Leccinum Burgundy in Snail Shells

This escargot-style recipe uses real snail shells, with Leccinum in place of the snail meat. (Perhaps this should be called "Leccargot"?)

If you decide to try to harvest shells from your own garden snails instead of purchasing clean empty shells, be sure to educate yourself on how to raise and harvest live snails for cooking first. Bringing live snails to food-grade standard is more complicated than you might think.

Snails often feed on vegetation and dead animal matter that are dangerous for human consumption. Some toxins can reside in their bodies for several days. Thus, you would need to raise your snails in a carefully controlled environment, performing certain tests along the way to ensure their edibility. Keeping them alive throughout the entire process is another matter, requiring care in handling the little critters. Finally, before cooking, it is necessary to put the snails and their shells through a careful cleansing process. (If you eat the snails themselves, a specific tenderizing process is also necessary.) Find a very good French cookbook or reliable online resource to understand what this ensnails entails.

But herein lays the greatest danger:  It is important to examine the livestock in your escargatoire (snail herd) one by one each day to evaluate their health, speed, size, snail color, etc. If one is not careful, one begins to ascribe personalities to them, encourage races, perhaps even name them. Over time, you may notice a difference in the way your family and close friends are behaving towards you... By then, popping the little rascals into boiling salted water takes nerves of steel!

Whatever you do, don't put "Jumbo" and "Slicker" back in the garden. And don't put them in my garden either. I've had enough problems with "Spit" and "Chip" as it is.