18th c. Snails Dried So 21st c. Snails Could Mucin
And other stories.
SMOOTH SNAILING
Snail mucin has been all the rage for years. Those little guys are crammed with peptides, antioxidants, acids galore, and other miracle ingredients that will counteract all the things that age us, like existing.
As long as humans have been humaning, snails have been ineffectively fleeing them. They haven’t fought back, it seems, since medieval times, which is a dinner theater I would be very interested in seeing.
In the 17th century, “experts” believed that boiled snail water “provokes Urine exceedingly.” In The Practice of Physick, In Two Volums, Very Much Enlarged, not a bit of snail is wasted:
Take Snails, shells and all, and burn them in a crucible, till the ashes be white; half a dram of this taken in white-Wine.
I’m not doing that. I’m not using snail mucin, either. I tried, but I don’t care for the product’s texture.
I’ve always felt bad for snails. As a girl, I never shed a tear for a boy, but I did cry after watching a boy pour salt into a snail’s shell.1
Maybe the mucin is the problem. I may have liked them in the 18th century, when snails were [made to be] dry. Nicolas Lémery’s recipe for “A Sort of Bread of which a Mouthful can maintain a Man Eight Days without eating any This else” suggests he didn’t consider baking a science.
How many snails do you need? A “quantity.” Perhaps, like a podcast of white men, that’s the collective noun for snails. I’ve never seen more than a few. Next step? “Mak[e] them void of their Sliminess” and then “Reduc[e] them to a fine Powder.” No thanks.
BONKERS
I spoke to CNN after Trump’s attorneys completely misrepresented George Washington’s Farewell Address in front of the Supreme Court.
D.C. WITH ME
I’ll be giving my final “How Should a President Be” talk in Washington, D.C. on May 14th. Of all the shocking things I’ve learned during the tour, the president and guns, gun control, and mass violence rank highest.
A PAN IN THE NYT BOOK REVIEW
My forthcoming review of a very big author’s new book is restrained, though it won’t read that way.2 I don’t think it’ll matter to the author’s readers or his book sales, but it may matter to him, and it certainly matters to me. I wish it’d been better. I think it could’ve been, had he taken one precaution. I’ll be back after it runs to talk more about that—and why I always take it myself. Safety first.
See you soonish! Until then, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram. If you’d like a personalized copy of my books, please order them from Oblong.
One of these things is true.
Ruh-roh. I just realized I put my marked-up advance reader’s copy in a free library.