Viennese shell out for the slowest food of all
Dinner grows at a snail’s pace on Andreas Gugumuck’s farm.
At his quaint little farm in Vienna’s 10th district, Andreas Gugumuck points to an entwined pair of Helix aspersa snails on a plank of timber. “Here, they make love,” he beams at their slimy congress. “This takes about 12 hours.”
Dressed in denim jeans, red-laced boots, blue shirt and braces, Gugumuck (it’s a very old German name — his family came to Vienna in 1720) cuts a coolly eccentric figure as he guides me around his 2000sqm plot, singing the praises of snails. After quitting his IT job with IBM, Gugumuck took over his grandmother’s farm in 2010 with a dream of reviving the Viennese tradition of gastropod-onomy. He now sells more than 300,000 snails a year to top city restaurants including the three-star Amador.
“When I started this business, nobody liked snails,” he says. “It’s very hard to convince people to eat snails for the first time because they only see the slime on the ground.”
This was not the case historically. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814-15, when European leaders gathered to remap the continent in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, renowned French chef Antoine Careme prepared snails a la Bourguignon (stuffed with butter, garlic and parsley) at a dinner in honour of Tsar Alexander I. From then until the end of the Hapsburg Empire a century later, snails were synonymous with Vienna.
The predominantly Catholic, carnivorous capital ate snails (and frogs and fish) as meat alternatives on fasting days including Lent and Fridays. There were once several snail markets in the city, including one behind St Peter’s Church.
Today there is only Herr Gugumuck. He has Austria’s sole licence to process escargots but says he has no desire to be a large-scale producer. “I just want to be the best producer,” he says.
The snails live in a lush organic vegetable and herb garden, their leafy diet supplemented with calcium “to build a strong house”.
In nature, snails tend to mate in spring but Gugumuck has set up a heated love chamber in a former pigsty to “simulate the merry month of May” and stimulate egg production. The snail caviar is harvested and sold as an expensive delicacy with a taste that he says is reminiscent “of forest and meadow”.
Before market the snails are put on a fast to purge them, later put to sleep in a storehouse at 5C and then boiled, briefly, to kill them. The flesh is then extracted by hand. Gugumuck can shell one in eight seconds, which equates to about 3600 in a relentless, eight-hour day.
Visitors to Vienna can sample his schnecken at the city’s restaurants and delicatessens or dine in at his contemporary farmhouse bistro. Guided tours conclude with a degustation of snails simmered for three hours with wine and herbs — “it’s an old Viennese tradition” — then topped with parsley and garlic butter, with lemon and anchovy, and with Parmesan and rosemary butter. He serves first-rate Wieninger wines to accompany.
Three Fridays a month he also stages seven-course dinners that book out months in advance. Recipes are often drawn from historical cookbooks; one from 1810 lists preparations such as snail dumplings, and shells stuffed with chopped snail meat, anchovies, mace and lemon zest.
Gugumuck has commissioned two shiny copper food trucks — snail-shaped, naturally — to take his schnecken to the streets selling snail burgers and snails and chips. And each September he runs a festival that culminates in a feast of specialities such as snail pizza.
Gugumuck promotes snail as a future food, far higher in protein than beef but requiring only a fraction of the fodder (and carbon footprint). Snails are also rich in the thyroid hormone T3, essential for healthy human development.
And, thanks to their marathon lovemaking habits, he claims they are also widely regarded as an aphrodisiac. “Snails are seen like this in every culture.”