Crawfish banners are springing up all across our state. If you had never heard of them, 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.
Calling them mud bugs is just some columnist trying to sound cute. They aren't bugs and they don't live in the mud. They swim backwards, which gives us country sayings such as, "Joe Bob, I believe old Billy Earl is a-crawfishing out of our deal." Yeah, you got it: backing out. It sounds just like something that would come out of Louisiana.
Most older rural Southerners can relate better to calling them crawdads. Some of my earliest memories are fishing for crawdads in an old boxed-up freshwater spring. It was about three feet deep and my friend Uncle Hugh, 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 bait. I would slowly pull it up and snatch the crawdad, which wouldn't turn loose of the meat.
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. We never even considered the possibility that anyone would actually eat a crawdad.
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 10 years Louisiana crawfish---we had to give up calling them crawdads for being too country sounding--are like fire ants from Texas. Everywhere you look there are banners with just the word crawfish. They haven't penetrated the top restaurants around the country 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 Le Bernardin, where the waiters hover around like crows at a roadkill, trying to avoid having crawfish heads chunked on the floor.
There is a popular festival held in Breaux Bridge, La., a little town that claims to be the crawfish capital of the world, proclaimed as such by former Louisiana Gov. Earl Long. The Longs were ruling Louisiana politics back years ago, so I wouldn't give the title much credence. 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 a crawfish eating contest. Since I know you're wondering how many pounds of crawfish a person could eat in 45 minutes, I'll tell you: 55 ¾ pounds. That's the weight of the whole crawfish. He's probably the only person to ever get full by eating crawfish.
Now let me give you some crawfish eating tips and describe how Vertis and I do our annual crawfish eating. Yes, it's an annual event; 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 backyard 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. Rip 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 20 minutes they draw a flock of turtles.
Now, 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. Here's the event 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. 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 in 2002. We get the little three-inch ones that, after about five minutes of work, yield a piece of a crawfish tail about the size of your little fingernail.
Eating around five pounds of crawfish for about three hours to get maybe eight ounces of tail is a sure-fire diet. If you eat crawfish for three meals a day, I guarantee you that the weight will just fall off you. The amount of energy it takes to peel and eat a crawfish tail is more than the energy your body gets from the crawfish tail.
That's why crawfish sellers put in a couple of ears of corn and two potatoes. It's to fill you up so you won't wonder, after eating five pounds of crawfish, "What's for supper?"
Richard Mason is a registered professional geologist, downtown developer, former chairman of the Department of Environmental Quality Board of Commissioners, past president of the Arkansas Wildlife Federation, and syndicated columnist. Email richard@gibraltarenergy.com.
Editorial on 05/06/2018