I rummaged around in my bookcase and found the following semi-recipe for grub, the maguey grub in this case. The following is from Why We Eat What We Eat, by Raymond Sokolov (a fine book, though it lacks the recipes of the original columns in Natural History magazine).
"These worms (really larvae) are also known as palomillas de maguey (maguey squabs)... or scientifically, Aegiale (Acentrocneme) hesperiaris. The butterfly that produces them [lays] its eggs under the fleshy leaves of the maguey pulquero (Agave salmiana and A. mapisaga)..."
Worm harvesters look for the worms and extract them, whole, from the plant.
"To store the worms they make pouches with the skin of a tender new maguey leaf that looks like parchment and is called mixiote..."
"To cook the worms, people sometimes just put a whole gusano-filled mixiote over coals or hot ashes, or they might must put the worms directly on a bakestone (comal) until they swell and stiffen, turning golden brown and crunchy..."
"Gusanos de maguey are only one of a long list of surviving pre-Hispanic oddments, mostly what we would call vermin... [There] are various algae and pond scum... The list of insects eaten in Mexico then and now is awesomely long."
Locusts are eaten by toasting them and eating them with tortillas and a sauce of chile pasilla. Red ant pupas and larvae are eaten in a special mole with nopal cactus, and so on.
Frying is another possibility. The most amazing things become quite yummy when cooked as fritters.
Grub pakoras, anyone?
--jp, who knows that culling (and eating) the herd is part of raising livestock, and assumes that silkworm ranching has similar requirements
(6/4/04)
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