Cargolade

One of the ados (teenagers) from the first session (you know who you are…) made fun of me once for writing the phrase “I used to think I was a city girl…” on this very blog. At the time, I agreed that it may have been overkill for the subject I was writing about, but today, I have to readdress it.

Yes: last time I was being overly poetic just for the sake of it. You got me. But this time, I’m serious: I think I’ve become a true bumpkin.

Alex and I were talking on the phone recently: we haven’t had time to talk at all for the past two weeks, and so we were catching up, when slowly, I started to realize that all of my stories were starting to sound the same…

“Les manouches went fishing and caught a fish. I gutted it on the kitchen table… it bled everywhere. We barbecued it and ate it for dinner. It was awesome!”

“Did you know that manouche #1’s family kills a pig every year and butchers it together? Isn’t that awesome?”

“We found wild mint growing at the fontaine des eaux… I think I’m gonna cook with it. How awesome is that?”

“We caught a snail and named him Phillippe. We’re keeping him in a box on the terrace and feeding him salad. I think we’re gonna eat him with the neighbors. Isn’t that awesome?”

I’m not ready to go back to Paris… not even close. I find myself hanging on to every day we still have here, trying to slow everything down, which, as we all know, is impossible.

Instead, I find myself standing somewhere I never could have imagined, wondering how all the choices I made, all my years of being a city girl, could have led to this.

We did end up grilling and eating escargots with the neighbors, although Phillippe–le petit malin–managed to escape just before we headed next door for the 100-odd Catalan snails they were preparing.

It was the girls’ last night before heading home, and nothing could have prepared them for what they would witness and eventually taste–nothing like escargots bourguignons, the ones dripping in a buttery, herby sauce that you sop up with baguette. These snails were tiny and grey and prepared before our eyes on a grill that is purchased–or made by hand, as this one was–only in the region.

The escargots had the membrane that covers the meat deftly removed by our neighbor, and were then seasoned (alive) with a mixture of salt, pepper and piment (hot pepper) that caused them to mousse before our very eyes.

How awesome is that?

We next watched as our other neighbor prepared them à l’ancienne, grilling them over an open fire and drizzling them with flaming lard.

For those of you who didn’t catch that… I’m going to reiterate: flaming. Lard.

Awesome.

A third neighbor taught us the proper way to eat cargolade, as the dish is called: prepare a piece of bread slathered generously with aoli, and then use a small fork to remove the snail from its shell. To be enjoyed with friends as close as family, homemade Muscat, jokes, stories of pig butchering complete with demonstrative hand gestures and colorful adjectives, and quiet epiphanies when you realize that the place you thought was your home is now the place furthest from it.