“[Martha] Weiss [a professor of biology at] nicknamed cicadas “tree shrimp” for their closeness in genetic makeup to shrimp of the sea — and because, as she put it, “if you’re happy eating shrimp, then there’s really no reason not to try cicada, which is like a shrimp except living in a cleaner environment.” But she describes their flavor as far different: nutty, with a bit of an asparagus taste. Lemann describes them as woody and earthy; Goon likened them to a potato chip.
While Weiss doesn’t think there’s a wrong way to eat cicadas, battered and fried, boiled like little lobsters or crawfish, roasted and dipped in chocolate, with wings and legs or without, there is a correct time. Cicadas have three stages to their above-ground life: the nymphal stage when they’ve just popped out of the newly warmed ground; the teneral stage, when they are milky white; and the fully adult stage when they’re all brown and ready to start screaming.
Also, if you’d like a dipping sauce, do what we do in the crawfish restaurants: mix mayonnaise, ketchup, horseradish, and a fuckton of hot sauce for what we like to call “crawfish sauce” but you may call cicada sauce. And, sadly, as I live much too far away to partake and have also missed nigh on three entire crawfish seasons, please let me know how they were.
Spare me. Don’t boil up any shrimp, crawfish or “tree shrimp” cicadas (with nutty aromas) with all kinds of whoopie to disguise what they look and taste like.
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