﻿OF THE STATE ENTOMOLOGIST. 145 



The records show us that iu ancient times these insects were cooked in a variety 

 of ways. (Edipoda migratoria and Acridium perigrinum, which are the more common 

 devastating locusts of the " Old World," are both of large size, and they are generally 

 prepared by first detaching the legs and wings. The bodies are then either boiled, 

 roasted, stewed, fried or broiled. The Romans are said to have used them by carefully 

 roasting them to a bright golden yellow. At the present day, in most parts of Africa, 

 and especially in Russia, they are either salted or smoked like red herrings. Chenier, 

 in his account of the Empire of Morocco (London, 1788), says that thus cured, they are 

 brought into the market in prodigious quantities, but that they have "an oily and ran- 

 cid taste, which habit only can render agreeable." The Moors use them, to the present 

 day, in the manner described by Jackson in his " Travels in Morocco," viz. : by first 

 boiling and then frying them ; but the Jews, in that country — more provident than the 

 Moors — salt them and keep them for using with the dish called Dafina, which forms the 

 Saturday's dinner of the Jewish population. The dish is made by placing meat, fish, 

 eggs, tomatoes — in fact almost anything edible — in a jar which is placed in the oven 

 on Friday night, and taken out hot on the Sabbath, so that the people get a hot meal 

 without the sin of lighting a fire on that day. In the Abbe Godard's " Description et 

 Histoire de Maroc''' (Paris, 1860), he tells us that " they are placed in bags, salted, and 

 either baked or boiled. They are then dried on the terraced roofs of the houses. Fried 

 in oil they are not bad." Some of our Indians collect locusts by lighting fires in the 

 direct path of the devouring swarms. In roasting, the wings and legs crisp up and are 

 separated ; the bodies are then eaten fresh or dried in hot ashes and put away for future 

 use. Our Digger Indians roast them, and grind or pound them to a kind of flour, 

 which they mix with pounded acorns, or with different kinds of berries, make into 

 cakes and dry in the sun for future use. 



The species employed by the ancients were doubtless the same as those employed 

 at the present day in the East, viz. : the two already mentioned, and, to a less degree, 

 the smaller Caloptenus Italicus. We have no records of any extended use of our own 

 Rocky Mountain species [Caloptenus spretus), unless — which is not improbable — the spe- 

 cies employed by the Indians on the Pacific coast should prove to be the same, or a 

 geographical race of the same. 



It had long been a desire with me to test the value of this species {spretus) as food, 

 and I did not lose the opportunity to gratify that desire, which the recent locust inva- 

 sion into some of the Mississippi Valley States offered. I knew well enough that the 

 attempt would provoke to ridicule and mirth, or even disgust, the vast majority of our 

 people, unaccustomed to anything of the sort, and associating with the word insect or 

 " bug" everything horrid and repulsive. Yet I was governed by weightier reasons 

 than mere curiosity ; for many a family in Kansas and Nebraska was last year brought 

 to the brink of the grave by sheer lack of food, while the St. Louis papers reported 

 cases of actual death from starvation in some sections of Missouri, where the insects 

 abounded and ate up every green thing the past Spring. 



Whenever the occasion presented I partook of locusts prepared in different ways, 

 and, one day, ate of no other kind of food, and must have consumed, in one form and 

 another, the substance of several thousand half-grown locusts. Commencing the ex- 

 periments with some misgivings, and fully expecting to have to overcome disagreeable 

 flavor, I was soon most agreeably surprised to find that the insects were quite palatable, 

 in whatever way prepared. The flavor of the raw locust is most strong and disagree- 

 able, but that of the cooked insects is agreeable, and sufficiently mild to be easily neu- 

 tralized by anything with which they may be mixed, and to admit of easy disguise, 

 according to taste or fancy. But the great point I would make in their favor is that 

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