Kosher Oaxa-Cuisine May 2, 2023
April and May are the hottest months of the year in Oaxaca de Juarez, with afternoon temperatures often reaching 90, and much of that heat is absorbed these days by the green stone masonry of downtown. In the past two weeks, thunderclouds have begun to form late in the day, and rain has returned to the valley. In one dusk event, the falling water was frozen. No one was prepared for it.
The most intense, if brief, deluge was enough to disperse the squatting tent-people who have occupied my street since February. Either their college independent study was deemed passable, or these aspiring teachers are but fair-weather activists. Regardless, traffic now flows freely down Calle Armenta y Lopez. The urine-stained cobblestone has been cleansed by the rain. I can again see Irma and Pablo’s bookstore across Calle Guerrero. Irma seems sad—I think she enjoyed mothering the young protesters.
With the return of the rainy season come the insects—beetles, mosquitos, and the flavorful ants called Chicatanas. It was almost a year ago, when I first arrived in Oaxaca, that I was introduced to the giant ants that Oaxaqueños consider a salsa delicacy. The foragers roam the early morning streets looking for disoriented males, and they can fill a plastic bag in short order with live ants, whose unnatural deaths come only later on a hot griddle.
To paraphrase Bill Clinton, I have tasted but not imbibed Chicatanas, and I could say the same about roasted Chapulines (crickets), whose repugnant aromas tend to resemble Aquarium food. Nevertheless, Oliver Sacks gives the bugs his endorsement:
“Grasshoppers, by a special rabbinical dispensation, are kosher, unlike other invertebrates. (Did not John the Baptist live on locusts and wild honey?). This always seemed to me a reasonable, even necessary, dispensation, for life in ancient Israel was quite chancy, and locusts, like manna, were a godsend in lean times. And locusts could come in uncountable millions, wiping out the always precarious harvests of the time. So it seemed only just, a poetic and nutritional justice, that some of these voracious eaters be eaten themselves.”
There is a woman in Consetti Park that always manages to recognize me on my shaded bench. Her bags of Semillas de Calabasa, or roasted squash seeds, cost 20 pesos, and she remembers I cannot resist them. “Tres por cincuenta hoy,” she says, to entice me to buy even more. She is carrying insects in bags too, of course, but we agree never to talk about those. Not unless God rains down on us with some bonafide Biblical pestilence. The storm clouds are black and boiling over the northern hills. I am still waiting for a sign, perhaps a lightning strike, a flying frog, or a raised thumb from Oliver Sacks.