With the emergence of the 17-year Cicada swarms imminent on America's East Coast, gourmets from Martha's Vineyard right on down to Cape Hatteras are preparing assiduously for the feast. Yes, everyone who's anyone knows Cicadas are crunchy and delicious, and nothing sharpens the appetite like waiting 17 long winters for another taste of succulent insects superbly prepared and presented to table.
These two-inch long, noisy, bug-eyed locusts will be crawling all over everything in sight for the next two months, veritable manna from heaven for true aficionados of haute cuisine. But it's so hard to find an American restaurant with a decent 17-year Cicada chef, the work being so seasonal.
No, the fine art of creating a locust luau remains an Oriental art, in my humble opinion. Fortunately, I have in hand the personal journal of our dear, departed family chef, Wong Wok Son, to guide me as I venture for the first time this year into preparing his famous dish, Shanghai Cicadas, all by myself.
Since only freshly emerged Cicadas will do for his grand dish, it means a lot of careful poking and picking at the nearby city park to find five dozen virgin locusts -- a stern task for someone of my silvered age. Fear not. I will take an hour or so to fortify myself with brandy and schnapps here at home beforehand, since they allow no imbibing of spirits in that public space. Join me over the fold when I'm all fortified, and see what adventures unfold.
Ah, there you are. Time to put away the snifter, is it? Mmmmkay. Let's quickly review the recipe for today's delicious dish, lovingly passed down to Wong Wok Son from his ancestors, and now from me to you.
60 freshly emerged live Cicadas, preferably virgins
2 teaspoons sea salt
4 tablespoons organic anise seeds
2 tablespoons of Soy Sauce
4 cups of salted sherry wine
4 cups of sake or rice wine
some celery for garnishing the plates before serving
20 cloves of mashed up garlic
some turnip greens to garnish the plates
some parsley to garnish the plates
Everything's here on the kitchen counter or in the icebox, and I've got an empty gallon glass jar in my backpack, so off we go. Wait. I'll just sample a little of this sherry here, and the sake, too. Make sure they're up to par. Whoo! That's par in anybody's book. Okay. Off we go. Wait.
Citronella. I always splash on lots of Citronella oil before I go out to keep away the bugs. And it keeps people from saying I smell like brandy, too. Off we go.
Here at the park the noise of Cicadas is deafening, way louder than all the shrieking little kids chasing them or imagining they are being chased by them. My task is simple. Stroll along looking for nymphs just emerging from their dirt tunnels in the short grass or just crawling up the lower trunks of trees and bushes, pick 'em up and pop 'em in my jar.
I'm glad I had all those brandies. The air is full of the most pleasant buzzing sound, and the perfume of honeysuckle bushes is so ripe it makes my head spin. Ah, spring! Makes me want to lie down under these shady trees and sleep the day away.
But there's work to do, and the pickings are easy here behind the ball field bleachers. I think I'll just crawl along on my hands and knees to get a closer look. I feel dizzy trying to focus on the ground from up here. Ahh, much better. I'm up to 27 prime specimens already. Another 30 minutes and I'll have my swag.
"What are you doing?"
A child, maybe 3 or 4. A nosy little urchin looking for trouble.
"I'm picking up nymphs. Go away." She's staring at my jar.
"What are nimfses?"
I hold one up for her to see, then pop it in my jar.
"Thirty-nine," I announce gravely.
"Eeeww. That's not nice."
"I said go away. I'm busy here."
"You're not nice."
"All right, please go away, with sugar on it."
"Let the nimfses go, too."
"I can't do that. I need them. Now go find your mother."
"See? You're not nice at all."
"If you don't go away, I'll call your mother."
She ran off. Good. Forty-seven.
Suddenly I need to pee. Slinging my backpack and jar over one shoulder I head for one of the Porta-Potties stationed by the baseball field. The heat and stink inside is suffocating, but the buzz in my head is easier to distinguish from the buzzing of the insect plague outside. Relieved, I exit to continue my culinary expedition.
There's the little girl again, and her mother, and two bicycle policemen in their shorts and helmets and guns all walking straight this way. Apparently a collision of some kind is inevitable. I sit down on a green bench to wait, cross my legs, my backpack by my side.
"Is this the man, honey?" says the Mom as they arrive.
"He's not nice," says the little one. The mother glares at me. I'm already convicted in her mind.
"Sir, were you interacting with this child just now?" asks one policeman. His partner hangs back, pretending to examine his bicycle's spokes as if he's never seen anything like them before.
"Only to tell her to go away. Politely."
"Was there any contact?" he asks.
"I simply told her to go away, please, with sugar on top."
"Was there any contact with the child?"
"No. None whatsoever. Only words. I was busy."
"Did this man touch you at all?" he asks the little girl.
"No. But he has bugs. He has nimfses in a big jar!" she replies
"So no contact," he says, looking at the Mom as if to say, "Can't help you."
She visibly deflates, taking her child's hand, glaring at me, and preparing to leave.
