Crawfish, crawdads, or mud bugs
Yes, it’s that time of the year again and the crawfish banner signs are springing up all across our state. If you had never heard of crawfish, you might think crawfish are fish that crawl, but they are freshwater crustaceans, and a cousin to a lobster. I guess back when the Cajuns named them they couldn’t tell a fish from a crustacean. Of course, the term mud bugs is just some columnist trying to sound cute. No, they aren’t bugs and they don’t live in the mud. Of course, not only is the crawfish not a fish, it swims backwards, which gives us the country saying such as, “Joe Bob, I believe old Billy Earl is a-crawfishing out of our deal.” Yeah, you got it, “backing out.” Yes, with Cajuns thinking a crustacean is a backward swimming fish, it sounds just like something that would come out of Louisiana.
Most rural, older southerners can relate better to crawdads, and some of my earliest memories are fishing for crawdads in an old boxed up freshwater spring. The spring was about three feet deep and Uncle Hugh, my friend, an elderly black man, got his drinking water there. I would tie a piece of fat meat on a string, lower it into the water where several crawdads were scurrying around, and in seconds one of the crawdads would grab the fat meat. I would slowly pull it up and grab the crawdad that wouldn’t turn loose. Later in life, as I got older, Buddy Henley, and I would seine the bar pits along the El Dorado Highway for crawdads to use as fish bait, and we never even considered the possibility that anyone would actually eat a crawdad or worms for that matter. Crawdads were fish bait.
A little later in life, when I realized folks down in South Louisiana were eating crawdads, I figured Cajuns would eat just about anything, since they are known to eat blood sausage. However, over the past ten years Louisiana crawfish—-yes we had to give up crawdads—— too country sounding, and now crawfish are like fire ants from Texas. Everywhere you look there are banner signs with just the word crawfish. Of course, they haven’t penetrated the top restaurants around the county yet, because there isn’t a tidy way to peel and eat crawfish. I can just imagine seeing a three-pound plate of crawfish in a New York restaurant such as La Bernadine, where the waiters hover around like crows at a road kill. “Henry Ray, don’t chunk that head on the floor!”
And of course, there is a top ten rated festival held in a little town that claims to be the Crawfish Capital of the World, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. It was proclaimed to be the Crawfish Capital of the World by Governor Earl Long. The Longs were the ruling Louisiana politicos back years ago, so I wouldn’t give the title Capital of the World much credence. Well, I’ve been through Breaux Bridge on my way to catch a crew boat at a little fishing village called Cocodrie, which I named the mosquito capital of the entire World for good reasons, but that’s another story.
In Breaux Bridge they have a Crawfish Queen, who rules over the festival and related activities, such as a crawfish race and naturally a crawfish eating contest, and since I know you’re wondering how many pounds of crawfish a person could eat in forty-five minutes, I’ll tell you; 55 ¾ pounds. Of course, that’s just the weight of the whole crawfish. He’s probably the only person to ever get full of crawfish.
Now let me give you some crawfish eating tips and describe how Vertis and I do our annual crawfish eating. Yes, it’s always just an annual event, and I think it takes that long to forget how much trouble it is to get such a little bit of food. First, buy somewhere around five pounds of crawfish per person, and be sure they cook them while you’re waiting. Next, remember; don’t eat a crawfish with a straight tail. A straight tail means the crawfish was dead before it hit the boiling water, and dead for how long? Only the crawfish knows.
We always set up a table and chairs on a small deck on the edge of a pond in our back yard, and have a bowl of cocktail sauce flavored with Tabasco. That’s the easy part. Now, dip up, with a sauce pan, as many crawfish as you can put on a dinner plate, and start the tedious job of peeling the tail after you have ripped off the crawfish’s head. If you are really into crawfish, like our neighbor across the street, Dr. Mickey Murphree, you will suck the head before you toss it. I don’t do that. I think Mickey spent way too much time in South Louisiana as a young man. Vertis and I toss the heads into the pond, and after about twenty minutes it draws a flock of turtle, or is it a herd of turtles? Anyway, I don’t suck the head, and I do devein the little piece of meat, which reduces the size about 15 %.
ow, as the ‘fun’ part continues, don’t use gloves, because washing your hands five times after peeling pounds of crawfish is part of the game. But now comes the long awaited part that you have been anticipating; eating a crawfish. First, peel the tail, which is a lot easier to say than to do, and if you just happen to luck out and grab a really big one that looks like a medium size lobster, you better hope you haven’t just had a manicure. Of course, the big ones are few and far between. I think the exported crawfish that come to Arkansas are sent up by LSU fans still mad about the Miracle on Markham. Yep, we get the little three inch ones that, after about five minutes of work, yields a piece of a crawfish tail about the size of your little fingernail.
Folks that drink wine say, “Don’t drink a wine before it’s time.” And I’d like to tell those Cajuns that don’t send us crawfish before their time. That means we want the nice big ones. After eating crawfish for about three hours and knocking out five pounds of crawfish to get maybe 8 oz of tail, I have come up with a sure fire diet. It’s an all you can eat crawfish diet. You eat crawfish three meals a day, and I guarantee you that the weight will just fall off. I calculate the amount of energy it takes to peel and eat a crawfish tail is more the energy your body get from the crawfish tail. That’s why the crawfish sellers put in a couple of ears of corn and two potatoes. It’s to fill you up so you won’t say to your wife, after eating five pounds of crawfish, “What’s for supper?”