A Bunch of Cicadas Sang... Before They Were Supper: ; a Wild Culinary Experiment Takes Wing As Three Staffers Get Their Fill of a Noisome Bug
Charleston Daily Mail › June 17, 2008
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Summary
On the Web Watch video of the Daily Mail Cicada Fest from preparation to consumption at dailymail.com.
This is a story of herd mentality. The herd in this case is a group of three and what happened when one of them made the flip remark, Lets cook some cicadas and eat them. The next thing you know they decide its a good idea. Someone is appointed to hunt and gather them. Someone offers to research preparation methods and formulate tasty (?) recipes. And somehow you wind up spending a perfectly nice Sunday afternoon watching people you already knew were not right in the head consume a meal of bugs. Beer-battered and fried. Oven- roasted with garlic and herbs, then buttered. Nestled inside an herbed cream cheese-filled fried wonton. And because we believe in dessert: dipped in melted chocolate. Heres how it went down. As anyone who lives near a tree and perhaps tunes into the news knows, this is the year in West Virginia for the emergence of the periodic cicada, an insect that has been feasting on tree sap below ground for 17 years and now bursts forth to mate so that the cycle may continue. The cicadas are big and clumsy and noisy. They have beady red eyes and kind of prickery legs. After keeping you awake with their mating calls, they have the nerve to hang out in your trees and fly into you when youre not looking. And then they die, leaving their carcasses scattered everywhere. But heres the thing: A lot of animals love cicadas. Cicadas are high in protein and low in fat and carbohydrates, plus they deliver a virtual One-a-Day dose of iron, calcium and riboflavin. At zoos in the East, zookeepers even collect cicadas to feed insect-eating animals that are kept inside or in areas where they may not have access to the tasty treats. The sloth bear has been known to gorge itself into even more sloth when it gets its paws on cicadas. In the people world, there also are folks who advocate eating insects. In many parts of the world, this has been done for centuries. In the United States, where we will eat Twinkies and sip on neon-colored sodas, we nonetheless balk at insects. Cookbooks yes, plural, cookbooks have been devoted to the gourmet preparation of insects. Author David George Gordons Eat-a- Bug Cookbook has become a textbook for a mission and he travels the country doing cooking demonstrations and speaking on the matter. He points out that once you get past the appearance, bugs are quite tasty. Gordon has been known to fry scorpions in tempura batter and stir up a bunch of roasted crickets in pasta. Cream of katydid soup? Curried Termite Stew? These are actual recipes in his cookbook. It also appears that in the world of bugs, ugly equals tasty. Gordons cookbook advice includes this little ditty: Red, orange or yellow forego this fellow. Black, green or brown go ahead and toss him down. So. This is how City Editor Brad McElhinny, Assistant City Editor Kris Wise Maramba and Design Editor Philip Maramba found themselves in a conversation about eating cicadas. Kris enabled the conversation between Philip (her husband!) and Brad. If theyd really eat em, shed cook em. Photographer and nature appreciator Tom Hindman offered (was ordered) to collect them and photograph the event. I did not actually offer to do a darn thing, but when asked to chronicle the debacle, I readily agreed. For the same reasons that I watch bad reality TV and listen to the police scanner for enjoyment. In the spirit of Its always better to ask forgiveness than to ask permission, Tom gathered the booty while covering a golf tournament at Berry Hills Country Club, quickly filling a reclosable plastic bag and screaming like a girl when cicadas landed on his neck or latched on to his fingers. Kris spent several days researching the best way to prepare the cicadas. Pesticides are a concern and these were gathered at a golf course but she learned that blanching them would help leach out impurities, kill any bacteria in their bellies and crisp them up nicely. Because they were gathered several days in advance, Kris refrigerated and then froze the cicadas. They were cooked in boiling water for about 4 minutes. That process rendered the wings tough as leather, but the next step, roasting at 300 degrees for 40 minutes, solved that. The wings dried up and were easily scraped off. Kris had decided that Philip and Brad would need to prove their manliness with some straight-up cicadas, though she thoughtfully seasoned them and dipped them in melted butter. We are not savages here. The rest were used for three other dishes battered and fried, tucked inside fried wonton and dipped in melted chocolate. Philip has a reputation for eating anything, even food that has passed a reasonable spoilage date. He is fearless and he has an iron stomach. Brad, on the other hand, is a bit finicky. He does not like tomatoes, for example, and is picky about any sauce that is derived thereof. Textures spook him just suggest the delicious Mexican custard called flan and he turns pale. I dont like jiggly textures, he said. This is one reason his wife, Karen, and their two daughters, Kate and Isabelle, insisted upon attending the meal: to offer love and support and laugh their heads off. They definitely have an odor to them, Kris noted, passing around a plate of plain cicadas for us to sniff. They smell like asparagus, we agreed. Philip admitted having second thoughts. This is going to be gross. Brad tried to prepare himself. I like ethnic food...and this could be considered tribal. Kris, by this point, had gotten over her aversion to touching them, and commenced to fry the heck out of them. Cicadas dont take to batter as well as mushrooms do, she observed. Brad tasted first, opting for the battered bug as his, um, appetizer. Honestly, not bad, he said. It is more beer- battery than anything. Not buggy. It has a crackley feel. Did the eyes burst in your mouth? someone piped up. Brad progressed fairly quickly to the roasted cicada and the stuffed wonton. Leggy, he noted. Not unlike a cured meat with a vegetable flavor. As for the dessert, he observed he could as easily have been eating a chocolate- covered nut, or raisin, or, we presume, mealy grub. Philip, as we expected, dove right in with the plain version first. These are pretty good its got a lot of garlic. I like the crunch, he said, before munching his way through the rest of the meal. It is asparagusy, he said, prompting a conversation about whether the insects might affect the smell of urine the same way that asparagus does. (Answer: probably so, because cicadas contain sulfur, and a sulfur compound in asparagus called mercaptan is blamed for causing the odd urine smell some people experience after consuming it.) Before you read this next part, please remember that we really did research the safety and preparation of cicadas. And only because we were confident of their safety did we feed them to an innocent child. It was perhaps proof of what bug-eating advocates say: The only reason more of us dont eat bugs is that we have been conditioned through our lives to think they are gross. When you are 2, you dont know that. And when you are 2 and are surrounded by the people you love and trust most in this world, you will eat a bug, secure in the knowledge that your parents would not let culinary harm befall you. Kate loved them. She licked the chocolate off her first cicada and then crunched her way through the rest of it. She bit right into the wonton, oblivious to its crawly center. And then she took another, slurping the bug right out of the soft-centered cream cheese. She chewed away at the bug, not bothered by its tough exoskeleton. Can you say fiber? Do you need some apple juice to wash that down? her father asked. She smiled sweetly, such trust on her face. And thus, we have chronicled a family story they may treasure for years to come.See the full content of this document
Extract
A Bunch of Cicadas Sang... Before They Were Supper: ; a Wild Culinary Experiment Takes Wing As Three Staffers Get Their Fill of a Noisome Bug
Cicada Wontons
Fresh wonton wrappers 8 oz. cream cheese 5-6 green onions...See the full content of this document
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