Snail keeping in Tunisia - learning to escargot

Written By Rachel Hobley

"Arslene!" comes a shout from the kitchen, "Where is my lettuce?!"

I laugh to myself, and hear Lamia chuckle to herself too. It's an acknowledgment of the slightly absurd reality that is being an avid cook married to a snail breeder. Running Sawa Gite Rural - a stunning guesthouse and table d’hôte- Lamia is preparing a salad for her guests.

"We can pop to the shop to pick some up?" I say.

"Thank you," Lamia replies, "Two lettuces for me, and one for the snails. And some fennel please too, maybe six?"

"Of course. We won't be long."

Mr Donkey in the yard in front of Lamia and Arslene’s home

We're staying with Lamia and her husband Arslene in Tunisia on Cap Bon. Here for a week as Workawayers, Lamia and Arslene are our extraordinarily hospitable and generous hosts in return for our help on their land.

Our biggest mission of the week: to update a snail farm. 

Here we are, then, walking up the road to find what lettuces are left in the village shop to feed both us and the slimy hoard. With a cactus hedge on one side and an olive grove on the other, I feel a long way from the spring that is struggling to arrive in the UK.

The landscape around Sawa

The farming of snails is a small but growing industry in Tunisia. The international market is where the real business is achieved - exporting is the most profitable. So Arslene, having stepped back from the legal life he had led for years in Tunis, took a three month héliciculture (snailing keeping) course, and started breeding snails.

When we first arrive in February there is much work to prepare for the big season ahead - most of the snails are farmed in early summer. There are, we learn, four main uses for snails, three of which Arslene pursues:

  1. Big snails for eating

  2. The burning of snail shells to use the resulting calcium as a fertiliser

  3. Snail caviar. So certain I had misheard this, despite knowing the French for caviar is caviar, I double check with Arslene what he said. Apparently snail caviar is the delicacy du jour in restaurants across Europe and the rest of the world.

  4. The fourth use is vetoed by Lamia - snail mucus (mucin) used for its anti-aging properties in cosmetics. One of the ways to farm the mucin is to stress snails, sometimes with small electric shocks, to create enough slime for humans to smear on their skin. Whilst this isn't always the way it is produced, it seems a good enough reason to me to not do it.

The snail farms at the beginning of their transformation

So we spend our mornings in the barn, scrubbing, sanding, building and netting. There are two structures, each about 10 long and 4 foot high. One is a nursery with fine netting, and the other with wider netting is for the collection of caviar from the larger snails. The biggest threat to the snails is bacteria which might be hiding in the wood. We get through litres of dettol as every piece of wood is washed, dettoled, dried, sanded and dettoled again.

When the snails are big enough, they are moved outside to a netted, 20 metre long tunnel. Here, they are fed and allowed to grow much bigger, until by mimicking rain with a series of sprinklers tempting them to the surface, they are picked and boxed for foreign tables.

The outside cage

Arslene's not a big chatter. Between us we have enough French and English to communicate, though occasionally I wonder if he is just too polite to tell us if we are doing something wrong. I fear what he tells Lamia about our progress each evening. One day when we are in the barn, it rains with such confidence that we can't hear each other. Arslene shouts something to me and smiles.

"What did you say?!" I shout back over the rain.

"It's raining cats and dogs!" he shouts back. It takes me so by surprise I end up bent double with laughter and by the time I look up Arslene has walked across the barn to Alex, where he repeats his English idiom, before pulling up his hood and walking back up the slope to the main house.

Alex sanding, accompanied by the geese

On day three I realise that the only snails we have met are the few sauvage/wild, snails that Arslene carefully rehomes when found hiding in perilous places.

"The family to live here? The premier occupants?" asks Arslene, motioning towards the snail palaces we're constructing.

"Oui, where are they?" I ask.

"Come, come," he replies.

Up by the house there are three rectangular plastic flower pots. Each has a fine mesh top and a block of wood to weigh it down. Arslene looks over his glasses and carefully pulls back the mesh on one, conscious there might be an inhabitant suctioned to the roof.

Inside are half a dozen one inch long snails. Their brown shells are mottled with light grey. A dark grey body splodges them onto the walls.

Two grosgris snails, and two younger snails on the right hand side lettuce leaf

Arslene points out their children. These tiny snails, balanced on lettuce leaves have shells almost translucent with youth.

With one finger, Arslene carefully lifts a piece of wood and pushes aside a lettuce leaf. Hidden in the darkest, dampest corner is the pearly white caviar, the snail eggs. This caviar is healthy, he says. Any colour other than this means there is a problem. He is happy with how his little snail family is progressing.

Most snails, Arslene explains, have both male and female reproductive organs. They mate for up to 15 hours, and then lay their eggs, which hatch between 4 to 6 weeks later.

The whole snail lifecycle is in this one flower pot, and the structures we're working on are the bigger, better version.

“You will get more,” I ask Arslene, “for the palais d’escargot?”

“Oui, I have someone I will buy from,” he replies, still peering into soil.

The snail caviar in the dark soil

Across the week we get the majority of the work completed for the bigger structures, though don't quite get to see the snail family move into their palace. I wonder what they’ll make of it.

One evening, as the sun is setting and I've closed up the barn for the day, I spot Arslene and pause. He's placed one of the flower pots on a chair and is squatting in front of it. In the last of the light, he gives his snail family some lettuce, checks on their health, and gently replaces the lid.

I didn't think it was possible to care about snails, especially if you were raising them to sell.

It turns out that, to the detriment of Lamia's lettuce supply, I was wrong.

Sawa Gite Rural

Sawa Taste of Tunisia Tours

Rachel Hobley
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