Editing Cockchafer (section)

=== 19th century ===
Both the grubs and [[imago|adults]] have a voracious appetite and thus have been and sometimes continue to be a major problem in [[agriculture]] and [[forestry]]. In the pre-[[Industrialisation|industrialised]] era, the main mechanism to control their numbers was to collect and kill the adult beetles, thereby interrupting the cycle. They were once very abundant: in 1911, more than 20 million individuals were collected in 18&nbsp;km<sup>2</sup> of forest.<ref name="BugLife"/> Collecting adults was an only moderately successful method.

In some areas and times, cockchafers were served [[insects as food|as food]]. A 19th-century recipe from [[France]] for [[cockchafer soup]] reads: "roast one [[Pound (mass)|pound]] of cockchafers without wings and legs in sizzling [[butter]], then cook them in a [[chicken]] soup, add some [[veal]] liver and serve with [[chives]] on a [[Toast (food)|toast]]". A [[Germany|German]] newspaper from [[Fulda]] from the 1920s tells of students eating [[sugar]]-coated cockchafers. Cockchafer larvae can also be fried or cooked over open flames, although they require some preparation by soaking in vinegar in order to purge them of soil in their digestive tracts.<ref>[http://www.bugsfeed.com/cooking_cockchafer Cooking cockchafer with old-timey Europeans] 11 February 2016 ''www.bugsfeed.com'' accessed 30 May 2021</ref> A cockchafer stew is referred to in [[W. G. Sebald]]'s novel ''[[The Emigrants (German novel)|The Emigrants]]''.

In Sweden the peasants looked upon the grub of the cockchafer as furnishing an unfailing prognostic whether the ensuing winter will be mild or severe; if the animal has a bluish hue (a circumstance which arises from its being replete with food), they affirm it will be mild, but if it is white, the weather will be severe: and they carry this so far as to foretell, that if the anterior be white and the posterior blue, the cold will be most severe at the beginning of the winter. Hence they call this grub Bemärkelse-mask—prognostic worm.<ref>De Geer, iv. 275–6. Kirb. and Sp. Introd., i. 33.</ref>