The doorbell rings and New Jersey’s Gene Rurka, a lean and hyper-kinetic fifty-eight-year-old, charges past the stacked boxes of dried scorpions on the kitchen floor, past the countertop terrarium with its thumb-sized Madagascar hissing cockroaches fattening on apple slices, past the stuffed coyote that guards the front hall, and exchanges a few pleasantries with the ups delivery man before returning with a Styrofoam container labelled “Annelids and Nematodes.” “The worms. Gotta have the worms,” he announces as he begins slicing open the package with a utility knife. “And scorpions. Rattlesnakes. Cockroaches. People’ll be pissed if I don’t have them.” He dredges up a snarl of writhing, foot-long earthworms and offers me a handful.
It is D-Day minus two for the man dubbed the King of Weirdness, and the deadline is pushing Rurka’s natural excitability toward irritation. The universe is not unfolding as it should. In two days, 1,300 people—members of the fabled Explorers Club and their guests—will gather in Manhattan’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for the group’s annual black-tie dinner, and Rurka, who is responsible for the exotic hors d’oeuvres, is determined to provide an experience unlike any in culinary history. Rurka scans the handwritten list on his kitchen counter: the beavers lie frozen in his Igloo coolers. Ditto the goat testicles, the shanks of kangaroo, and the shrink-wrapped bags of skinned Texas rattlesnakes. He’s had to pass on the yak and the llama, which, at $15 to $20 (US) a pound, would have blown his $25,000 budget. Nor could he locate any good, farm-fresh southern raccoons. But what is holding up the maggots? And where are the edible Hawaiian orchids The zucchini flowers? The damn tarantulas?
For over a century, the Explorers Club dinner has featured food meant to celebrate the things adventurers confront—or are forced in extremis to eat—at the world’s frontiers. In 1904, the menu listed roast polar bear; in 1978, elephant stew; and in 1987, freeze-dried astronaut ice cream, straight from the tube. But the fear of becoming a twenty-first-century anachronism recently propelled the group’s president, forty-six-year-old Richard Wiese, to throw caution to the wind. He’d learned from experience that the club could bring in a Sir Edmund Hillary or a Buzz Aldrin as keynote speaker only to have the New York Times report on the unusual cuisine at the dinner. So he asked Rurka “to go crazy” and seek out the strangest comestibles the planet has to offer. There were to be no endangered species. That meant no more elephant, blue-whale steaks, or paddlefish filets. And nothing that might offend political or personal sensitivities, which meant no domesticated dog or peacock or seal flippers. (In 1984, Prince Philip resigned his Explorers Club membership over the exotic hors d’oeuvres.) But insects, spiders, snakes, flowers, raccoons, pickled duck tongues, South American rats—these were another matter entirely. No one would feel sorry for a few hundred dead tarantulas.
Rurka, a farmer by profession and big-game hunter by avocation, was happy to help out. He loved food. He’d try anything. Most importantly, he had an inclination toward the comically macabre. In recent years—he’s been “exotics chairman” since 2002—Rurka had arranged the roasted crickets to appear as if they were crawling out of the herbed cream-cheese toastettes. He’d draped poached earthworms on the bare branches of a decorative tree, which looked, he now laughingly admits, as if someone had just sneezed.
In the back of Rurka’s Chevy Suburban is almost half a ton of food destined for the Waldorf-Astoria’s kitchen, where some of the gamier meat, like beaver, will marinate for thirty-six hours while other exotic items undergo final recipe-testing. It’s important to Rurka that no one equate the dinner with something out of Fear Factor. Instead, it’s meant to provide the guests, who pay up to $1,000 per person, with a lighthearted interpretation of what human hunter-gatherers may encounter. It’s survivalist make-believe on a porcelain plate. Each year Rurka tries to add something new and bizarre to the menu. There were rattlesnakes in 2002, worms in 2004, and—if they ever arrive—there’ll be maggots this time.
