THE VARIED ROLES OF SNAILS - National Universities Commission

and sometimes chourico). Bigger varieties called
“caracoletas”, are generally grilled and served with a butter
sauce, but other dishes also exist such as “feijoada de
caracois”. Overall Portugal consumes about 4000 tonnes of
snails each year.
Traditional Spanish cuisine also uses snails (“caracoles”),
consuming several species such as Helix aspersa, Helix
punctata, Helix pisana or Helix alonensis among other
small to medium sized varieties are usually cooked in
several spicy sauces or even in soups, while the bigger ones
may be reserved for other dishes such as the (a paella-style
rice with snails and rabbit meat dish) “arroz con cotio &
caracoles” or “carecols”. In fact the Catalonians have a
snail celebration they call “Aolec del cargol”. Here snails
are called cargols or caragols. The gill the snails inside
their shells and eat it after dipping in garlic mayonnaise or
a la gormanda, boiled in tomato and onion.
In Greece snails are popular in the Island of Crete but are
also eaten in other parts of the country and can even be
found in supermarkets, some times pleaced alive near
partly refrigerated vegetables. In this case, snails are one of
the few live organisms sold at super markets as food. They
are eaten either boiled with vinegar added or sometimes
cooked in a casserole with tomatoes and squashes. Another
cooking method is the “Koali Bourbouristi” traditional
Cretan dish, which consists of fried snails in olive oil with
lemon. In sicily snails are known as babbaluciiad and
widely eaten.
In a nutshell, snails are eaten in several countries in the
world even as far back as thousands of years beginning in
the Pleistocene. They are especially abundant in Caspian
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