Bover snails stewed with spicy chorizo and cured pork belly, served in an earthenware dish. One of the house classics, at Carrer de la Cera, 49.
At Can Lluís we use bover snails. We stew them with spicy chorizo and cured pork belly on a sofregit of onion, pepper and tomato, moistened with meat stock. We add sweet pimentón de la Vera and a little chipotle chilli, which gives a gentle, smoky heat. It is a dish made for mopping up with bread.
Our snails come from Marc Molleja, who raises them in Vilassar de Mar, on the Maresme coast just north of Barcelona, and feeds them on herbs and natural produce. In the kitchen we first boil them with aromatic herbs, then finish the cooking with chorizo and cured pork belly, so they take on all the flavour of traditional cooking.
€18.90
Snails are among the oldest foods we have: people have eaten them since prehistory. The Romans already farmed them, and in the Middle Ages they stayed on the table as food for Lent and for Fridays, when meat was forbidden. In the nineteenth century they reached grand tables: the story goes that Talleyrand had Carême cook a dish of snails to impress the Tsar of Russia.
Catalan cooking has always prized the cargol bover, the common garden snail, for its plump, juicy meat. It is cooked a la llauna (on a metal tray), over embers or stewed, nearly always starting from a sofregit and often finished with a picada, and it is paired with rabbit, pig’s trotters or cured sausage. It is a dish for feast days and village gatherings, but also for inns and taverns.
They are eaten with the fingers, picked out of the shell with a pin or a toothpick, with bread to mop up the sauce. Tradition wants them spicy and with wine on the table. The Catalan sayings put it plainly: «Si vols menjar cargols bons, amb força salsa i picantons» (for good snails, plenty of sauce and a bit of heat) and «Cargols sense vi, no els vull per a mi» (snails without wine are not for me). And one more: «Pel maig, els cargols a raig» – in May, snails by the bucketful. Fittingly, May is when Lleida holds the Aplec del Cargol, a huge gathering devoted to eating them, during its main festival.
Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, who wrote Can Lluís into his Pepe Carvalho stories, included in La cocina de los mediterráneos a dish of “cargols llepats”: snails stewed on a sofregit of onion and tomato with pork belly and botifarra sausage, which he says should taste both sweet and spicy. The same book has pig’s trotters with snails, the pairing behind our own trotters dish.
If you like them, try the stewed pig’s trotters with snails too (€22.50), a traditional inn stew, rich and intense.
Further reading: Cuina catalana, by Borja Sierra and Òscar Gómez (Montagud Editores), and Història de la cuina catalana i occitana, vol. VIII, by Vicent Marqués (Edicions Sidillà, 2025), and La cocina de los mediterráneos, by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (Ediciones B, 2002).