There’s a real logistical challenge to this enterprise, Rurka explains, and that is to collect the food from far-flung sources and know for certain that it has been raised to exacting health standards. Over the years, he has accumulated more than a dozen American suppliers and many more contacts. He grows circumspect when pushed for the business details of the exotic buffet, partly to protect his sources so others don’t try to duplicate the event and partly to protect his suppliers from animal-rights activists. Another consideration is the club’s experiment with franchising, in alliance with California’s Redwood Creek Wines, its exotic tasting: Pair scorpions on herbed-cheese endives with the 2002 Sauvignon Blanc! Try sautéed rosemary rattlesnake with the 2003 Chardonnay!
Rurka eventually confesses that the feral hogs, which are, at the moment, stacked in the back of the Suburban, come from a private game farm in Texas. A New York state trapper sent along the beavers, also frozen in back. From an alligator farm in Louisiana, from an Oregon earthworm breeder, from a Colombian ant exporter, the oddities have been sent, some packaged in steaming dry ice, others carried live to Rurka’s home in Somerset, New Jersey, by unsuspecting delivery men. And since Rurka’s developed an interest in entomophagy—the eating of insects—he has become familiar with breeders and pet-store suppliers. From them he buys $8,000 worth of scorpions, tarantulas, ants, crickets, cockroaches, and mealworms annually. The size of the specimens is crucial. A tiny tarantula doesn’t carry the same je ne sais quoi as a hairy, fist-sized beast served in a soy-tempura batter. And consistency of size ensures thorough cooking: Rurka doesn’t want a repeat of the 2001 fiasco, when a dozen guests, including his wife, Marianne, ate underdone tempura tarantulas and had to seek medical treatment when they reacted violently to the hairs on the spiders. (The New York Times ran a subsequent article titled “A Host’s Worst Nightmare: When Dinner Bites Back.” The club carries insurance to cover such embarrassments.)
The next day, seated in his trophy room in Somerset amid a dozen wall-mounted deer heads and another dozen stuffed birds, Rurka exudes relief. He has scrounged up eighty pounds of elk for a red-wine bourguignon, which will replace some of the other victuals that were too pricey to order. Moreover, his 740 organic edible rosebuds have arrived, as have the zucchini flowers and the tarantulas. And best of all, he says, is the fifteen pounds of dried fly maggots. Rurka and his wife have just spent two hours experimenting with ways to make them presentable. There are maggots on honey-glazed bananas, maggots in little phyllo triangles, and sautéed maggots in baked mushroom caps. I sample, and Rurka watches, relieved to see the maggots go down uneventfully. “Crunchy,” I report.
” I’ve had friends say, “I can get you maggots for free. I’ve got ‘em under the mat in my car’s trunk,’”” he tells me. “But I need clean maggots. Not from road kills or garbage. I’ve been working for a couple of years with an insect supplier. At first, he couldn’t believe I wanted “human-grade’ maggots. He thought I was nuts! I told him farmed maggots are raised on manure. They stink. I pay top price: $50 a pound. We’ve found a replacement substrate—“he pointedly refuses to name the material—” the maggots eat so they aren’t smelly. You can’t serve food that stinks or that’s repulsive. You don’t want to kill anyone.”
When I arrive at the Waldorf-Astoria’s vast kitchen on the morning of the dinner, more than twenty cooks are bouncing between workstations and stainless-steel trolleys as Rurka’s strange harvest is unloaded from the walk-in refrigerators. Rurka is bent over a colander, triple-rinsing a thousand earthworms to remove remnants of moss and cornmeal, their last gut-cleansing supper before they hit the grilling oven. From just behind him, Millie Lardizabal, one of the kitchen crew, offers one of her eighteen-day-old embryonic duck eggs, known as balut, and said, in her native Philippines, to have a Viagra-like effect. “Try it,” Rurka advises, then in a whisper adds, “but you might want to close your eyes.” Lardizabal removes the top portion of the shell, salts its contents, holds the egg to my mouth, and directs me to bite. I get a glimpse (which is quite enough) of embryonic duck. I bite blindly and chew fast. A slightly crunchy and feathery, coagulated, egg-tasting mush. When I open my eyes, Lardizabal is grinning. “Good” she asks. “Good,” I reply, weakly.
