Sam Irwin - Louisiana Crawfish: A Succulent History of the Cajun Crustacean

Published by American Palate

A Division of The History Press

Charleston, SC 29403

www.historypress.net

Copyright 2014 by Sam Irwin

All rights reserved

First published 2014

e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978.1.62584.713.3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Irwin, Sam.

Louisiana crawfish : a succulent history of the Cajun crustacean / Sam Irwin.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

print edition ISBN 978-1-62619-236-2

1. Crayfish culture--Louisiana--History. 2. Crayfish--Louisiana--History. 3. Louisiana--Civilization. I. Title.

SH380.92.U55I68 2014

639'.6409763--dc23

2013049033

Notice: The information in this book is true and complete to the best of our knowledge. It is offered without guarantee on the part of the author or The History Press. The author and The History Press disclaim all liability in connection with the use of this book.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form whatsoever without prior written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

For Joe and Mathilde Amy and Robert K. Irwin

CONTENTS

FOREWORD

A CRAWFISH TALE

I remember (I really do) the first time I laid eyes on a live crawfish. I was riding shotgun in Papas Chevy pickup truck heading to Catahoula, a fishing community in St. Martin Parish located just outside the levee system that contains the Atchafalaya Basin (also known as the Atchafalaya Swamp).

Papa and I often stole away in the pickup to go on great adventures around the parish. You see, Papa was the publisher/editor of our local weekly newspaper, the Teche News, and he took me with him on his route to collect the coins in the many newspaper stands that were located outside of just about every grocery store, bait shop and caf in St. Martin Parish.

That particular day, our first stop was at Mr. Laviolettes. This was a place I had never been before. A putt-putt boat, called le bateau by the locals, was pulled onto the banks of Catahoula Lake, where two boys about my age were hosing down the cypress watercraft. Cypress was the wood of choice for basin fishermens boats.

Comment a va? Mr. Laviolette greeted us.

a va, Papa responded.

They continued their chat while I walked gingerly down the oyster-shell driveway to see what the boys were up to. As I approached, one of them reached into a bucket and pulled out a small, squigglingsomething. It wasnt a crab, nor was it any kind of fish. It kind of looked like a shrimpbut no, it had little claws. The boy shoved it right to the tip of my nose. I screeched! The boys howled with laughter.

Papa and Mr. Laviolette looked over to see what was causing such a commotion.

Papa gathered me up by one hairy armthe other held an ice-cold beerand shushed me.

T-Black. (My fathers name is Marcel, and I was named after him. His nickname was Blackie, so I became T-Black.) Its only an crevisse, a crawfish. Mr. Laviolette is giving us a sack of them to take home for a crawfish boil.

Our bounty was chucked into the back of the pickup, and we headed home.

In our big backyard, shaded with ancient live oaks, the crawfish were dumped into a large metal tub to be cleaned and purged. After Papa dug into his ever-present ice chest for a cold beer, he showed me how to hold a crawfish so its claws couldnt pinch me. While we set about our task readying the little crustaceans for our boil, Papa told me this story:

A very, very long time ago, the lobster and the Acadians resided happily together in what is now Nova Scotia in Canada. Then the Acadians were cruelly expelled from their beloved land and wandered for years searching for a home, some finally settling in the bayous of southern Louisiana. The lobsters yearned for their French friends and set out off across the country to find them. The journey south was so long and arduous that they began to shrink in size. And now we have these, chre, an almost perfect miniature of a lobster, and they are called crawfish.

Ever since that day, Monsieur crevisse and I have been very good friends.

Who would have known that these small freshwater crustaceans would become a multimillion-dollar industry?

In the 1950s, most of the crawfish came from the Atchafalaya Basin. Fishermen would bring in their catch, keep what they needed to feed their families and then peddle the rest to their friends and neighbors for pennies a pound. They were considered a poor mans food, and boy, was I happy we were poor. Just about every Friday of my childhood, when we had to abstain from eating meat in our Catholic community, Papa had big pots of crawfish (and sometimes shrimp or crabs) boiling in the backyard. The boiling water was seasoned with a copious amount of salt and cayenne pepper, and potatoes, onions and corn on the cob were added to the pot to stretch the meal. Oh my, those were some of the best times.

Everyone would stand elbow to elbow around the big picnic table that had been dressed with layers of old newspapers and pinch, peel and suck mountains of crawfish, munch on the perfectly seasoned vegetables and wash it all down with cold beer (root beers for the youngsters). (I remember my mother warning me not to eat boiled crawfish in front of people we didnt know else they would think we were barbariansall that pinching, peeling and sucking going on.)

But in 1959, our world of crawfish consuming was about to change big time. The town of Breaux Bridge decided to celebrate its centennial by having a crawfish festival of all things. People were eating boiled crawfish out of paper bagson the street for goodness sake. There was even a crawfish queen! (I would have joined the competition, but only girls from Breaux Bridge could participate.)

All of a sudden, crawfish were cool! People were coming from away to eat crawfish. Crawfishermen were on a roll. Sacks of crawfish (about forty pounds) went for about twenty-five dollars. By the 1960s, peeling plants sprung up in the communities along the Atchafalaya levee system to supply peeled tails with which to make touffe, bisque, pies, boulettes and anything else conjured up by the resourceful Cajuns. During the crawfish season, which back then ran from January to June, sacks of live crawfish and bags of peeled tails were exported to markets in Houston and New Orleans.

Where were all these crawfish coming from? According to the LSU AgCenter,

up until that time, most of the crawfish available for people to consume had come from wild harvests in natural habitats. Although crawfish were very abundant some years due to high water levels in the Atchafalaya Basin and other natural wetland areas, in other years crawfish were scarce and difficult to come by. This variation in supply made it difficult for markets to grow. Once crawfish farming began, it allowed for more consistent supplies from year to year. By the mid-1960s, the amount of land devoted to crawfish farming had increased to approximately 7,000 acres of managed ponds. At this point, an industry based on peeling crawfish became established, and the new markets for crawfish meat allowed both crawfish farming and wild harvests to increase even more. Acreage continued to increase in Louisiana, from approximately 44,000 acres in the mid-1970s to current levels of roughly 185,000 acres.