While on a visit to Baton Rouge, I was hoping to sample some mudbugs as March through May is prime crawfish season.
A crawfish boil in Louisiana is much like a backyard barbecue in Texas with a few exceptions.
Texans need a barbecue pit, cold beverages, and charcoal.
Cajuns need a propane burner, a large pot, cold beverages, and lots of seasoning.
Both celebrations are best when held in someone’s back yard where there’s a wooden picnic table, and kids can run through a sprinkler.
We had quite a few crawfish boils in the Hebert family. Cousins and friends would throw a party whenever the mudbugs were inexpensive and plentiful.
Getting ready for a crawfish boil means covering the picnic tables with layers of newspaper. The reason for the layers is that after the first batch of crawfish is dumped on the table, you roll up the top two layers of newspaper with the crawfish shells and throw that away. Then the table is ready for the next round.
Dump, eat, and repeat.
When the crawfish boils were at our house, Dad would arrive a few hours before we started with big mesh bags filled with crawling, snapping crawfish.
I remember spraying the snapping crustaceans with the hose every few minutes to keep them alive while my dad seasoned the water in the big pot. Just like cooking brisket, crawfish cooking recipes are often passed down from generation to generation.
Each cook has his or her own secret to cooking tender, well-seasoned crawfish. Some people use pre-measured boxes of seasoning created for shrimp, crab and crawfish.
Others use their own heavily guarded recipe of salt, cayenne pepper, paprika, garlic and liquid crawfish boil concentrate. Some cooks add other spices, but hot seasoning is a must-have.
Next comes what to boil with the crawfish. Savvy cooks never let that seasoned water go to waste.
Growing up, the only extra foods thrown in the big pot were small red potatoes and corn-on-the-cob. These extras soaked up the seasoning and were often spicier than the crawfish.
Cajun cooks these days fill mesh bags with green beans or asparagus, brussels sprouts and carrots.
My nephew was in charge of the crawfish for Mother’s Day, and he uses his father’s award-winning recipe. He added links of hot sausage and cocktail links, and both were a big hit. The crawfish were perfectly cooked.
As usual, we debated about how long to cook the crawfish and how to cool them down.
There’s those who believe one adds ice directly to the water at the end of the boiling period and those who let the crawfish cool down naturally.
No matter who’s doing the cooking, crawfish boils follow the same script.
After the agreed-upon time for soaking and cooling, it’s time to dump those now red, steaming crawfish and extras out onto the newspaper-covered picnic table.
Guests stand around the table, peeling, sucking the heads, dipping potatoes in butter and chasing all that down with a cold beer with either an LSU baseball game or Zydeco music on the radio.
There’s usually a wise relative around the table showing the young ones how to snap and twist off the tail, suck the heads and then clean the meat out of the claws.
They teach them not to eat the ones where the tails are flat because they weren’t alive before they were cooked.
In Texas, nothing beats backyard barbecues. In Louisiana, nothing comes close to a spring afternoon and peeling crawfish until your fingers sting.
Mais oui, cher, dat’s a good time.
This column was originally published in The Fort Bend Herald.