The Chemistry of Cookery

At a Neapolitan restaurant I found ‘_Gambero di Mare_’ on the _Carta_, which I translated ‘Leggy things of the sea,’ or sea-creepers, and ordered them accordingly. They proved to be shrimps fried in their shells, and were very delicious—like whitebait, but richer. The chitin of the shells was thus cooked to crispness, and no evil consequences followed. If reduced to locusts, I should, if possible, cook them in the same manner, and, as they have similar chemical composition, they would doubtless be equally good. Should any epicurean reader desire to try this dish (the shrimps, I mean), he should fry them as they come from the sea, not as they are sold by the fishmonger, these being already boiled in salt water; usually in sea water by the shrimpers who catch them, the chitin being indurated thereby. The introduction of fried and tinned locusts as an epicurean delicacy would be a boon to suffering humanity, by supplying industrial compensation to the inhabitants of districts subject to periodical plagues of locust invasion. The idea of eating them appears repulsive _at first_, so would that of eating such creepy-crawly things as shrimps, if no adventurous hero had made the first exemplary experiment. Chitin is chitin, whether elaborated on the land or secreted in the sea. The vegetarian locust and the cicala are free from the pungent essential oils of the really unpleasant cockchafer. That curious epicurean food, the edible birds’-nests, which has been a subject of much controversy concerning its composition, is commonly described as a delicate kind of gelatin. This does not appear to be quite correct. It is certainly gelatinous in its mechanical properties, but it more nearly resembles the material of the slime and organic tissue of snails, a substance to which the name of _mucin_ has been given. Thus the birds’-nest soup of the East and the snail soup of the West are nearly allied, and that made from callipash and callipee supplies an intermediate reptilian link. The birds’-nests, when cleaned for cooking, are entirely composed of the dried saliva of swallows, or rather swiftlets (_collocalia_), and this