The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations suggests that if more people incorporate insects into their diet we could reduce world hunger, food shortages and food insecurity.
I would therefore be interested to see if any of the multitude of food presenters on Australian television or in newspaper/magazine columns latch on to the above and offer recipes that might find favour with our palates. I wonder what they could come up with?
Meanwhile, I offer the following from a fascinating old cookbook I have – The Art of Cuisine, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Maurice Joyant. Yes, that is the famous painter, and Joyant was an art gallery director who became Lautrec’s executor. They were childhood friends and in adult life shared a mutual love of food. Lautrec was convinced that cookery is an art and both he and Joyant invented recipes. Here’s one on grasshoppers, which have a high nutritional value. It is titled “Grasshoppers grilled in the fashion of Saint John the Baptist” (Sauterelles grillees a la mode de Saint Jean-Baptiste):
“From a large swarm of grasshoppers, choose the most beautiful, the pink rather than the brown or the yellow. Put them on a screen and let them grill lightly over a charcoal fire while at the same time sprinkling them with a few pinches of coarse salt. Tear off the head by turning them so that the whole digestive tract will come out intact.
“Lay the grasshoppers on a dish garnished with rounds of lemon; season to taste with salt and ordinary and red pepper. Shell and eat the desert grasshoppers (locusts) in the same way as ‘grasshoppers’ of the English Channel, that is to say shrimps, which have the same savor.”
This recipe was followed by one that will intrigue my old friend Percy from the Pews, titled “Saint on the grill” (Saint sur le gril): “With the help of the Vatican try to procure yourself a real(!) saint. Treat him as St Lawrence was treated on August tenth, a.d. 258. When you have whipped him, lay him on the grill over a big bed of charcoal. Like his predecessor, if he is a real saint, he himself will ask to be turned over in order to be grilled to a turn on both sides.”
