Cicada Mania

Weird Meat: Cicadas in Jinan. Weird Meat is a blog about non-Western food (no cows and chickens) like cicadas. Check it out.

So minutes later, we had a huge plate of fried bugs. I’d say about a hundred of these little bite-size insects were deep-fried crispy. Everyone liked them. Even my friend Boya from Texas, usually not as adventurous a diner, enjoyed them.

I came across this article thanks to Google’s news alerts: UC Engineering Researchers Find Mercury In Cicadas. I’ve never eaten a cicada and I don’t plan on doing so in the future, but a lot of “cicada maniacs” do, so here’s your PSA.

Think twice before you eat one of Cincinnati’s Brood-X cicadas. That’s the warning from researchers at the University of Cincinnati College of Engineering, who have found surprising levels of mercury in these insects.

These sort of things disgust me, but I’m posting it anyway.

Four cups of chopped rhubarb, 1 cup of fresh cicadas, washed and any hard parts removed; 1�1/3 cups white sugar, 6 tablespoons all-purpose flour, 1tablespoon butter, and a 9-inch double crust pie crust.

You’ll find the rest of the recipe in this article from the Arizona Republic: Answering bug query is easy as pie.

From this article in the Shippensberg Sentinel:

Jake Crider takes a bite of a chocolate-covered cicadas. He has kept a container of pre-cooked, frozen periodical cicadas that he harvested last year.

Kids having a cicada eating contest. Just look at the joy on their faces.

Deep End Dining has a post about cicada soup, including a picture of a big steaming bowl of them.

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?