With all due respect, we don’t really care what you call them back home. Crayfish, crawdads, mud bugs, yabbie. whatever. We also know that you probably use them for various non-edible purposes — fish bait, aquarium stock, dissection in Zoology 1. In Louisiana, they’re called crawfish (or ecrevisses to French speakers) and they occupy an esteemed place in our collective food culture.
The unenlightened look at a crawfish and see a well-armored aquatic insect — beady eyes, claws, a butt built like a tank — but Louisiana natives look at the same crustacean and see a tiny, freshwater lobster with sweet tail meat wrapped in a crunchy protective coating.
The scientific name for the delicious little beastie is procambarus clarkii (the red swamp crawfish), and originally that’s still their preferred habitat. In the wild, crawfish thrive in standing water and burrow into any kind of soggy ground — swamp floors, riverbanks, ditches, waterlogged cattle pastures – creating telltale chimneys with the excavated mud. The can handle a little salt in their water, so brackish waterways aren’t really a problem. With such a high water-to-land ratio, swampy south Louisiana is a crawfish wonderland.
Some European cooks, including French and Scandinvian chefs, use the little crawlers for food, but it was Cajun cooks who took the little critters into the big time. As a plentiful resource with a reputation for scavenging, crawfish have traditionally been a food of last resort for denizens of rural Louisiana. Up until the 1950s or so, eating crawfish was a sign of poverty and backwardness. Even now, some older Cajuns have a hard time eating crawfish on the grounds that it “tastes like hard times.”
Over time, boiling points and seafood patios brought the local specialty to more diners, and family crawfish boils became more commonplace across the social spectrum. By the 1970s, crawfish had shed their stigma of “poor man’s food” and were embraced as a symbol of south Louisiana.
With the exception of rich, labor-intensive crawfish bisque, dishes starring the beady-eyed beast were comparatively rare in New Orleans cooking until the Cajun incursions of the 1980s. When Prudhomme came to the city, he brought the crawfish with him and added the meat to a wide variety of now-standard Louisiana dishes.
Wild crawfish — especially those caught in the Atchafalaya Basin swamp west of Henderson — have traditionally been considered a springtime food. The crawfish lay low during the cold winter and emerge into waiting traps as the water warms up. The omnivorous crawfish feed on the bounty of the swamp and develop a distinctive flavor that varies with the animal’s diet. In Acadiana, “Basin crawfish” are the most prized springtime specimens.
But with the advent of modern aquaculture methods, large-scale crawfish farms have developed throughout the state, especially in the rice farming country of the Cajun prairie near Lafayette. It’s a perfect example of agricultural multi-tasking: when the rice crop is harvested, the fields are re-flooded and seeded with crawfish, who eat the rotting rice stubble and grain-based feed. With farmers controlling water and food supply, the crawfish season now stretches from December to July.
Since they’re cooked while still alive, crawfish don’t travel well and are best consumed near the source, especially in their boiled form. Many of the standard dishes of the Cajun/Creole repertoire — crawfish etouffee, crawfish stew, crawfish pies — only require peeled tail meat, which can be purchased in one-pound bags from a variety of seafood processors.