From Peasant Fodder to Fine Dining, Feast on the Tasty History of How Snails and Oysters Became Luxury Foods

Humans have eaten mollusks for millennia, but they weren’t always viewed as elite treats

Garritt C. Van Dyk, The Conversation

May 29, 2025

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Oysters and escargot are recognized as luxury foods around the world—but they were once valued by the lower classes as cheap sources of protein.

Less adventurous eaters today see snails as a garden pest and are quick to point out that freshly shucked oysters are not only raw but also alive when they are eaten.

So, how did these unusual ingredients become items of conspicuous consumption?

From garden snail to gastronomy

Eating what many consider to be a slimy nuisance seems almost counterintuitive, but consuming land snails has a long history dating back to the Paleolithic period, some 70,000 to 170,000 years ago in southern Africa.

Ancient Romans also dined on snails, and they spread their eating habits across their empire into Europe.

Lower- and middle-class Romans ate snails from their gardens, while elite consumers ate specially farmed snails that had been fed spices, honey and milk.

Pliny the Elder described how snails were raised in ponds and given wine to fatten them up.

The first French recipe for snails appeared in the 1390s, in Le Ménagier de Paris (The Parisian Household Book), but similar recipes are not found in other cookbooks from the period.

In 1530, the author of a French treatise on frogs, snails, turtles and artichokes considered all these foods “equally bizarre but popular with his contemporaries,” writes Alan Davidson in The Oxford Companion to Food. Some of the appeal had to do with avoiding meat on “lean” days. Snails were classified as fish by the Catholic Church and could even be eaten during Lent.

For the next 200 years, snails only appeared in Parisian cookbooks alongside an apology for including such a disgusting ingredient. This reflected the taste of upper-class urbanites, but snails were still eaten in the eastern provinces of France.

An 1811 cookbook from Metz, in the Alsace region, describes raising snails as the Romans did and a special platter, l’escargotière, for serving them. The trend did not travel to Paris until a few years later.

French diplomat Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord hosted a dinner for Alexander I after the Russian czar marched into Paris following his alliance’s defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1814.

The chef catering the meal was the father of French cuisine, Marie-Antoine Carême, a native of Burgundy, spiritual home of the now-famous Burgundy snails.

Carême served the czar what would become a classic recipe, prepared with garlic, parsley and butter. Allegedly, the czar raved about the “new” dish, and snails became wildly popular. A recipe for Burgundy snails first appeared in a French culinary dictionary published in 1825.

It’s ironic that it took the approval of a foreign emperor who had just conquered Napoleon to restore luxury status to escargot, a food that became a symbol of French cuisine. Snails remain popular today in France, with consumption peaking during the Christmas holidays. May 24 is National Escargot Day.

Oysters: the original fast food

Oysters are another early food, as seen in fossils dating to the Triassic era, 200 million years ago. Evidence of fossilized oysters has been found on every major land mass, and there is evidence of Indigenous oyster fisheries in North America and Australia that date to the Holocene period, about 10,000 years ago.

References to what are probably oysters appear in classical Greek texts by authors like Aristotle and Homer. Oyster shells found at Troy confirm they were a favored food. Traditionally served as a first course at banquets in ancient Greece, they were often cooked, sometimes with exotic spices.

Pliny the Elder referred to oysters as a Roman delicacy. He recorded methods of the pioneer of Roman oyster farming, Sergius Orata, who brought the best specimens from across the empire to sell to elite customers.

Medieval coastal dwellers gathered oysters at low tide, while wealthy inland consumers would have paid a premium for shellfish, a perishable luxury, transported to their castles.

English nobles around 1390 preferred cooked oysters, roasted over coals or poached in broths, perhaps as a measure to prevent food poisoning. As late as the 17th century, an English author cautioned, “But if they be eaten raw, they require good wine … to help digestion.”

That same century, as many as 100,000 oysters were reportedly eaten each day in Edinburgh. Shells from the tavern in the basement of Gladstone’s Land, a tenement house in the Scottish capital, filled in gaps in the building’s brickwork.

By the 18th century, small oysters were a popular pub snack, and larger ones were added as meat to the stew pot.

Scottish oyster farms in the Firth of Forth, an inlet of the North Sea, produced 30 million oysters annually by the 1790s, but continual overharvesting soon took its toll.

By 1884, only 6,000 oysters were harvested in the Forth, and the local population was declared extinct in 1957.

As wild oyster stocks dwindled, large oyster farms developed in urban centers like New York City and Baltimore in the 19th century. Initially successful, these harvesting enterprises were eventually polluted and infected by typhoid from sewage. In 1924, contaminated oysters killed 150 people in the deadliest outbreak of food poisoning in United States history.

Far from the overabundance of oysters we once had, overfishing, pollution and invasive species all threaten oyster populations worldwide today. Due to this scarcity of wild oysters and the resources required to safely farm environmentally sustainable oysters, they are now a premium product.

Next on the menu

Scarcity made oysters a luxury, and a czar’s approval elevated snails to gourmet status. Could insects become the next status food?

Ancient Romans ate beetles and grasshoppers, and cultures around the world consume insects, but not (yet) as luxury products.

Maybe the right influencer can make honey-roasted locust the next species to take pride of place on the plate.

This article is republished from the Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Garritt Van Dyk is a historian at the University of Waikato in New Zealand.