminded me of eating a small clam, or a tiny muscle. The flesh was a little chewy, not very flavorful aside from what it was cooked in. All in all, I’d eat it again. There was nothing wrong with it except for my pure American lazyness when it comes to food. Unless we live in Baltimore (crabs) or Maine (lobsters), we basically don’t like to have to work for our food. These snails simply did not have enough meat(?) or taste for me to go about wrenching them from their shell one by one.

So, if you ever come to visit, get ready for the xiao ye. You don’t have to worry, they let the snails sit in clean water for 12 hours before they cook them, nice and clean.