Jack Sprat: how to eat crickets

Alex Renton
The Times
July 25, 2008

Would you like flies with that? 'Stuffed crickets au champagne' is a highlight of The Cuisine of Cambodia. We try it in Phnom Penh

I began to suspect that the chef, Mr Ry, wasn't entirely familiar with haute cuisine when he tried to open my champagne bottle with a machete. But he was a cook willing to try something new, and that's always good - although his menu at the Stung Sen, the second-best diner in the town of Kompong Thom, central Cambodia, was far from dull. The English version listed some specialities: sour soup, fried water with cauliflower, fried cat with ginger. I'm not certain that the last meant catfish.

When I gave Mr Ry the recipe, he said he'd never heard of it. I was surprised. “Stuffed crickets au champagne” is, after all, a highlight of The Cuisine of Cambodia, the only Khmer cookbook ever translated into English, featuring contributions from no less a chef than King Norodom Sihanouk himself. With its nod to the luxuries of the country's French colonial past and the staples of the famine years, it's real fusion cuisine.

The champagne I had brought from Phnom Penh. The coconut and peanuts for the stuffing came from the Kompong Thom market. The crickets I'd paid some kids 50 pence to find in the rice paddies. Chef Ry topped and tailed them, as is normal, keeping their torsoes and thighs in tact. The latter are hardly bigger than matchsticks, but are said to be the best part.

Into the tiny bellies, Ry painstakingly poked the stuffing. Then he fried them in butter. At the last moment, I tossed the glass of champagne into the wok. The whole kitchen applauded as it went up in steam.

Why Not Eat Insects? is the title of Vincent M.Holt's must-have 1885 cookbook on this important subject. “In entering upon this work,” Holt begins, “I am fully conscious of the difficulty of battling against a long-existing and deep-rooted public prejudice ...”

But why not indeed? As Holt points out - before proceeding to the recipes for slug soup and braised beef with caterpillars - insects are not really so very different from crabs and lobsters.
And with food prices soaring, we must look where we can for protein. Holt wisely remarks:
“What a pleasant change from the labourer's unvarying meal of bread, lard, and bacon, or bread and lard without bacon, or bread without lard or bacon, would be a good dish of fried cockchafers or grasshoppers. [The poor] neglect wholesome foods, from a foolish prejudice which it should be the task of their betters, by their example, to overcome.”

I couldn't agree more. Sadly, though, I'm not sure that crickets in champagne is a dish for the poor or, indeed, anyone. But that may be because Chef Ry wasn't used to butter. He did slightly burn it. I was the only person in the restaurant to eat more than one cricket, and I have to admit that eating prawns with their shells on would have been similar. “So you always eat this dish in your country?” asked one of the waiters politely. But the crickets were miles better than the tarantula fried in garlic that I ate later in a town called Stung. That was very greasy.

“I foresee the day when the slug will be as popular in England as the sea slug is in China, and a dish of grasshoppers fried in butter as much relished by the English peasant as a similarly treated dish of locusts is by an Arab or Hottentot,” concludes the wonderful Mr Holt. I'm not as optimistic. But I was interested to find, in Bee Wilson's brilliant book on food industry fraud, Swindled, that insects are part of most processed food. In the United States, the Food and Drug Administration acknowledges this and limits it quite precisely. For example, by the FDA's rules, up to 30 insect parts are permitted per 100g of peanut butter, and 100g of tomato juice may contain 20 fly eggs or two maggots.

Enthused? You may be able to collect crickets - or grasshoppers - as the Cambodians do, by suspending a bright light outside at night above a deep bucket. I haven't yet tried. But if anyone wants the recipe for crickets au champagne, please e-mail me. There's one for potted red ants' eggs, too.