STOW, Ohio — Cicadas. For Don Xu, they’re what’s for dinner.
Xu, a self-described foodie, could hardly wait for the 17-year cicadas to emerge last month so he could fry some up and taste them. He cooked his first batch shortly after they started appearing in his yard in mid-May and has prepared them a few times since.
“I’d come downstairs and he’d be like, ‘I had cicadas for breakfast,’” his forbearing wife, Stephanie, said with a look of revulsion.
Like her, most Westerners are repulsed by the idea of eating insects. But in the Chinese culture in which Xu was raised, it’s normal to eat what he called “a lot of weird stuff.”
He’s eaten pig brain. He’s eaten cow tongue. He wants to try fried tarantula, which he’s heard tastes just like soft-shell crab.
He writes about his food experiences and shares recipes — most of them quite conventional — on his Facebook page, Food Cures All.
“A lot of people go, ‘How can you eat that? It’s a bug,’” he said. “Well, if you think about it, a crab is kind of like a bug in the ocean. … It’s just getting past the bug factor.”
Insects are a good source of protein, he pointed out, and lots of cultures eat them.
Xu (it’s pronounced “Soo”) said he first ate cicadas during a visit to China when he was in second grade. The last time the 17-year cicadas appeared here, he was only 13 and not yet interested in cooking them. But this time, “I was actually really excited,” he said.
He’d go out around sunset and collect cicada nymphs just after they emerged from the ground, before they had a chance to break out of their outer coverings and emerge as adults. He found a cicada mother lode in his yard under some fallen leaves, which he suspects kept the ground warmer and encouraged the insects to emerge earlier than in other places.
“It looked like the ground was moving,” he said.
Nymphs make for better eating than adults, he explained. The adults don’t have much meat on them, and they’re a pain to prepare, because you have to pull off the wings.
Are you grossed out yet?
Not Xu. Earlier this week, he prepared a couple of dishes using cicadas he’d stored in his freezer after rinsing them thoroughly and soaking them overnight in salt water to kill them.
He gamely dropped ladles full of brined insects into a pan of bubbling oil, letting them cook until they were browned and crisp and then seasoning them with salt and pepper.
Others he dipped in beaten egg and rolled in flour before frying them. He then stirred them into the sort of sauce used in the Chinese dish General Tso’s chicken and served them sprinkled with a little chopped scallion for color. After all, it’s all about the presentation.
(For you cooks out there, he made the sauce by sauteeing ginger and garlic in oil and then adding hot chili sauce, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, salt, pepper and a little cornstarch for thickening, none of which he measured. You can substitute chicken for cicadas if you’re squeamish.)
Despite Xu’s enthusiasm, it’s worth pointing out that not everyone encourages chowing down on cicadas. Studies have found that some of the insects contain significant amounts of mercury, although as one scientist pointed out, you’re probably no worse off eating a few cicadas than you are eating fish from the Great Lakes. Others have raised concerns about eating cicadas from areas that have been treated heavily with pesticides, but that’s probably a bigger concern for insect-gorging pets than for humans.
Xu isn’t worried. He doesn’t use fertilizer or pesticide in his yard, he said, and he harvests cicadas only where he’s sure there’s no potential for contaminated runoff.
He even let his 2-year-old son, Parker, eat one. Daughter Scarlett, at 10 months, is still a little young.
He’s such an enthusiast that it’s hard to resist his cicada salesmanship. Before the end of the evening, even his wife had tried one, although she insisted it was her last.
One thing Xu hasn’t done is eaten the cicadas raw. He’s considered it, but “I do have some limits,” he said.
Sure.
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