Long Street Mud Snails

Long Street Mud Snails

　　Long Street Mud Snails

　　The mud snails primarily produced in Long Street are also very famous. Long Street mud snails have crisp and tender flesh without any mud veins (intestinal mud), are large in size, and have a delicious taste. Locals often preserve them through pickling. The best-pickled mud snails are those from May ("Yellow Clutch" mud snails) and August ("Osmanthus" mud snails). The pickling method is as follows: wash the snails, stun them using salt mixed with plant ash, then rinse off the mucus and ash residue. After pickling for five days, drain the brine and boil it, then let it cool and clarify before reusing. Add a small amount of salt, and after another month of preservation, the snails will be ready to eat.

　　Mud snails, also known as "vomiting iron," belong to the class Gastropoda and the family Assimineidae. They are a major traditional product in the coastal areas of Ninghai County.

　　Mud snails are delicious, aromatic, and highly nutritious, making them an excellent dish for the table. They are sweet and salty in flavor and cool in nature, with benefits such as nourishing the liver and kidneys, enriching essence, moisturizing the liver, improving eyesight, and promoting saliva production. Particularly, the mud snails produced in Long Street Town of our county are known for their tender meat, large size, and soft texture (free of sandiness), offering a uniquely delicious taste. They enjoy great fame in the Shanghai–Ningbo region and in Hong Kong and Taiwan, and are called “Long Street Mud Snails.”

　　Long Street mud snails not only grow quickly but are also particularly plump. The larger ones can be as big as fresh broad beans, while the smaller ones are bigger than green soybeans. Typically, 160 to 170 snails weigh half a kilogram. There are two peak harvest seasons per year: the "Wheat-Yellow Mud Snail" season and the "Osmanthus Mud Snail" season, with the former generally being of higher quality. Currently, Long Street mud snails are very popular in the market. Fresh ones sell for 30 yuan per kilogram, while salted ones go for 36 yuan per kilogram—prices that are four to five times higher than mud snails from other sea regions.

　　In the past, Long Street mud snails were all wild-caught. In recent years, coastal farmers in the Long Street area have explored and developed a new method for artificially breeding mud snail spat. They collect mud snail eggs embedded deep in the silt (as big as table tennis balls, which contain tens of thousands of mud snail eggs visible to the naked eye). By enclosing ponds to retain water and protect against waves for hatching, the spat are then transferred to clam or blood clam ponds or dedicated mud snail ponds for cultivation. According to statistics, the area of artificially cultivated mud snails in Long Street grew from 10 acres in 1989 to 3,200 acres in 1992, and reached 15,000 acres in 1997, yielding 750 tons of fresh mud snails and generating 20 million yuan in output value.