Nothing says soul-satisfying dinner like a heaping plate of helix pomatia alpina.

That's snails to you, and sadly, some people can say that and mean it.

The last time I tucked into a plate of snails was some 23 years ago. Turns out it wasn't long enough. My family had recently moved to what then was West Germany. I wanted a burger, but my first week of German lessons hadn't covered that critical subject.

I ordered what sounded as much like a Whopper as anything else. But turns out "Weinbergschnecke" doesn't mean "two patties with extra cheese." It means gray blobs floating in melted butter.

I know I tried at least one. I have no memory of the rest of the meal.

More than two decades later I was dispatched to Italy's Piedmont region to cover a Slow Food festival, a celebration of artisanal foods and taking time to care about what we eat.

Seemed only fitting to try the ultimate in slow food.

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Nestled into the base of the Alps, the Piedmont region is known for its snails (and, thankfully, much else). In fact, the snail is the symbol of the Slow Food movement. Since we'd consumed every other sort of critter during the festival, it was time to brace my stomach.

So I enrolled my wife and myself in a tasting class on snails run by Slow Food. It began with a brief history of the consumption of snails. It moved as quickly as the food on our plates.

Turns out, snails have quite a culinary history. Prized as gourmet grub for the rich by the Greeks and Romans, snails fell from favor and were left to slime their way around the world for quite some time.

By the Middle Ages, snails were back in fashion, this time with the poor. Let them eat snails! Only later did they once again become the food of the privileged.

We also learned that snails have a relatively simple digestive system. And so they tend to taste like whatever they eat. Moss, anyone? This is enhanced during winter (prime snail season in Italy is December), when the snails apparently fast. This cleans out their systems, giving them a fresher taste. How considerate of them.

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None of this made us want to chow down. I was even less motivated when the first dish arrived. Boiled snails in the shell. The only cool part was the 2-inch stainless nail with which we were told to pry the flesh free.

Once you yank the snail from its shell, you have a curlicue of gray meat-like substance. It's very gray. Very squooshy. Very juicy.

Taste? Something between liver, grass clippings and what you imagine chewing on an eyeball might be like. With effort, we forced down the three boiled snails we'd each received. The olive oil and herbs for dunking didn't help. Nor did the aioli. I started hitting the spumante served with the snails. Hard.

The second dish was a major improvement. Handmade pasta tossed with a sauce of cheese and finely diced snails. It resembled a mushroom sauce and tasted meaty and exceedingly good.

By now the snail lecturer had exhausted his supply of fascinating snail facts and turned the microphone over to the guy whose job it had been to pair wines with the snails.

He suffered from an acute case of verbal diarrhea. No wine should suffer this treatment.

"Sweet. Spices. White pepper. Cacao. Tobacco, from a pipe," he said between sips. "Very intriguing bouquet. Immediately available. This one is ready despite the acidity. Very smooth. Round in the center part of the mouth."

Huh? Whatever. I wasn't even sure which of the three wines in front of me he was talking about.

Final course, a timbale. Diced snails, potatoes and leeks wrapped in savoy cabbage and served with a snail juice reduction. I'm guessing snail lovers have a prettier name for that last bit. I don't plan to learn it.

The reduction actually was OK. It tasted like chicken broth, and why not? Something had to taste like chicken.

But by then I'd consumed four to five glasses of wine. All sorts of things had become, blessedly, not memorable.

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asap columnist J.M. Hirsch covers food, diet and nutrition for the AP. E-mail him at This email address is being protected from spam bots, you need Javascript enabled to view it

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