There, some peeled, some not, some sliced, some not, piled high, all sizes and shapes, were the mountain oysters, testicles with the knife resting on the cutting board. The men took one look at me and turned on their heels. This was a long time before Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer of young men who kept some of his victim’s parts in a freezer, but it was clear they had an instantaneous impression of a mass murderer or at least a mass castrator. “No,” I said, “you don’t understand.” They kept running, to the elevator. I ran after them.
When I caught up with them, sans knife, I must have looked easy to overcome by force, so they listened. They started laughing in disbelief and followed me to the apartment. Bless their hearts, they helped get all those snails up while I put the mountain oysters in the refrigerator.
Neil returned with the rest of the food when the job was half done, and helped with the rest, laughing as hard as the rest of us. I proceeded to boil the snails in their shells, then remove them from the shells and bake the shells to sterilize them, like the book said. And then it hit me. These were New York City snails. They had been roaming around, God knew where, eating whatever. The oatmeal was to clean out their digestive tract, and I didn’t believe it had been cleaned in the short time it had taken them to pep up and jump out of the sink.
I threw them all away and sent Neil out for more snails. The kind that came with a sleeve of shells. And the mountain oysters? The best kinds are duck and veal, fried. But Corrine wanted the lamb ones, and of those we had plenty. I’m a specialist in them now.
I have long given up remembering Neil as I lie in bed some nights, but I often remember my first Parisian dessert and the wild strawberries. I was not prepared for their exquisiteness, the sumptuousness of the cream enveloping them, or the weightlessness of the omelet soufflé into which they were tucked. I frequently make soufflé omelets at home, usually limited to using raspberries or strawberries, but these days we can find crème fraîche or mascarpone to accompany this soufflé. And I’ve been known to wake up laughing about testicles, large and small. I even have some quail ones, the size of small pearls, in my freezer, sent by the owner of South Carolina’s quail farm. She doesn’t expect me to reorder them, she said, as no one thinks they are delicious, but she wanted me to know their size.
Majorcan Snails
When I was thirty I found myself chef of a restaurant in rural Majorca—one hour’s drive from the major city, Palma. I neither spoke the language nor had worked in a restaurant (except a coffee shop in Cambridge) before. I could hardly believe I had been hired.
My then-husband, David, whom I had married after Neil and I had broken up, was the bookkeeper. I was chef. Neither of us spoke Catalan—the patois of French and Spanish that is spoken in Majorca. I had barely scraped by college Spanish, confident I would never need it. Wrong again. The maître d’ and one of the waiters spoke English, but the maids who doubled as prep cooks did not. The restaurant was in an old finca, or farmhouse, built around an olive press with an extensive garden. There was a massive olive tree just outside of the door of our bedroom and I could pick figs and roses during the short walk up to the restaurant.
A few evenings later, it rained just as we closed the restaurant for the evening. We hadn’t seen much rain. We welcomed it and that particular, fresh smell rain has after a long dry spell. Taking a drive down the dark and winding country roads, we started seeing little lights dotting the fields. We were bemused—even, perhaps, a little alarmed. Could it be poachers? If so, what on earth were they poaching, and why were they using flashlights to do so?
The next morning, we were eager to share our observations and went up to the restaurant together quite early, finding all the staff—waiters, gardeners, and kitchen staff alike—already there and prepared to solve the mystery. All around the kitchen were buckets of snails. Alive. I eyed them warily, having familiarity with live snails. The lights we had seen were all the local people out with lanterns and flashlights, looking for snails. In fact, the staff viewed us with a bit of derision for not having a few kilos of our own to add to the stash.
There was a great deal of joking about how many snails everyone could eat, most people claiming a hundred each, and a long discussion about the preparation. The upshot was that the snails were washed and placed back in the buckets. The tops of the buckets were covered with a wire mesh to prevent their wiggling out. The snails were to be fed cornmeal, rosemary, and/or fennel until Sunday, which was several days away, and a day when we didn’t serve lunch.
After church on Sunday the kitchen, normally empty, was full of rapidly talking people. The maids, their husbands, the wife of the arrogant maître d’, all moving around, hands in sinks, scrubbing snails, rinsing ducks, separating eggs, or chopping herbs.
I joined the maître d’ in moving several tall stockpots to the back of the stove. To each we added a dead and cleaned duck, a dead and cleaned chicken, handfuls of thyme and fennel from the garden, dozens of peeled garlic cloves, cut-up onions, and, finally, the clean snails. We opened several bottles of a favorite Spanish white wine and poured them atop the snails, then added water to fill the stockpots three-quarters of the way to their brims, and covered them with lids.
Turning the gas on high under the