The policeman asks me what's in the backpack by my side. I pull out my jar.
"What are you doing with those?" he asks. His partner is wide-eyed, too. Now he really does have something he's never seen before.
"I'm collecting five dozen in an hour, all of them in the nymphal stage."
He's taken aback by such a precise answer. The Mom and child are trooping off across the diamond, almost to second base. She's scolding the girl, and swats her once on the bottom as they march away, leaving a little trail of fine dust in the air.
"Virgins," I say, to press even more of his buttons. "Unmated, freshly emerged Cicadas. I need exactly sixty with no sexual history."
He's astonished and frankly curious now. "May I?" he asks, leaning over and picking up the jar anyway. I let him. He examines the mass of crawling, red-eyed things inside.
"Can they breathe in there?"
"If you open the lid briefly every few minutes they do just fine."
"You a scientist?"
"Ph.D in Entomology from Johns Hopkins, and fifteen years with the CDC studying tropical fungal diseases in Senegal and Namibia. My current prosthesis involves the 17-year Cicada, Bovem Stercore, which is obviously plentiful at the moment."
"So you're collecting them for your lab."
"For processing and research, yes."
He hands it back, and I dutifully pop the lid for a moment to give the nymphs some air.
The cop apparently gets some air as well. He asks me if I've been drinking.
"That's Citronella oil in an alcohol base. I splash it on by the bucket because I'm highly allergic to certain mosquito bites. My throat closes up. It's why I can't work in Africa any longer."
He's heard enough, wishes me a nice day, and they ride off together, talking about football games on TV.
I watch their retreat, and wonder about this world, where a little Latin goes such a long way.
In a few more minutes I have my catch for the day, and stroll on home. I need a drink.
I decide to stick with sake for the duration of today's exercise. There's a whole gallon of it here, and it doesn't all have to go in the mix.
Okay, here we go. Turn on a couple burners, get some olive oil heating for deep frying later, get a pan out and pour a whole pint of salted sherry in it. I remember Wong Wok doing that much to start, before he chased me out of his kitchen.
Wow! That's salty wine. I fill the pint cup with sake to wash away the taste. So what does his journal say? Boil the cicadas anus, no no, boil the cicadas and anise in salty sherry for five minutes. I can do that.
As soon as the sherry is simmering. I turn down the heat and in goes my whole jar of virgins, Cicada nymphs alive and kicking up anise seeds. Briefly. They all relax into their bath right away.
I sip my sake and stir my stew for five minutes by the clock. This is going really well.
Looking at the empty jar I notice it's all stained with cicada poop, just like every car parked under a tree up and down my street. Probably should have hosed down my virgins before I boiled them alive, but that's a detail for next time. Cest la vie. I raise my cup, "Salud!" as the five minute bell goes off. The cicadas get scooped out into a bowl beside the stove. The sherry and anise goes down the drain. What's next?
Now I have to saute 20 cloves of smashed, wait, mashed garlic with soy sauce and more sherry. Yay for more sherry! Wow, that's salty stuff! Thank God for sake, so clean and fierce. Cleans up the taste buds better than bread. My little food processor will smash garlic, so all the peeled garlic cloves go in and in seconds it's pasty liquid. Into the pan it goes with the soy sauce and sherry. It thickens in a few minutes, turning a brownish, muddy color and consistency. But it smells wonderful.
"Next!" I shout, raising my sake cup no one in particular. I'm the only one who lives here any more.
How did that happen?
"Lesseee . . . deep fry the cicadas a few at a time, then skour, skuwer . . ." oh hell just stab them with little bamboo sticks. Each bamboo stick goes in with a distinct crunch, like I'm executing sixty little gladiators who got a thumbs down in the games today. A little cellophane banner atop each stick marks the scene of each murder.
"Lay them out on a plate, arranging the celery, browned garlic paste, parsley and other greens to resemble the little dirt burrows in the grass that nymph cicadas emerge from every 17 years."
Wait a damn minute. Wong Wok Son never wrote English this good. I think he copied this recipe from a book and then lied to me about it being four thousand years old, and only taught to one child in his family every 17 years. I think that was Bovem Stercore of the first order.
And I was happy to believe him. It's got to make you wonder about this world when no one's immune to Latin.
Okay. All arranged on an oval glass platter, with the brown garlic paste looking a lot like the dirt around a cicada tunnel, and the parsley and celery and turnip leaves like the surrounding grass. And there's the cicadas emerging on every side. Looks just like the lawn out back, where the dog goes. With toothpicks.
Suddenly it looks like a battlefield scene from Starship Troopers, where the Bugs lost and the Troopers won.
This isn't the dish I remember. Wong Wok Son must have known some magic he didn't have the words to write down.
I'll just pop this in the fridge and maybe warm it up later. Right now I need a nap, then I hafta write this up proper for Gourmet Magazine by Friday noon. Those Conde Nast editors are sticklers for detail.