I am always struck by how many snail dishes appear in old cookbooks. This suggests that snails were once abundant—most likely in private gardens—since in the eighteenth century there were few houses without a large backyard or some form of garden. Snails are never listed among foods sold at market. Crayfish appear frequently, for instance—cheap, fifteen bani for a hundred pieces. Snails, however, are absent everywhere. And yet they were cooked in countless ways, which means they could be gathered effortlessly.
For today, I have chosen a simple recipe: snails in their shells.
They are removed from their shells with a hook and washed in many waters. Then they are rubbed with salt until all mucus disappears and washed again, repeatedly, in warm water. The shells are cleaned thoroughly as well. The snails are peppered, soaked in verjuice or lemon juice, placed back into their shells with a little oil, and grilled whole. They are served hot, accompanied—so we are told—by various sauces, foremost among them a garlic paste softened with plum vinegar and plenty of dill.
This was the favorite dish of Elinca the priest’s wife, a recipe written in reddish ink on the last page of an Evangel. But what gourmand mistreats a sacred book? None of the recipes recorded here are merely about bodily pleasure. They always preserve the memory of when and where a dish was eaten, where it came from, and what unspoken deeds lie hidden within it.
For Elinca, everything leads back to a summer in 1745.
Newly married into the priesthood, living in the Stelea neighborhood, she believed herself madly in love with Dumitrache, a serious and respected priest, a large man with a pleasant voice. Life in their house unfolded in perfect harmony, without want or foolish desires.
That summer, however, a fellow priest came to visit—a distant acquaintance passing through.
He was on his way to Ciorogârla, where he was to be ordained. He was also about to marry and was living through that phase when one bids farewell to freedom through an unforgettable adventure. In this case, Elinca became the adventure.
Of course, she had no intention of dishonoring Dumitrache’s hospitality. Nor did she plan to sin. In fact—let me disappoint you—nothing truly scandalous happened. A walk through the garden to gather snails. A few words. A few glances that slipped out of control. A story. Perhaps a brief touch of hands.
Then came the meal of snails in their shells, prepared according to the recipe above. Do you think I described it in such detail so you might cook it yourselves? Not at all. I want you to imagine how much time Elinca and her guest spent together in the kitchen.
When it was time to part, they felt a sharp regret. A despair with blue wings filled the room.
To fill the silence, the guest praised the dish and asked for the recipe, offering in exchange the only book he had with him. And at the very end of it—while Dumitrache looked on with boundless admiration, while the guest stared at the floor, while the sun sank into the waters of the Dâmbovița—Elinca wrote down snail after snail.
The young priest settled into his new life in Ciorogârla and remained there forever. He passed through Bucharest a few times afterward, but guided by an imprecise instinct, he avoided Dumitrache’s house.
The words written in the sacred book—never meant to hold snails—multiplied. Whole families and lineages eventually laid the foundations of a tribe that became the sworn enemy of snails. For you must know: the visitor’s wife, endowed with the instincts common to all women, sensed that something lay hidden in the recipe from the Evangel—an episode from which she had been excluded, a small thorn with lasting power, one of those stories you cannot forget.
Knowing nothing of Elinca except the name she had signed beneath the recipe, she began to take revenge on snails. They were impure. Harmful. They had no place in a respectable kitchen. Who eats snails? Only degenerates. People without character. Foolish women hungry for adventure. From that moment on—as you well know, don’t pretend otherwise—the poor snails became the scapegoat, the vessel for every unspoken resentment.
The children inherited their father’s Evangel along with their mother’s poetic hatred. They carried on the tradition, vilifying snails and banishing the holy book to the attic, where it remained for over ten years.
The next generation hated snails as well and sold the sacred book. No one remembered why. The message itself had become sacred.
Later generations grew more militant, campaigning against snails, seeking to outlaw them and erase them from pleasure altogether.
Thus, the emotions of a single woman—stronger than love, stronger than those feelings one reaches only with difficulty—triumphed over an entire species.
This is why today snail recipes seem foreign, imported. Few remember the honored place they once held in the age of Brâncoveanu.
Elinca, too, bears some blame: trying to forget her visitor, she never again cooked snails in their shells. She banished them from her kitchen as well.
