The large lizards of Australia, sometimes from 4ft. to nearly 6ft. long, are most excellent and delicate food, but the proper method is to roast them in the skin; and we have known the most intense anxiety felt lest we should require the skin of a particularly fine one as a specimen of natural history. This was somewhat calmed by the assurance that we only wished to sketch it, but the operation was most jealously watched, and, when we had completed our picture, we divided the body into quarters and the tail into four junks, for the four members of the party; and these dainties, carefully spread upon forked branches cut for the purpose, were set up above the embers of an ample fire, raked out into glowing heaps under each junk or quarter. In about twenty minutes they were thoroughly cooked, and proved, indeed, a delicacy, the flesh being white as chicken, and the taste reminding us rather of turkey than anything else.
The various cockatoos, parrots, wood-pigeons, storks, and cranes are all good. The dawn or rose-breasted cockatoo (Cacatoa eos), the white variety with the sulphur-coloured crest, or the black cockatoo, each form a very tolerable, though not an ample, meal for one man. Various species of hawks or kites, though not so delicate, may also be eaten; and in Australia, where carrion is not so plentiful as in Africa, and the hawks feed principally upon insects or small fish, their flesh, though dark in colour and tough, is by no means bad. We have eaten the white-headed African fish-eagle and the large horned owl, which, though somewhat tough and rank, were better than going upon scanty fare.
We first ate the flesh of a snake at Graham’s Town, South Africa. A friend had brought us a puff-adder as a specimen; and, when we had skinned it, the flesh looked so white and firm that we cut out a junk, about 6in. long and as thick as our wrist, and desired the Kafir girl, who acted as cook, to fry it. An acquaintance who partook of it acknowledged that it was good, and that only the thought of eating snake prevented his enjoying it more fully.
The Australian blacks eat snakes of every kind, as well as any small animals they can catch; and we have often seen fellows whose sole apparel consisted of a snake girded round their waist, with two or three rats hitched by their tails to it. We were taught the orthodox way of cooking them by a first-rate fellow, John Fahey, an Irishman, who had been nearly fourteen years among the blacks. He first let the flame expend itself, and then spread out the embers, on these he coiled up the snake until the scales were slightly scorched; then taking it by the tail, he drew it repeatedly through his hand, brushing the crisp scales off toward the head, and again coiled it on the embers till it was thoroughly cooked; then opening it and throwing away the offal he picked out the tit bits and offered them to us, and afterwards divided the body.
The flesh of the alligator while young, and not more than 6ft. in length, is very good; but when larger, it becomes very strong, and acquires a musky flavour. We once killed an alligator of 11ft. on the Horseshoe flats, near Curiosity Peak, Victoria River, North Australia. The smell was to a degree rank; yet when we took the carcase to the vessel next morning, and the second overseer cleaned the skin and skeleton, we found that excellent cutlets were to be obtained from the muscular portion of the tail; and after breakfast, when the prejudices of the crew had given way, claimants were found for the flesh as fast as it could be stripped from the bones. Considerable seasoning was required, but still it was better than salt junk.
White ants.
In South Africa, just when the white ants are about to swarm and take the half-hour’s flight which is allowed them before their wings drop off, the natives collect with torches; the ants, being attracted by the light, assemble, and are swept up by basketsful. After being scorched, they are kept in mat bags, holding two or three gallons each, and are really delicious food. They are pleasant to the taste, and very nutritious; for if one be left on a sheet of note-paper when the sun is shining brightly on it oil enough will exude to make a spot a couple of inches in diameter. The chief convenience of these is that they require no cooking, but any quantity may be carried in a bag, and a handful taken out and eaten when wanted.
The vast clouds of locusts, which in some countries both darken the air and devastate the land, are eaten greedily by nearly everything possessing life—men, animals, birds, fish, and insects, all join in the locust feast. The provident savage lays by a store merely smoke dried, to consume at his leisure with such tuberous roots or other underground productions as his sable spouse, armed with her sharp pointed grubbing stick, can procure for him.
The inhabitants of many of the islands of the Eastern Archipelago consume certain insects as food, wherever they can procure them. Mr. Wallace, who resided some time among the Dyaks, says: “Every day boys were to be seen walking along the roads, and by the hedges and ditches, catching dragon flies with birdlime. They carry a slender stick, with a few twigs at the end, well anointed, so that the least touch captures the insect, whose wings are pulled off before it is consigned to a small basket. The dragon flies are so abundant at the time of the rice flowering, that thousands are soon caught in this way. The bodies are fried in oil, with onions and preserved shrimps, or sometimes alone, and are considered a great delicacy.” In Borneo, Celebes, and many other islands, the larvæ of bees and wasps are eaten either alive as pulled out of the cells, or fried like the dragon flies. In the Moluccas the grubs of the palm beetles (Calandra) are regularly brought to market in bamboos and sold for food; and many of the great horned Lamellicorn beetles are slightly roasted on the embers, and eaten whenever met with. In many districts where the cocoanut palm grows abundantly, the curved and tightly rolled up immature fronds are perforated by the workings and burrowings of the “Tucuma” or “Grugru,” the larvæ of Oryctes rhinoceros. These are large plump grubs, with black hard heads, and are esteemed a great luxury, being either fried in cocoanut oil, or seized by the head, dipped in a little lime juice and disposed of without further preparation.
The nests of the white ants are often broken by the natives in search of the eggs, and even of the insects, for scarcity of animal food compels them to eat anything, and the grubs that lurk under the bark of the gum trees are accounted delicious fare. John Fahey was an adept in searching them out; and in fact, when we first made our camp, girdled several trees in order that they might die, and that grubs might accumulate under the bark. The grubs are eaten fresh, raw and living, just as they are taken from the tree.