Essay A very buggy banquet By John Gathright	フレームで見る  英文をプリントする  脚注をプリントする
ちょっと変わったご馳走 サソリのガーリックいために蜂の子アイスクリーム - - 筆者の友人のケンジは、虫の料理の達人だ。正直言って、そうした嗜好を持ち合わせていない筆者だが、ある事件を機に生じた、サソリとの「食うか食われるか」の関係に決着をつけるべく、恐る恐るケンジが調理したサソリを食してみたら…。

"Hey, I've got some bee larvae. Are you hungry?" I looked up. Kenji was standing on the second floor of our tree house with a huge bee's nest in one hand and a pot full of larvae at his feet. "Bee larvae?" I asked. "What happened to our scorpion feast?!" "These are just for starters," Kenji said, grinning. He patted his backpack where he had the scorpions.

My bug-eating buddy Kenji is a mild-mannered guy - a dentist - who just happens to have a passion for edible insects and arthropods. He's always full of culinary surprises, and today's menu included scorpions fried in garlic with buckwheat bread and wild-flower salad. Dessert was bee larvae in vanilla ice cream.

"Scorpions are old hat!" he told us. "Everyone eats them in China and Taiwan. Bee larvae ice cream, though, this is a bug-eater first!"

In all honesty, I don't share Kenji's passion for eating insects. The thought of bee stingers tickling my tongue turns my stomach. But eating scorpions on the other hand is something that I have been dying to do for the past year.

You see I have a bit of a score to settle. Last year, while tree-climbing 40 meters up a huge hinoki in Taiwan I had the unpleasant opportunity of sharing my trousers with a few little brown assassins.

"Hey, there are scorpions crawling on me!" I shouted. I was out on a limb and my heart was beating like a drum. "Are they deadly?" "No, no," came the reply from the forest floor. "Not deadly. Delicious!" This was followed by a sudden burst of laughter. The scorpions crawled down my leg for what seemed like an eternity. Finally they moseyed up the tree. I quickly descended to the taunting of my tree-climbing friends.

"Eat or be eaten," as the saying goes, and now, a year later, I was on the side of the eating. The first bite was the hardest. As I looked at the scorpion with its stinger still attached, it took all of my strength to put it in my mouth. Surprisingly, it wasn't bad! Scorpions sound scary but they taste like shrimp. These deadly little guys actually were delicious!

So I did some research into scorpion cuisine. Apparently, they can be dipped in chocolate, fried in butter, eaten half raw or bought in bags like potato chips. They are a delicacy eaten all over the Earth - from Taiwan to Mexico. A quick deep fry kills the deadly poisons and if you want to eat them raw, all you have to do is cut off the poison sack and stinger

Handling the scorpions can be dangerous and according to a Chinese chef I know, long cooking chopsticks are a must, as is a small net to catch them should you drop one in the kitchen and it starts scurrying away and scaring the diner guests.

Fortunately, our scorpions were frozen when we started to cook them so really they were quite harmless. The only scary thing about our meal was Kenji's ice cream! Baby bee ice cream was deadly and not delicious! For hours my mouth was a little funny and it felt like I had something fuzzy on tongue!

Shukan ST: Aug. 12, 2005

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