As much as I enjoyed the recent Lincoln Street Food Festival, I would have loved to see a Cambodian stall. I could wax lyrical about a pressing need to try amok fish or banana flower salad, both local delicacies in the South Asian country, but there’d be just one item I'd really be dying to try: a-ping, or deep fried tarantula.

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Found all over Cambodia, it’s natural home is the town of Skuon, just north of the capital Phnom Penh. Here, vendors offer piping hot spiders for as little as five pence.

 

The tradition is thought to date back only a few decades, to the widespread food shortages common under the Khmer Rouge regime. For much of the late 1970s, thousands of Cambodians were in danger of starving, until they realised there was food all around them. The Khmer Rouge were eventually ousted, unlike the locals’ love of tarantula, and they soon developed the perfect recipe.

 

Tossing the spiders in a little salt and sugar, they then cooked them in a pan full of crushed garlic and oil until the whole thing goes stiff. In addition to tickling their taste buds, many of the women believe that eating this snack makes them more beautiful.

 

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Where to start? With the legs actually. Pull off a couple at a time and wolf them down, for these are the best parts. Easy to chew, with more than a little crunch, they’re comparable to prawn tails or crab. Now it’s onto the head and body.

 

This is the part you may baulk at, because it contains a brown paste where the organs and spider eggs used to lie. If you can get over the pungency, the meat inside is lovely and delicate, tasting like a cross between chicken and cod.

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The worst thing you can do is pop the whole thing in your mouth, as the many limbs will be hitting your gums from all sorts of angles, giving you the feel that the creature is still alive and trying to escape. And nobody wants to be thinking about that as they sink their teeth into a sautéed Shelob.