Montreal's Insect Tastings — a gala gourmand affair.
Georges Brossard, founder of Montreal Insectarium, all covered in insects
Tingling taste buds - or bugs?
The locust brochette was an inch from my mouth. The camera was poised to shoot, when my knees started knocking. Entomologist Laurent Desaulniers laughed at my failing courage, and started to put the camera down. “But Nancy, you eat other arthropods," he chided. "Like lobsters and crabs. It’s just your conditioning. The locusts are delicious. Like crunchy potato chips!”
Potato chips with wings, legs and eyes! Yes—it was just my conditioning. But like some of the over 15,000 people who come to Croques-Insectes, the bi-annual insect tastings at the Montreal Insectarium in February and March, I was still waiting for my curiosity to get the better of my conditioning. Start with the thing that scares you the most, was my approach.
Cricket sushi, anyone?
The Mexican-style locust brochette looked exactly like a winged locust with bulging eyes impaled on a toothpick. Whereas the cricket sushi, mealworm pizza, endive and walkingstick canapés, and bee larvae tarts were tempered by a variety of friendlier ingredients—like lettuce and rice and pizza dough.
I’d certainly eaten other weird things in my travels. I’d gagged on squishy boudin—blood pudding—at a creole Christmas dinner on Guadeloupe. I’d slid a plateful of greasy, hairy pig’s tails down my gullet in Dublin, at the Ballyfermot house of the folk singer Liam Weldon. (“Mostly gristle and fat, but a cheap source of protein,” Liam joked.)
Heavy metal mantis
I’d savored manta rays in Malaysia, cold jellyfish salad in Florida, and in Tokyo, raw gummy sea urchins and slivers of raw fugu, the toxic blowfish that has made centuries of Japanese diners drop dead at their chopsticks.
And, as if to prepare me for this insect endeavor, I’d inadvertently chomped live ants for breakfast in Jamaica only the week before. I failed to notice that the crackers I’d bought at a roadside stand in Kingston, Jamaica had overnight become infested with ants—until I’d crunched the last cracker and felt something stinging my tongue. In the mirror I saw a black dot holding fast on a taste bud. It was an ant! The stinging formic acid gave it a peppery taste. The empty cracker box was swarming with tiny ants, but most of the colony had gone down my hatch.
A gala gourmand affair
Croque-Insectes is a gala gourmand affair. Tall starched chef’s hats. White linen and silver platters. Elegant looking hors d’oeuvres that sound more edible in French—trempettes au couvain d’abeilles— than the English "bee larvae dip."
The event had the same caché as a Nouveau Beaujolais or Cordon-Bleu tasting—if you ignored what was displayed in the glass cases on the Insectarium's walls (hairy tarantulas, greasy giant roaches, woody walking sticks)- and if you didn’t know what was derrière la scene— “backstage.”
I knew what was backstage because entomologist Laurent Desaulniers had given me a tour of the Insectarium’s insect breeding laboratory. Glass cases featured writhing mealworms, crawling water bugs, lurking walking sticks, sulking scorpions and tarantulas They were all waiting to be fed: apples and carrots for the vegetarians; crickets for the carnivorous scorpions and tarantulas.
The walking sticks being gobbled at Croque-Insectes were raised at the Insectarium, but the crickets and migratory locusts were raised by specialized producers, Laurent explained. These producers assure the purity of the insects, which are starved before being frozen alive. But however they’re grown, pure or unpure, mealworms look like mealworms, I was thinking.
Madagascar roaches feeding on fruit
“Did you know that the Piaroa Indians of Venezuela eat tarantulas?” Laurent said, casually reaching for a tarantula with a beautiful rosy bronze velour. Laurent is a tarantula specialist who leaves town occasionally for jungles from Madagascar to Mexico to work as "insect wrangler" with the film crew of the TV series "Insectia."
