All are of one opinion. The joint is juicy, tender, and very savoury. The taste reminds one a little of burnt almonds flavoured with the merest suggestion of vanilla. In short, the dish of worms is pronounced to be most agreeable, one might even say first-rate. [[180]]What would it not be if the art of the ancient epicures had been lavished on its cooking!
The skin alone leaves something to be desired: it is very tough. One might describe the new dish as the daintiest of force-meat, wrapped in parchment; the inside is delicious, but the outside defies the teeth. I offer it to my Cat: she refuses it, though she is very fond of sausage-skin. The two Dogs, my assiduous acolytes at dinner-time, refuse it likewise, refuse it obstinately, certainly not because of its hard texture, for their omnivorous gullets are sublimely indifferent to difficulties of deglutition. But their subtle sense of smell recognizes in the proffered morsel something unfamiliar, something absolutely unknown to all their race; and, after sniffing at it, they draw back as suspiciously as though I had offered them a mustard-sandwich. It is too new to them.
They remind me of the innocent wonder of my neighbours, the women of the village, when they pass in front of the fishwives’ stalls at Orange on market-days. Here are baskets filled with Shell-fish, others with Craw-fish, others with Sea-urchins.
“Eh,” they ask one another, “are those things meant to be eaten? And how? [[181]]Roast or boiled? You wouldn’t catch me tackling that stuff.”
And, vastly surprised that there should be people capable of making a meal off anything so loathly, they turn aside from the Sea-urchin. Even so do my Cat and my Dogs. With them as with ourselves, exceptional food needs an apprenticeship.
To the little that he has to say about the Cossus, Pliny adds: “Etiam farina saginati, hi quoque altiles sunt,” which means that the worms were fattened with meal to improve their flavour. The recipe startled me at first, all the more so as the old naturalist is much given to this system of fattening. He tells us of one Fulvius Hirpinus who invented the art of rearing Snails, so highly esteemed by the gormandizers of the day. The herd destined to be fattened were placed in a park surrounded by water to prevent escape and furnished with earthenware vases to serve as shelters. Fed on a paste of flour and syrupy wine, the Snails became enormous. Notwithstanding all my respect for the venerable naturalist, I cannot believe that molluscs thrive so remarkably when put on a diet of flour and syrupy wine. These are childish exaggerations, which were inevitable at first, [[182]]when the scientific spirit of research had not yet come into being. Pliny artlessly repeats the talk of the country folk of his day.
I have much the same doubts about the Cossi that put on flesh when fed with meal. Still, the result is less incredible than that alleged to take place in the Snail-park. As a scrupulous observer, let me test the method. I put a few grubs taken from the pines in a glass jar full of flour. They receive no other food. I expected to see the larvæ, smothered in that fine dust, dying quickly, either suffocated by the obstruction of their air-holes or perishing for lack of suitable nourishment.
Great was my mistake. Pliny was right: the Cossi thrive in the flour and feed heartily on it. I have before me some that have spent a year in this environment. They eat their way through it, scooping out corridors and leaving behind them a brown paste, the waste product of their digestive organs. That they are actually fatter I cannot state for a fact; but at least they have a magnificent appearance, no less imposing than that of others which were kept in jars filled with scraps of their native tree-stumps. The flour is amply sufficient, if not to fatten them, [[183]]at least to keep them in excellent condition.
Enough of the Cossus and my crazy skewers. If I have studied the question so closely, it certainly has not been with the hope of enriching our bills of fare. No, that was not my object, even though Brillat-Savarin[5] has said that “the invention of a new dish is a greater benefit to humanity than the discovery of an asteroid.”. The scarcity of the pine-tree’s plump inhabitants and the repugnance with which the vast majority of us view any sort of vermin will always prevent my new comestible from becoming a common article of diet. It is probable even that it will remain a mere curiosity, which people will take on trust without verifying its qualities. Not everybody has the needful independence of stomach to appreciate the merits of a worm.
Still less, so far as I was concerned, was the bait of a dainty dish the motive. My sober tastes are not easily tempted. A handful of cherries is more to my liking than all the preparations of our cookery-books. My sole desire was to throw light upon a point of [[184]]natural history. Have I succeeded? It may well be that I have.