People who need pupa are the pluckiest people

Or, do I really have to warn queasy people not to read this? Video in post!

I bought this can of silkworm pupa at the Winchester Farmer’s Market. Of course, I’m not the first blogger to try silkworm pupa but it’s 2009 there’s not much that hasn’t been eaten and blogged about at this point. I’m not sure that anyone reads the words to my Museum of Snack Food Posts so we’ll get straight to the pictures.

The first thing you’ll notice is that it says “Fish Bate”. At first I was worried that this was because it couldn’t be legally imported into the United States as people food and they misspelled bait, but I thought I’d look up the word bate in case there was another meaning as I was only familiar with “bated breath”.

From Wordnet:

bate (soak in a special solution to soften and remove chemicals used in previous treatments) “bate hides and skins”

That’s not much better, is it? And still doesn’t explain the fish part of it. I was conflicted but decided to carry on with the test since I asked my mom about eating pupa and she said she used to eat it as a child in Korea. I asked her how they served it, thinking perhaps it might be more appealing if it was traditionally served on a bibimbap but she said no, they just boiled it in salt water. She also said she liked it then but wouldn’t eat it now. I guess kind of like I used to really love Vienna sausages rolled up in Wonder Bread slathered in mayo but wouldn’t eat it now unless you paid me cash money.

The good news is that there are no artificial ingredients, flavors or colors!

$1.49 – a bargain! I don’t know what the rest of that says, but I was really glad when I pasted in this picture that the expiration date hadn’t passed because I didn’t think to check before the taste test.

Yeah, I started to lose heart here. It wasn’t just that it looked grody, but the smell! You know how some people (sorry to say, but it’s mostly Americans) smell like that processed square lunch meat ham? Do they still make that? I’m not talking about how the ham smells, but how people who smell like that ham smell, that smell. Not good, not good at all.

I put it on some lettuce leaves to look like in the can. Seriously, is it just me or does that look like folded up little pupa arms on the upside down ones? I bet that’s what it is, folded up little arms under some sort of shell. By the way they didn’t feel all mushy and squishy like I feared; they were rather firm.

See what I mean? Shudder, ew. Yeah, I know I eat plenty of other things with legs, but these look like arms. BIG DIFFERENCE. It just doesn’t seem decent  to eat something that looks like it has folded up mummy arms.

What can I say? It’s silkworm pupa on a spoon.

I got this idea from the IHMMB Forums. I didn’t have any parasols, so I just used firework skewer thingies for a fourth of July theme. Sandra Lee ain’t got nothing on me!

See kids, see what happens when you don’t use sunscreen and/or sit under a parasol to protect yourself from the sun?!

Take me to your leader!

By this time I was starting to have fun posing the pupa so I took them back outside to make some tableaux.

What? Me stalling? Never! Don’t they look so at home on the ferns?

One of the criticisms I got for Chicken in a Can was that I wasn’t creative enough, so I decided to try and make some appetizers. I call this one Beelzebub on a Donkey because I thought chicken livers and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon was called devils on horseback but then I looked it up and remembered that was really called rumaki. Eh, I’m sticking with Beelzebub on a Donkey and when I am old I shall say that as one would say Jumping Jehosophat because I aspire to be known as an old coot.

I also made some hush puppies with pupa center and deep fried some plain.

The thing is, I’m not very photogenic but luckily my brother was here visiting and so I talked him into being my on camera taste tester.

And I’ll let him tell you himself what they tasted like:

So basically they taste like dirt. I really don’t know, because after we taped this, I tried to try one myself, but I got it into my mouth and bit down just a teensy bit when the smell hit me and I remembered Ron saying that the water they were packed in tasted like hot dog water. Now, I have a serious aversion to boiled hot dogs and the water and yes, the surface of it tasted like that and together with the smell of lunch meat ham people it was too much and I started gagging and spit it out. I always thought it was the texture that made foods grody, but the smell has a lot to do with it, too.

Be sure to check out the rest of the pupa photos on my Flickr stream. If you’re new here, you might also enjoy taking a peek at my Museum of Snack Foods.

Tagged as: museum of snack foods, my brother, pupa