50 in '08: 19

[sakon76]

Title: The Eat-A-Bug Cookbook
Author: David George Gordon
Length: 100 pages + 16 pages of introductory material


To be fair, I didn't pick this one up. My coworker (prior to my linking to that cooking bugs video, even) mentioned she was getting it, and I asked if I could borrow it over the weekend. It's an interesting read, certainly, and full of facts like how many insects per ounce the FDA allows into food in America, the fact that locusts (swarming grasshoppers) are explicitly listed as kosher, and what parts of a scorpion need to be removed prior to cooking. Plus how can you NOT love any cookbook where there's an instruction to "place one cricket on top of a pineapple chunk, in a lifelike pose"? It's organized in sections by different bugs (crickets, grasshoppers, termites, bees, ants, cockroaches, tomato hornworms, water bugs, silkworms, centipedes, dragonflies, spiders, and scorpions, among others) rather than by type of cooking, and most of the recipes seem like they'd be pretty good devoid of bugs too. One pest which did not make an appearance was the slug/snail, which disappointed me. But then I guess it's too easy... escargot is already known to the European gastronome at whom this is directed. All in all, there are thirty-three different recipes, randing from "curried termite stew" to "sweet and sour silkworm" to "chocolate cricket torte." My favorite on title alone, though, has to be "fried green tomato hornworm." ^_^ Throughout, the author details where tribes and people of different nations readily eat different insects and how, to the point that while I'm not ready to incorporate them into my cooking yet, neither am I as grossed-out by the idea as I used to be. And for those braver than myself, he includes mail-order sources for his ingredients, businesses that breed bugs mostly for laboratory use, but as for as culinary use goes... well, these are insects that you don't have to worry about whether or not they've ingested pesticides in your neighbor's yard. I think this would be a particularly good book to read with a child of about 5-11 that you're trying to interest either in (1) nature, or (2) learning to cook. But in any case, it was a neat read.

Verdict: Recommended.

Comments

[racerxmachina.livejournal.com]

I've eaten crickets at a street festival (Mexican). They were OK. I got sick immediately afterwards (Eric too) and the bathroom was in constant demand for three straight days. Turns out we were lucky-- crickets are sometimes vectors for intestinal parasites, so we could have been sick for much longer. Dollars to donuts they didn't use mail-order bugs.