The curiosities of food

by P. L. Simmonds

The cocoons of the wood ant (popularly and erroneously called ants’ eggs) are collected on the Continent as food for nightingales and larks. A recent writer tells us, that in most of the towns in Germany one or more individuals make a living, during summer, by the business. He describes a visit to an old woman at Dottendorf, near Bonn, who had collected for fourteen years. She went to the woods in the morning, and collected in a bag the surfaces of a number of ant hills where the cocoons were deposited, taking ants and all home to her cottage, near which she had a tiled shed, covering a circular area, hollowed out in the centre, with a trench full of water around it. After covering the hollow in the centre with leafy boughs of walnut or hazel, she strewed the contents of her bag on the level part of the area within the trench, when the nurse-ants immediately seized the cocoons and carried them into the hollow under the boughs. The cocoons were thus brought into one place, and after being from time to time removed, and the black ones separated by a boy, who spread them out on a table and swept off what were bad with a strong feather, they were ready for market, being sold for about 4d. or 6d. a quart. Considerable quantities of these cocoons are dried for winter food for birds, and are sold in the shops.

Humboldt mentions that he saw insects’ eggs sold in the markets of Mexico, and which are collected on the surface of lakes. Under the name of axayacat, these eggs, or those of some other species of fly, deposited on rush mats, are sold as a caviare in Mexico. Something similar, found in the pools of the desert of Fezzan, serves the Arabs for food, having the taste of caviare.

In the Bulletin de la Société Impériale Zoologique d’Acclimation, M. Guerin Méneville has published a very interesting paper on a sort of bread which the Mexicans make of the eggs of three species of hemipterous insects.

According to M. Craveri, by whom some of the Mexican bread, and of the insects yielding it, were brought to Europe, these insects and their eggs are very common in the fresh waters of the lagunes of Mexico. The natives cultivate, in the lagune of Chalco, a sort of carex called touté, on which the insects readily deposit their eggs. Numerous bundles of these plants are made, which are taken to a lagune, the Texcuco, where they float in great numbers in the water. The insects soon come and deposit their eggs on the plants, and in about a month the bundles are removed from the water, dried, and then beaten over a large cloth to separate the myriad of eggs with which the insects had covered them.

These eggs are then cleaned and sifted, put into sacks like flour, and sold to the people for making a sort of cake or biscuit called ‘hautlé,’ which forms a tolerably good food, but has a fishy taste, and is slightly acid. The bundles of carex are replaced in the lake, and afford a fresh supply of eggs, which process may be repeated for an indefinite number of times.

It appears that these insects have been used from an early period, for Thomas Gage, a religionist, who sailed to Mexico in 1625, says, in speaking of articles sold in the markets, that they had cakes made of a sort of scum collected from the lakes of Mexico, and that this was also sold in other towns.

Brantz Mayer, in his work on Mexico (Mexico as it was and as it is, 1844), says,—‘On the lake of Texcuco I saw men occupied in collecting the eggs of flies from the surface of plants, and cloths arranged in long rows as places of resort for the insects. These eggs, called agayacath’ (Qy. axayacat), ‘formed a favourite food of the Indians long before the conquest: and when made into cakes, resembles the roe of a fish, having a similar taste and appearance. After the use of frogs in France, and birdsnests in China, I think these eggs may be considered a delicacy, and I found that they are not rejected from the tables of the fashionable inhabitants of the capital.’

The more recent observations of Messrs. Saussure, Sallé, Virlet D’Aoust, &c., have confirmed the facts already stated, at least, in the most essential particulars.

‘The insects which principally produce this animal farinha of Mexico, are two species of the genus Corixa of Geoffroy, hemipterous insects of the family of water-bugs. One of the species has been described by M. Guerin Méneville as new, and has been named by him Corixa fermorata: the other, identified in 1831 by Thomas Say as one of those sold in the market at Mexico, bears the name of Corixa mercenaria. The eggs of these two species are attached in innumerable quantities to the triangular leaves of the carex forming the bundles which are deposited in the waters. They are of an oval form with a protuberance at one end and a pedicle at the other extremity, by means of which they are fixed to a small round disc, which the mother cements to the leaf. Among these eggs, which are grouped closely together, and sometimes fixed one over another, there are found others, which are larger, of a long and cylindrical form, and which are fixed to the same leaves. These belong to another larger insect, a species of Notonecta, which M. Guerin Méneville has named Notonecta unifasciata.’[32]

It appears from M. Virlet d’Aoust, that in October the lakes Chalco and Texcuco, which border on the city of Mexico, are haunted by millions of small flies, which, after dancing in the air, plunge down into the shallowest parts of the water, to the depth of several feet, and deposit their eggs at the bottom.