Stories Collected While Living in France

French la Vie

Cargolade: The French Guessing Game (S)Nailed!

La Cargolade

Photo Source

Photo Source

cargolade

A Cargolade!

The other day I saw this iron wire tray at the French Brocante. I thought it was cool! I imagined a hundred ways, okay maybe not a hundred but you follow my drift, how I could use it.

Serving cheese was one of the ideas I had. A cooling rack was another. I even thought it would be sweet holding little pots with herbs on the garden table. It wasn't expensive about $30. In the end I didn't buy it, but I took a photo of it and asked the antique dealer what its purpose was.

JWalk nailed it! Bravo! Clapping happily I am! Send me an email and we can talk about your gift that I will send you.

The most creative answer was Laurie SF, who incorporated France and Spain in her answer by saying, "A 'Camino de Santiago' backpacking essential."

"The cargolade is not a dish, it is also a representation of a certain lifestyle. It is consumed in summer, preferably in a meadow or at least in nature, with many people: A cargolade less than 10 people lose interest. Ones organized by the municipality of Bompas together thousands of participants. In practice, the cargolade consists of snails, of course, but also Catalan sausages, meat to grill and a healthy dose of aïolli and joie de vivre. A Catalan adapts the squirrel you will eat an average of 100, 30 for a small eater, ten for those who catch up on the sausage. Attention, we all know an exception to 150, see 200 snails per meal!"

 

Check GOOGLE images for various Cargolades, recipes, images and stories.

 

Bravo! Thank you, for guessing and making this one a royal stumper! I had so much fun!

 

Comments

10 responses to “Cargolade: The French Guessing Game (S)Nailed!”

  1. Melissa Paruzel

    LOL… I won’t have guessed. It’s not common here to eat snails, or at least it’s hard to find any restaurant except the French that serves snails. Congrats on the guessers.

    Reply
  2. Gail marie

    This was a fun one! Loved it…..so many stories in the brokante!

    Reply
  3. La Contessa

    I was going to say CHESTNUTS!!!!!!!!!!!!But just saw the photo of snails……………close however!

    Reply
  4. Laura @ 52 FLEA

    …gee whiz…I was going to guess that! wink! 🙂

    Reply
  5. Kathie B

    I’ve read that a century or more ago, some entrepreneur in Northern California* got the not-so-bright idea that he could make a fortune by importing snails to raise for food, in hopes of cultivating a taste in and establishing a market for escargots there.
    Unfortunately, the “livestock” got loose and went feral — involving, over the generations, regression to the norm, size-wise (rendering their descendants probably too small to eat).** So, by the time I was a kid, snails were a veritable plague in gardens and on sidewalks all over the Bay Area, where we’d step on them and squish them, intentionally or otherwise — or, for sheer meanness, pour salt on them, then watch their bodies fizzle. To this day, home gardeners there curse snails.
    * I wonder if it was what I’ll euphemistically describe as a less-smart member of my father’s ethnicity (LOL!).
    ** Whenever I think about what it must be like to eat snails, I say thank goodness I’m vegetarian! Hmmm: A vegetarian who still eats fish is called a pescatarian, so I shudder to think what one who eats snails would be called (“escargotarian” fails to roll trippingly from the tongue!).

    Reply
  6. Laurie SF

    It takes three months to walk the Camino de Santiago. I double dare you to walk it with me!

    Reply
  7. Kathie B

    Laurie, did you happen to hear an interview this week with a young author named Gideon Lewis-Kraus on NPR’s “Weekend Edition Sunday” about his new book “A Sense Of Direction”? In it he describes three pilgrimage trips he made:
    a) First to Santiago de Compostela in Spain (nowadays quite secular, and with scads of people).
    b) Next, a “900-mile, circular, solo walk that visits 88 Buddhist temples on the Japanese island of Shikoku” where he sometimes went for weeks(!) without seeing another person.
    c) And finally, with his father and brother on “a pilgrimage to pay homage to the tomb of a Hasidic mystic in Ukraine”?
    See more info at:
    http://www.npr.org/2012/05/13/152264424/three-pilgrimages-to-gain-a-sense-of-direction
    (I do worry about Corey undertaking any long treks, however, given the serious injury to her ankle on those stairs in Thailand).

    Reply
  8. Franca Bollo

    The snails look like like tiny skulls. A headhunter’s feast.

    Reply
  9. Kathie B

    Guess you’ve got “brains on your brain”, huh? Sorry, I couldn’t restrain myself.

    Reply
  10. Jackie

    Only in France would you find a specialized snail cooker, and of course it’s beautiful as well as functional. Great guessing game! Question, did FH know what it was? Would it have been obvious to the average French person?

    Reply

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