Is snail high in nitrites?

Watch for

• Snail is a mollusc, not a crustacean.Allergy to one group does not imply allergy to the other, since the sensitisation patterns differ, but molluscs do share tropomyosin as a major allergen across the group.
• Mite and snail syndrome is the genuinely useful fact here.House dust mite tropomyosin cross reacts with snail tropomyosin closely enough that people with strong dust mite allergy have had severe reactions to snail the very first time they ate it, with no prior exposure to sensitise them.
• Escargot is a delivery mechanism for garlic butter.A reaction to a plate of snails is at least as likely to belong to the garlic, the butter or the bread as to the mollusc.
• Undercooked snails carry a real parasite risk.Angiostrongylus cantonensis, the rat lungworm, uses snails and slugs as intermediate hosts and can cause eosinophilic meningitis. This is a reason to eat properly cooked snails from a commercial source rather than foraged ones.
• Wild caught snails need purging before cooking, since whatever they have been eating is still in them.