Crawdads
Along with the burgeoning of blooms following the spring rains this time of year is the sudden appearance of crawfish. Where they come from on a city block, I don’t know. I do know that my neighborhood a hundred years ago was rice land, and crawfish love wet, muddy bogs. Maybe my crawfish are descended from those original rice paddy inhabitants.
It’s hard to know much about a nocturnal creature who spends its life burrowed deep underground. What brought them to my attention is the cats. They have each staked their claim to a crawfish hole near the ditch in my front yard. Like guardian sentinels, or perhaps patient fishermen, they lie nose to hole, peering into its depths for great lengths of time. It’s quite a funny sight to see a cat staring so intently into a cigar-sized hole in the ground. I want so much to inform them that the crawfish only come out at night.
Other than recipes for cooking them, not much else appears online about the lowly crawfish. The burrowing kind like I have eat decomposing plant material and their own shells (yuk!), which they shed daily when young. Their burrows may reach ten feet in depth, providing aeration to hard, wetland clay. They spawn and incubate their eggs in these burrows. The turrets, or chimneys, that result from their burrowing may reach ten inches in height.
Crawfish are prey for nearly every living thing in their world — fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals eat them. No wonder they dig such deep holes. My hope for all the burrowing crawfish of the world is that an occasional earthworm will stick its head through a hole and provide a quick, easy meal for this beleaguered species.
There are more crawfish in Georgia than in Louisiana, but 98% of the crawfish consumed in North America come from Louisiana. An estimated 100 million pounds are consumed every year. Before they were farmed in the 20th century, crawfish were seined from the bayous and marshes of South Louisiana and brought to culinary prominence by the Acadians.
When I was young growing up in North Louisiana, crawfish were esteemed about as highly as dung beatles. My family called them “mudbugs” or “crawdads.” Their reputation has improved over time, however. Next weekend my brothers are hosting a crawfish boil at the lake house for Mother’s Day. I wish I could be there but I can’t.
What’s great about a crawfish boil, apart from sheer scrumptiousness, is the outdoorsiness of it. Crawfish have to be boiled and eaten outside. Inside, the peppery vapors from the pot can burn your eyes and throat and smell up your house for days. Of course, modern restaurants serve boiled crawfish indoors, usually on giant round platters, but that doesn’t begin to compare with the old way Cajuns served them–outdoors on picnic tables covered in newspaper, laden with steaming crawdads, onions, corn, and potatoes. Mmmm!
Most people from the South have crawfish stories. My neighbor tells the story of her and her brothers fishing them out with bits of bacon tied to sewing thread. As Texas children they knew nothing about cooking and eating them. The point of the exercise for them was to dump bags of dead crawfish onto the porches of their enemies.
My brothers and I caught some crawfish in a ditch once and decided to cook them. We had heard that you can eat the tails. So while they diligently separated tails from shells, I heated up some cooking oil on the stove. When the tails hit the oil, they instantly turned into tiny, hard, round marbles. After that, we couldn’t imagine how anyone would want to eat crawfish.
The mud turrets by the holes near my ditch are all gone, victims of the lawnmower’s blade. One particular hole has a deep well around it, and the grass has been scratched away. I wish I could have been there to see which cat put so much effort into trying to excavate a crawfish. I wish I could tell them that those holes may be ten feet deep.
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