Monogatari Series - Volume 31 - Chapter 41

Mayoi Escargot

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“That reminds me, Hachikuji. Back in my motherland, there’s this traditional cuisine that involves cooking snails. Have you heard of it?”

“Why are you suddenly pretending to be a Parisian? Paririgi-san.”

“Oops, my bad. The vestiges of the time I spent in France as a young lad, as a leader in fashion, ended up slipping out. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth to bring this up, so I must restrain myself.”

“A bad taste? More like an acrid taste. And unfortunately, you can’t call yourself a Parisian unless your lineage goes back three generations.”

“That’s for Edokko!”

“Considering your vampire constitution, I suppose you could say that even in Paris you’d be a night owl (yoippari).”

She’s saying something needlessly clever, but only because she’s Mayoi.

But if it means I’ll fit into the nights of Paris better, then sure, Araragi Koyomi is a night owl.

“You are quite obviously a Japanese youth. Um, what were we talking about? Traditional cuisine that involves cooking snails?”

“Yep. Let’s see, I believe in French they call it, cogito ergo sum…”

“That means ‘I think, therefore I am’!”

And I’m pretty sure that’s in Latin, said the elementary school fifth-grader, with a retort about the linguistic system… This is what makes life interesting.

C'est la vie.

“But you’d be better off forgetting who you are, Paririgi-san.”

“You keep referring to me as if I’m one of those 'party people’, huh. Even though when I’m in front of you, I’m constantly in ecstasy.”

“I’m scared I’m scared I’m scared! Instead of snails, it feels like I’ll be the one to be cooked up and eaten!”

After being frightened, Hachikuji said,

“It’s escargot,”

correcting my earlier statement–why was it that, even though she could pull out French words so fluently, she still kept flubbing my name after all this time? It was quite suspicious.

“What did you want to discuss about it?”

“Even though French cuisine is one of the top three cuisines in the world, why would they go out of their way to use snails as ingredients? That was what I was thinking… Considering France is the country of wine, wouldn’t it be better sense to use something like deer or bears, animals that can lay waste to the fields, as part of their local cuisine?”

“Even without alluding to gibier, it’s not actually all that mysterious. Even in Japanese cuisine, we eat grilled sea snails or sake-steamed clams or clam miso soup, and voluntarily eat mollusks, don’t we?”

Ah, is that so.

Snails didn’t really have that sort of image, but once you perceive snails as just another type of mollusk, it might actually be easy to consider it, without any resistance, as an ingredient in food–so it wasn’t something that could necessarily be chalked up to variation in food cultures.

Not to mention, some people even say that eating octopus or raw fish is intense.

“I talked about this with Senjougahara before, but it turns out that the popular red king crab isn’t actually a crab, but a hermit crab.”

“Hermit crabs (yadokari) don’t count as mollusks, Yadorigi-san.”

Snails and hermit crabs just happen to look similar, said Hachikuji.

She sure is picky. I wonder if she’s on that side of things.

“Speaking of resistance, I have much more resistance to the idea of the French eating cute little rabbits. Then again, snails can have those fiendish parasites residing in them, so your life could seriously be in danger if an amateur like you prepared them. No matter how immortal a night owl you are.”

She sure is well-versed in the art of French cuisine.

Perhaps it’s you who is the Parisienne?

A Parisienne that’s as crispy (paripari) as a croissant.

“I see. So even if you find a snail on the side of the road and sprinkle salt on it right then and there, no matter how good it tastes, it’s still bad for you.”

“Is there a famine in this city or something? Also, if you sprinkle salt on it, it will melt before you can eat it.”

“The connoisseur’s way of doing it is to take it when it’s half-melted and savor the feeling of it sliding down your throat.”

“Don’t talk about a snail as if it’s ice cream… Even connoisseurs can have superficial, half-baked knowledge. You could even say they’ve only lived half their lives… Saying that eating snails raw or enjoying the numbing feeling of the fugu’s poison is the connoisseur’s way of doing it? That’s basically suicidal.”

I’ve never had snails or rabbits, nor have I had fugu, but I did feel a desire to try it even if there was poison. With its ovaries that contain the tetrodotoxin that I’ve become familiar with from mystery novels, they say in the Ishikawa prefecture that it can take several years to prepare and remove the poison…

“However, speaking of fugu, they ingest large amounts of poisonous snails from a young age, to the point where their internal organs become poisonous as well, so you’d be quite the reckless gourmet. There are even tales of raising fugu in controlled environments to have them free of poison.”

“Is that so. In that case, it seems like we’ll be able to safely eat delicious fugu even without a license.”

“There are some gourmets that say that it tastes worse without the poison. Just like your girlfriend, Araragi-san.”

“Whose girlfriend tastes worse without the poison? Don’t talk about people as if you’re some poison connoisseur.”

“I said all that earlier to frighten you, but even for snails, if they’re carefully raised in a well-supervised institution, you can eat them without fearing for your life. Of course, if we say that, then all sorts of ingredients have some kind of poison within them. Humans can even die from eating potatoes.”

And, while it’s not Senjougahara, as the saying goes, even if you eat crabs, don’t eat the gills… Unlike potatoes that have sprouted, it’s merely superstition that the gills of a crab can hurt you, but thinking about it, there are a lot of foods in this world that you can’t eat without preparing first.

The menus that appear on dining tables all over the world actually go through a considerable amount of processing. There was a point in time where pepper used for seasoning was valued highly, not just over other ingredients, but even more than gold–and perhaps this was the reason why.

Even with rice, the crux of Japanese cuisine–if you told someone they had to do the manual labor of rice polishing, they’d switch over to the bread faction in an instant.

“Even with bread, if you told someone to bake (yake) it themselves starting from wheat, they’d fall into despair (yake).”

“I’d get frustrated from folding the dough for croissants, too.”

“It’s the same with ramen and udon. If we were told to prepare the noodles ourselves, we’d probably reach our limit immediately. We wouldn’t be able to go without hesitating.”

How clever.

But if it’s udon that you make, I’ll eat it no matter how bad it tastes.

“If there’s a food that you can eat simply without preparing it somehow, would it just be bananas?”

“Apparently, if you don’t put bananas through a selective breeding process, they’ll end up being full of seeds and hard to eat. You have to use fertilizers and agrochemicals to get the kind of banana you want.”

Does that mean we should just eat mist to survive?

Well, considering the air pollution nowadays, even mist might not be safe to eat… It would be a bit like drinking rainwater, and you’d have to boil it before doing so.

“Then it would become a sauna, wouldn’t it.”

“Really, before the discovery of fire, what exactly did humans eat to survive?”

“Even plants will wither if they get too much sunlight or too much water. When it came to eating, humans became masters of their regressive state. In conclusion, they were so thankful to be able to eat at all that, regardless of what they liked or disliked, they ate everything and anything, whether it was snails or rabbits or balut, with a munch munch chew chew. Bon appetit!”

“That’s exactly it. When it comes to escargot, never again will I talk about what I like or dislike. 'I eat, therefore I am’–I’ll engrave that into my heart.”

But still, I sweetly whispered.

“But still, Hachikuji, I’ll say je t'aime to you as much as you want.”

“You’re only a Parisian for le dessert.”