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1
Cream the softened butter in a bowl until smooth and even. Work in the parsley, garlic, shallot, salt, white pepper, nutmeg, and Pernod. Mix until all aromatics are uniformly distributed through the mass. The butter is ready when it is a coherent, pale-green compound with no streaks of unmixed fat.
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2
Transfer the beurre d'escargot to cling film, roll into a log, and refrigerate until firm — or proceed directly to assembly. The butter must be cold and hold its shape before it enters the shells; warm butter will liquefy and run from the shell in the oven before the snail heats through.
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3
Heat the oven to 220 °C. Place a small plug of cold beurre d'escargot in the base of each cleaned shell. Insert one snail. Seal the opening with a generous dome of cold butter — approximately 10 g per shell — pressing it level with the rim so the snail is fully encased. Arrange the filled shells butter-side up in the dimpled indentations of a snail plate. This is where the dish lives or dies: butter that is too warm or too sparse will evacuate the shell in the oven, leaving the snail dry and the plate a pool of wasted fat; the butter must be cold, dense, and abundant.
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4
Slide the snail plate into the hot oven. Bake for 8–10 minutes. The dish is ready when the butter is bubbling vigorously at the rim of every shell and the edges of the butter are beginning to colour. The garlic should be fragrant and mellowed; if the rim shows any darkening to brown-black, remove immediately — burnt garlic is acrid and will dominate the plate.
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5
Serve at once, directly on the snail plate, with fresh baguette presented alongside. The act of sopping the green-flecked, garlic-saturated butter from the plate with bread is integral to the dish, not incidental to it.