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On the northshore,
the four seasons of the year are King Cake, Shrimp, Crabs, and Crawfish. (We
don’t recycle newspapers as much as most folks do around the country
because we use them as tablecloths for seafood so often!) But it’s those
incredible edible crustaceans, the crawfish, that we seem to crave the most.
And just like
Bubba said of shrimp in “Forrest Gump”, you can boil ’em, fry
’em, sauté ’em, stew ’em, make crawfish éttoufée,
crawfish pie, crawfish bisque - you get the idea.
While there are more than 450 varieties of crawfish in the world, here at
home the red swamp crawfish and the white river crawfish are our favorites.
Last year, crawfish farmers in Louisiana produced over 28 million pounds of
the pond-raised variety on some 84,635 acres. Many farmers alternate their
rice crops with crawfish. They satisfy local cravings until winter rains raise
the water levels where the best crawfish are found.
The swamp crawfish
caught in the wilds of the Atchafalya Basin around Lafayette are heartier
and better-tasting, according to Richard Capdeboscq of French Market Seafood
in Old Mandeville. “The rich soil and nutrients of that spillway produce
the finest crawfish in the world,” he says.
Once
in a blue crawfish
Richard called
me recently with an astonishing find amongst the countless crawfish he routinely
cleans before boiling. “Got a blue one for ya, podnah,” he said
on the phone. “A blue one what?” I queried. “A blue crawfish.
He’s axin’ for you. Come on by.”
I hurried over
to the back boiling room and was amazed when Richard’s nephew and “chief
boilin’ engineer” Joey handed me a beautiful blue crawfish. It was
about the same size as most others, though its claws were a bit smaller. Richard
says he’s seen them only a few times. “Once in a blue crawfish,”
he quipped. (I did some research later and found that blue crawfish occur
only once in every 1,250,000!)
Just down the road is Mandeville City Hall, where the employees are always sharing recipes and new dishes cooked at home and enjoyed in the lunchroom. I learned of a secret recipe for crawfish pie that an aunt of one of the ladies absolutely refused to reveal. After her niece poured her a third glass of wine, the aunt loosened up and started preparing the magical pie. It’s an easy, freewheeling recipe, with your own tastes making ingredient measurement decisions. To protect the guilty, we’re not revealing all the names; we just call it “Aunt Jean’s Crawfish Pie á la Mandeville City Hall.” (See accompanying recipe.)
What’s
in a name?
Crawfish have
been called by many different names through the centuries. I think the most
interesting was when they were called the “Irishmen’s Friend”
during the 19th century around New Orleans. It seems that the burrowing critters
undermined the levees along the Mississippi, and thus provided steady employment
for the Irish laborers of that era.
The medieval
French term ecrevisse was shortened to the Norman Middle English crevis, which
later became crayfish. While Yankees still might call ’em that, the preferred
term today is crawfish - which actually derived from the creature’s typical
form of locomotion, crawling.
Whatever you call ’em, crayfish, crawdaddys, or mudbugs, we only have a short while - to the end of July, max - to savor that perennial northshore favorite: CRAWFISH!
Copyright © 2002 L&M Publishing, L.L.C. All rights reserved.
