Summer at the River

Summer vacation in Korea always began with the monsoon season. We watched the heavy rain clouds and waited for them to pass, knowing that once the sun returned we would head straight to the local river, Jiktang (직탕).

During those summer months, tents went up and we temporarily migrated there. Our days revolved around the water. My mother was constantly cooking, feeding us whenever we climbed out of the river for a moment. My father would arrive straight from work carrying food — samgyeopsal (삼겹살) on one side, a watermelon on the other, and often more things to eat. The sun was strong enough to burn our skin, and by the end of the season we were all dark from the summer, though none of us cared.

My brother even earned a nickname: mulgae (물개), “seal.” He almost never came out of the water. He would dive and stay under so long that my mother began to worry, only for him to suddenly surface again somewhere downstream. He simply loved being in the river.

For me, the reason I loved going there was different. I went to collect daseulgi (다슬기). These small freshwater snails clung to rocks beneath the clear river water. We would lift the stones carefully and gather them one by one. I could spend an entire day doing this, often losing track of time. If my mother hadn’t called us for lunch, I probably wouldn’t have noticed my hunger at all. Little by little, the pile grew. As we collected more, we kept them in a red onion sack — a loose mesh bag, something like rough cheesecloth — tied to a rock so they wouldn’t drift away in the current.

Once we had gathered enough, my mother would boil them. Then everyone would sit together and eat them with toothpicks, pulling the tiny pieces of meat out of their spiral shells. It required a bit of skill. If you weren’t careful, half the meat would remain stuck inside, impossible to rescue.

My parents especially loved the broth that came from boiling them. At the time I didn’t care much for it. Apparently it was considered good for curing hangovers — knowledge that only became relevant later in life.

Golbaengi and Other Snails

As I grew older, and eventually became old enough to appreciate that kind of broth after a long night of drinking, another craving appeared — one that belonged to the bars of the city.

Golbaengi-muchim (골뱅이 무침).

It’s a classic Korean anju (안주), food meant to be eaten with alcohol. Perfect with beer or soju: spicy, salty, and pleasantly chewy, with the jjolgit-jjolgit (쫄깃쫄깃) texture Koreans love. The sliced sea snails are tossed with crunchy vegetables like cucumbers, carrots, and onions in a bright red gochujang-based sauce. The dish is saucy enough that it usually arrives with somyeon (소면), thin boiled wheat noodles that you mix in as you eat. It’s the kind of food that stretches a drink into a meal.

For a long time I had never seen the animal itself. In Korea, golbaengi (골뱅이) almost always came from a can. The ingredient is usually imported whelk from colder northern waters, already cooked and preserved before reaching the kitchen. The canned version became so common that many people, like me, knew golbaengi only as something sliced and mixed into spicy salads, far removed from the sea creature it once was.

But I knew daseulgi. I caught it with my own hands growing up. There was the small thrill of finding them under rocks and the second thrill of coaxing the tiny piece of meat out of the shell. That part required patience and a bit of technique.

So when a seafood platter arrived at Oesterij, something immediately made me smile. Stuck into a wine cork were two small metal pins meant for picking snails out of their shells. I had seen this before. The gesture felt instantly familiar. The skills I had learned through the ritual of eating daseulgi growing up at the river were suddenly useful again.

Of course these were not freshwater river snails but common periwinkle, small sea snails that live along rocky European coasts. Still, I knew exactly what to do: a tiny spiral shell, a small tool, and the careful twist needed to pull the meat out cleanly.

I found it charming that the humble toothpick of my childhood had been replaced by small metal pins stuck into a wine cork. The setting was different, with oysters, wine, and the North Sea in front of us, yet the ritual itself felt exactly the same.

The same familiarity appeared again when I encountered escargot in a French restaurant. Here the snail was dressed in butter — garlic butter, parsley butter, rich and unmistakably French. The snails arrived in their shells, arranged neatly in a special plate with small round indentations to keep them from rolling. A pair of tongs held the shell steady while a fork pulled out the meat.

These, however, were not sea snails like golbaengi. They were land snails, the small ones that appear in gardens and fields after rain. I had seen many of them during summer in Hungary, especially after storms, when they suddenly seemed to appear everywhere — in the grass, on sidewalks, and along garden walls. Hungarians themselves rarely eat them. Most are collected and exported to France, where they eventually become escargot.

It was funny because, just as I was wondering why Hungarians themselves didn’t eat snails when they were so abundant there, my husband said, “If French people saw this, they’d probably start collecting the snails right away.” While walking the Camino de Santiago after a stretch of rain, he had seen people doing exactly that along the roadside. They turned out to be French pilgrims who planned to cook them for dinner that evening with a little wine.

In that moment the famous restaurant dish returned to what it once was: something much simpler. Snails had long been countryside food, gathered after rain and cooked by people who knew where to find them. Only later did they appear on restaurant menus, dressed in garlic butter and served on porcelain plates. What looks elegant today did not begin that way.

One Small Shell Across Cultures

Of all the countries I’ve visited, Vietnam comes to mind first when I think of snails. Vietnamese people truly love them. There are countless varieties, large and small, from the sea and from freshwater rivers and canals. At many street stalls the snails are kept alive in shallow basins of water. Once an order arrives they are cooked immediately, often with bold flavors — chilies, garlic, lemongrass — sometimes simmered in coconut broth, sometimes stir-fried or grilled, sometimes appearing in noodle soups like bún ốc, the kind of hangover cure that once arrived for me with an extra bowl as seobiseu (서비스).

In the evening people gather at small outdoor tables, sharing plates of ốc with beer and conversation. Snails there feel casual and abundant, part of everyday life. In that sense they remind me very much of golbaengi in Korea — not fancy food, but food meant to be eaten slowly while drinking and talking with friends.

For a long time, I didn’t quite know how to explain golbaengi to someone who had never grown up eating snails. It felt like one of those foods that might invite a puzzled look — something small, slippery, and perhaps a little strange to anyone unfamiliar with it. I sometimes assumed it belonged only to the places I knew: the rivers where we collected daseulgi as children, or the bars where plates of golbaengi-muchim appeared alongside drinks and conversation.

Over time, traveling changed that assumption. The same spiral shell kept reappearing in different forms — in French restaurants as escargot, on Vietnamese street corners as plates of ốc, or along European coasts where people patiently pull sea snails from their shells with a pin. The settings were different, the sauces and tools changed, yet the gesture itself was always familiar.

A small spiral shell travels quietly across rivers, seas, and cultures. The ways we eat it, with a toothpick, a pin, chopsticks, or a fork, tell different stories about where we come from. And somehow the experience feels familiar: the simple pleasure of coaxing a tiny piece of meat from its shell and tasting the water it came from, whether sea or river.