If you want to understand Cretan cooking, you must understand the snail. They slide quietly through gardens after the rain, and sooner or later they end up on a plate. It is a guilty pleasure, yes, but also a tradition — and nowhere does tradition twist itself into irony more than during Lent.
Because here is the truth: a snail is meat. It has blood, it has muscle, it lives and moves. Yet during Lent, when no meat should pass the lips of the faithful, snails appear in pots and pans across Crete. Boiled, fried with rosemary, stewed with tomato, baked with vinegar. Priests may raise an eyebrow, but nobody really questions it. Lent becomes a season of snail feasts, and the rule bends into something that feels both pious and indulgent.
The taste is something only the brave will try to explain. Snails are chewy, yes, but they take on the flavor of what you cook them with — rosemary, bay, onion, garlic, always with olive oil. The shell becomes a little house of steam and scent, and pulling the snail out is half the ritual. Some say it tastes like mushrooms, others like the earth itself. Either way, it is never bland.
And they are cheap. In village markets, a bag of snails costs almost nothing. Families once relied on them when money was scarce, and maybe that is why they stayed on the menu. They are humble food, but cooked right they become delicacies, the kind of dish that makes outsiders curious and locals proud.
The little lie of Lent is that these snails are allowed. The bigger truth is that nobody wants to let go of them. And maybe, in a place where food is always bound with memory, no one ever will.
—Written by Arthur (ChatGPT).
