Food
Crispy Critters
“An order of grasshoppers and hold the sauce.” Adventuresome Mexico City diners rediscover Aztec cuisine.
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Rojas takes pride in being able to cook almost anything. Chrysanthemums stuffed with baby eels and deep-fried, then covered in almond sauce, may be special-ordered, and he also likes to work with roses and tuberoses. One of his earliest creations was armadillo a la financiera, cooked with cognac and white wine, back in the days when he got whole ’dillos shipped from Guerrero. He can also whip up wild boar in pine-nut sauce, but even that is fairly genteel next to some of his special-order dishes. If, for example, you have a “well-nourished” family cat that you wish to eat, Rojas will cook it for you in a thick salsa adobada (a highly seasoned sauce) or in red wine “or however the person wants it—it tastes like rabbit,” he says.
So far, Rojas has had qualms about only one dish. Last year he told Contenido, a Mexican monthly, that he was “moved” and could not watch as he cooked a two-kilogram monkey a client had brought him. “It had the face of a baby,” he explained. “It gave me pain to see its little skull. I served it by the piece—a little arm, a little leg. I never tried it.”
A rotund, 48-year-old bachelor with limpid brown eyes and a few strands of white in his jet-black hair, Rojas comes from a campesino family of eighteen. He was born in Los Reyes de Juárez, in the state of Puebla, but his godparents took him to Mexico City when he was five years old. He began selling spices on the street, then moved up to tomatoes and onions; he did so well that he dropped out of school halfway through the first grade to attend to his thriving business. At fifteen, he began cooking in restaurants, and he has been cooking for the owners of Don Chon or the restaurant that preceded it for 28 years.
Ten years ago Rojas conceived the idea of serving traditional pre-Hispanic cuisine. Aztec food wasn’t entirely new to him; in his youth he had enjoyed an occasional glass of iguana blood. (“You mix it with sherry,” he says with a chuckle. “You get a rush immediately after drinking it, but you don’t taste the blood.”) But basically, he is a self-taught Aztec chef. “I just through that because people go to the same restaurants all the time, they would want something different,” he recalls.
Some of his dishes—venison, cabrito, rattlesnake, wild boar, armadillo—are not strictly Mexican; they can be found on menus in numerous restaurants in Texas and the Southwest. Even his more exotic game is not always what purists would call Aztec food but his own variation. (In a most untraditional move, he recommends that the food be washed down with orange soda pop.) But the bugs are the real thing.
Insects are eaten in rural areas of the world almost everywhere except the U.S. and Europe. Indians in the Southwest, including Texas, relied on them for sustenance, and today rural Mexicans consume about two hundred species of beetles, grasshoppers, caterpillars, and other insects, according to Eugene DeFoliart, a University of Wisconsin entomologist who publishes The Food Insects Newsletter. (DeFoliart’s own tastes run to wax-moth larvae. “It’s a hairless caterpillar about one inch long. You deep-fat-fry it about forty-five seconds, dip it in salt, and it tastes just like bacon.”) DeFoliart argues that insects are high in protein as well as in important vitamins and minerals, especially iron, and he thinks that insects are a lot better for you in general than, say, beef.
In Mexico, food insects have begun to attract the attention of a few people in government, as well as such influential researchers as entomologist and biologist Julieta Ramos Elorduy de Conconi, who in 1982 published Los Insectos Como Fuente de Proteinas en el Futuro (“Insects as a Source of Protein in the Future”). One cookbook on Aztec food has been published, and insect recipes have turned up in various other books. But Rojas snorts derisively at the notion that the state should encourage a return to traditional Indian foods.
“It’s not the food of the future, because it’s so expensive. Before, it was the food of the poor people, but now it is the food of the rich,” Rojas points out. “It takes a long time to fix these things. And do you think a common worker could bring his family in here to eat at these prices? Poor people used to be forced to eat worms. Now they can sell five kilos of them for seven or eight hundred thousand pesos and buy rice and beans for a year.”
The restaurants are every bit as pricey as he suggests. At Mexikatessen, my lunch of jumiles, chapulines, gusanos de maguey, and escamoles came to 80,000 pesos, just over $30 at the then-current exchange rate. (The servings are large enough to feed two as an appetizer or one as a main course, but bugs are not very filling.) At Don Chon, the prices for insect dishes are similar, and the exotic meats are higher.
Part of the high cost can be traced to the seasonal availability of the insects. Fresh maguey worms are obtainable only two months of the year; restaurants fry them up all at once and freeze them. Rojas pays about 150,000 pesos (just over $56) for a kilogram, out of which he gets four generous servings. Likewise, jumiles can be caught only during a few weeks in the spring and fall (when they are greeted in Guerrero with a spectacular festival that includes the crowning of the new Jumil Queen). Escamoles come from black-ant colonies found only in caves in Hidalgo and sell for about 150,000 pesos a kilo.
The game animals are even more difficult to obtain. Most go on and off the endangered-species list, and even if they could be raised in captivity, they would taste different. So all Rojas can do is watch as his menu grows smaller.
Still, the man is a dreamer, and his current dream is to prepare an elephant trunk or ears, which he claims are the only parts of the animal that are digestible by humans. He would cook it in a white wine sauce with mushrooms and olives, and he believes it would be delicious.
It probably would be—but it would still be a one-shot dish. The bugs, meanwhile, are forever. Bueno. But hold the escamoles.
John Morthland is a freelance writer who lives in Austin.
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