This course made a brief appearance on our menu. And although it was very enthusiastically received, I never really sunk my teeth into it (metaphorically speaking). The idea was born out of asking whether snails are from the water or the land. From there I formulated the idea of creating the dish as a setting. A still life picture with ingredients representing the water, sand, and earth. The beauty of snails is that their intense flavor lends well to other robust flavors, and there are several ingredients represented with a forward flavor profile. To represent the water, we utilized a black garlic puree. No, water is not really this dark, but we told our guests they needed to use their imaginations a bit since there is not much edible that is the color blue. Besides, inland lakes and rivers certainly appear murky at best. In any case, once you get past this, the rest is conceivable. Royal trumpet mushrooms represented the earth, dehydrated olives the dirt, and nasturtium, leaves the grass. We made a puree of the mushroom stems to represent sand and placed the Burgundian snails that had been sauteed with butter, garlic, shallot, and parsley on this. In the end, we determined that the snails must come from the water since we get them from our seafood supplier… and they know about these things since they deal directly with God.