He spent two weeks in the Venezuelan jungle at Kilometer 88 in the Gujana Highlands of La Gran Sabana, collecting 4,000 insects, including the five-inch Megasoma acteon scarab beetle. But he didn't eat any tarantulas.
Laurent told me how the Piaroas ritualistically trap by hand and prepare the largest and deadliest spider in the world, the Theraphosa blondi. This giangantic tarantula can devour a 12-foot long poisonous Fer de lance in 17 hours! The Piaroas scrape the poisonous hairs off the abdomens of pregnant female tarantulas; squeeze out the 80 or so eggs; wrap them in banana leaves and grill them over a open fire to make a bitter-tasting omelette.
Nancy holding a velvety tarantula - assured by the Montreal Insectarium lab technician that it would not bite. Scary though.
They roast the thorax, head and legs to singe off the poisonous hairs, and suck the flesh and juice out of the legs— just like we do with crabs and lobsters. And after this tasty meal is over, they use the long, needle-sharp tarantula fangs as toothpicks!
If I wanted to see how the Piaroas did it, Laurent said, I could see the film Giant Tarantula by Nick Gordon being shown at the Insectarium. Not today thanks, I said, contemplating the six-legged repast laid out in the other room.
Fortunately it was not a sit-down seven-course dinner, but a finger-food buffet, and I had made sure to eat a big breakfast. And yet I nearly freaked when I saw the fried locusts impaled on toothpicks. I was still standing with the toothpick an inch from my mouth when Montreal Gazette columnist David Rose came over and said “It’s not bad. Quite crunchy.”
And so I did it. While Laurent Desaulniers popped the flash, I popped the whole locust in my mouth, determined to ignore what it was I was eating, until my teeth crunched down on the bulging eyes. By then it was too late to do anything but swallow. I admit the taste was nice—spicy, with a hint of roasted soy.
But as David and I agreed, although some people were pigging out on seconds and thirds, one was quite enough. The mealworm pizza was also tasty. But I stopped after one bite when I realized that the mealworms weren’t invisibly ground into the dough, but were hanging out under the cheese.
“Let’s go get drunk on ant wine,” I joked to David. “For courage to try the rest.”
The ant wine was no joke. It was made from grain alcohol and liquified ants, and at 76 proof—38% alcohol—packed a head-spinning wallop. Specially imported from Harbin, China for Croque-Insectes, the amber brew was served in tiny glasses. But it tasted like Listerine mixed with lemon and honey, chile peppers and rubbing alcohol.
“It is medecine,” the server explained. “In China it’s used as an arthritis remedy.”
I couldn’t finish my hit of Mescal either, that 80-proof grain alcohol mealworm-spiked potion imported from Mexico. So I faced the cricket sushi and walkingstick canapés stone sober.
Chef Jean-Louis Thémis and the students of the Institut du tourisme et d’hôtellerie du Québec had prepared this eerie smorgasbord, facing down 90,000 honeybee larvae, 80,000 mealworm larvae, 25,000 house crickets, and 10,000 migratory locusts for the event.
“We have to remove the locust legs because they’re awkward to eat. They get stuck in the teeth,” he laughed, “so we save them to use as toothpicks-or grind them into a powder to use in cookies. The only problem with preparing the insects,” said Thémis, who created all the Croque-Insectes recipes, now contained in his cookbook Bugging You is the fear. Some people are afraid to even touch the insects.”
High in protein, low in fat, and widely abundant, insects have been eaten all over the world for milleniums. In Thémis’ native Madagasgar, insects are sold in the markets— crickets to roast over the grill, and yellow caterpillar larvae to scramble like eggs. But Thémis explained that it’s advisable to eat only plant-eating insects that are either all white, all green or all brown, not colored, and those specifically raised for culinary consumption.
Are we, as they say, what we eat? Remembering how Gregor Samsa, in Franz Kafka’s story The Metamorphosis wakes up to find himself changed into a huge insect, I sure hope not.
