Issue 82

Chapulines, a Mexican Delicacy

 

Crickets, Grasshoppers, and Locusts

By Corinna Sargood
Drawings by Corinna Sargood

Maria was our elderly neighbor in the mountains above Oaxaca. Hospitality flowed from her verandah, where a wooden table of monumental proportions filled the end nearest to the kitchen. The table was covered in oilcloth printed with garish photographs of mouth-watering fruit and vegetables. At lunchtime, local workmen came to eat; within moments, a meal would appear. While Maria served, her daughter Guadelupe would fetch cool drinks from a shed. Jugs of honey-sweetened pumpkin juice circulated, and children were passed from knee to knee, hugged, and given bristly kisses.

In Mexico, St. Valentine’s Day is celebrated as the day of women’s friendship, and Maria included us, along with many of her friends, in her festivities. Early that day I went with my husband to the market to purchase our contribution to the meal — chapulines. That’s the Mexican word, from the Nahuatl chapoli, for grasshoppers, crickets, and locusts. These days they are harvested commercially and rightly considered delicious.

Before the Spanish arrived and introduced domesticated animals from Europe, the population of Mexico was, by circumstance, largely vegetarian. Archaeological evidence indicates that they supplemented this diet with the highly nutritional chapulines, and that they ate them in great quantities for at least five millennia. Ounce for ounce, they provide more protein than animal meat, to those hungry enough to catch them.

Chapulines abound during the rainy season, which lasts from May to October, and they are best hunted in the cool of the morning, while they are still dormant. The traditional symbiotic trio of corn, beans, and squash, still grown in the milpas, the tiny traditional fields, form an ideal habitat for chapulines. Later in the day, they jump all over among the tall, rigid stalks of maize, the basis of the local diet for thousands of years, the climbing beans, whose roots add nitrogen to the soil, and the large spreading leaves of the squash, which shade the ground and help retain humidity.

Maria remembers being fully occupied as a young girl darting through themilpas, capturing the leaping insects. “Su brincan,” she repeated — “They spring.” She mimed her stealthy pursuit of the chirruping insect as it leapt from stem to stem, defensively displaying its brightly colored underwings. She would snatch it between her forefinger and thumb and drop it into the front pocket of her best embroidered apron.

Once captured, the insects are starved for 24 hours and left to defecate, which prevents them from tasting bitter. The next day they are plunged into boiling water. After they have turned red, they are laid out in the sun to dry. In the markets of Oaxaca in wide, shallow baskets, you see chapulines sold by the scoop, usually in a choice of three sizes. The majority come from the state of Oaxaca; in lesser quantities, they are harvested as far north as Michoacan, Hidalgo, and Puebla and to the southeast in Chiapas and the Yucatan.

Having very little flavor, the insects take on the taste of the sauce in which they are cooked. They can be fried with garlic, salt, lemon, and the tiny, very hot piquin chile. Or they can be baked without fat in the pre-Hispanic tradition on a corral — a flat unglazed clay dish — with salt, tomatillos, and the piquant herb epazote. Served with slices of lemon or lime and a little salt, they are an excellent accompaniment to a preprandial glass of mezcal or tequila.

The female grasshopper lays eight to 25 pods of eggs that adhere to long grasses or other vertical plants. Each mass contains 25 to 150 eggs. The tiny tlalchapoli, or nymphs, emerge from the eggs looking like small adults. (These are sprinkled on guacamole.) The unharvested nymph grows quickly, and after discarding several skins, its nascent wings develop into those of the flying adult.

For the Valentine’s Day meal, our offering was placed at the center of the table, on the fine white embroidered linen brought out only for special occasions. The plate of fat dried insects together with a basket of lemons met with general approval, which extended even to the price we had paid. “They are not gringos,” Maria explained.

“They look like gringos,” said a disgruntled guest, scrutinizing us from the other side of the table.

“They are not”, our friend insisted.

“How is that?”

“She does her own washing.” After that, most of the guests warmed to us, and lifting their glasses of mezcal in salutation, they passed the grasshoppers around.

The sun lowered itself below the horizon, and in the cottages on the mountainside lamps began to be lit, indistinguishable from the stars until the moon rose. Owls hooted, a dog barked, but the sound that filled the night to bursting was the relentless tinnitus of the chapulines, rasping their legs in the damp of the gathering dew.●

From issue 82

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