Eating Cicadas
From a Southern Voice article titled Eatin’ of the Green by George Oliver:
If you think crabs and lobsters are delicious, and you’re not turned off by the way they look, then you have no right to gasp at a sautéed cicada on your plate.
Do you think that the first person in beachside cooking history looked at a crab scurrying across a sand bar and said “yum”? No, he probably said, “ohmagod, what a hideous beast, with way too many legs and dirty, unfashionable armor.”
If he was gay, he might have also mused on its possible use as a campy cave latrine decoration. If he then decided it might be good to eat, he was either very adventurous or very hungry.
Now in the interest of full disclosure, I haven’t actually eaten a cicada yet, so I had to go online to see what cooking techniques are recommended. I suspected that, like with crabs and lobsters, a mature creature might be too hard, but how do you crack a cicada, and is there much to eat inside?
James attended a cicada fest somewhere in the Appalachians, I think in 2000, but not sure of the year. The two chefs hired to prepare the meal used cicadas that had already hardened, not good and too crunchy. However, if cicadas are collected as soon as they emerge, this usually requires nocturnal collection, then the whole body can be eaten with no crunchy parts. If the collectors were to concentrate on collecting only females, then it seems logical that the nutritional value would be much greater due to their egg filled abdomens. I’m hypothesizing here, but it does seem logical.
Comment by LisaRenee English — January 1, 2007 @ 10:23 am