Gene Weingarten: Would you like some Brood X with your Dom Pérignon?
By Gene Weingarten,
When they are cooked, the color comes out and they look like cockroaches, the really icky ones with greasy, striped black bodies, the kind that infest kitchens and ooze their abdomen goo over food; but, when boiled and sauteed in butter and lemon and garlic and a dash of white wine, they taste like the larger legs of soft-shell crabs. Succulent and crunchy. They satisfy, particularly when accompanied by Dom Pérignon, vintage 2010, a very good year.
Let’s get that out of the way right at the start. Cicadas are not just edible, they are delicious, after you murder them.
As soon as the stories started coming out — reminding us that the Brood X cicada was going to descend on us like locusts upon the pharaoh, a punishing wave of filth with diaphanous but horrifying dragon-like stunted wings — I decided I had to eat them, for two reasons. The first is that I have a weekly deadline on a column. The second is that I am infamous for being un-squeamish in dining. I once ate the raw tail of a live lobster while the head watched me, distressed and disapproving. So.
So my biggest problem turned out not to be eating the cicadas but finding them. I live in downtown D.C., and as I write this, the predicted swarm of oily little monsters has not materialized here. I spent a day searching for them, with dismal results: I found a few vacated exoskeletons, which resemble something a dog coughs up. Eventually I discovered cicadas were basically a suburban event, and that’s when I found Molly. Molly Quigley is a friend of mine. She is a PR person for the stately D.C. restaurant the Old Ebbitt Grill, and I wondered if she might get a chef there to cook me some cicadas. This request did not go well; apparently it would be like asking Auguste Escoffier to whip up some mac and cheese. But Molly turned out to be a great food source.
Mol lives in Washington, but only remotely, in a far-flung area that contains trees, bushes and cicadas. “I have hundreds,” she said, and she wasn’t bragging. Her dog, an exuberant 7-month-old Lab named Ruthie, brings them into the house and deposits them on the floor still alive. Ruthie eats grass, shoes, reading glasses, baseball gloves, human hair and her own feces, but she won’t actually eat the cicadas, which seem to revolt her. (Ruthie has a lace collar because she was named after Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a fact I mention only because it involves impeccable judgment.)
Anyway, Molly and I harvested 24 live cicadas from her backyard. I carried them home in a box, then made them quiescent in the freezer for an hour, and then boiled them semi-alive for two minutes. Plucked off their wings, sauteed them for two more minutes and poured the Dom Pérignon.
I am not a religious person, but my girlfriend, Rachel, is a practicing Episcopalian, and I asked her to say grace. This is, verbatim, what she said: “Lord, thank you for providing us with this food of disgusting little creatures who lived as slugs underground for 17 years in the pathetic hope they could have sex with each other once and then die. We hope this turns out to be the most humane way to kill them, and their sacrifice shall not have been in vain, just as you gave your body …”
“THANK YOU, RACHEL,” I blurted.
“… AND that you are big and munificent enough to have a sense of humor about such things,” she said, glowering.
We chowed down, a little buoyed by a news report that some cicadas have a fungus that makes the bugs sex-crazed “flying salt shakers of death.” We got no hint of that, alas. They were great, but we’re not sure our judgment is sound. We held off the last cicada for our cat, Sherman Bodner. Gave it to him with his dinner. He ate everything but the bug.
Email Gene Weingarten at gene.weingarten@washpost.com. Twitter: @geneweingarten. For previous columns, visit wapo.st/weingarten.
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