What Are Crawfish Anyway?

         Let's take a look at the history of those delicious little red crustaceans that will fill our bellies at this year's DGA Family and Friends Crawfish Boil on March 12, at Maison Lafitte in Mandeville. 

          Crawfish season runs from late February through early June. They live and grow in the wetlands that surround the Mississippi River and its estuaries. In the centuries before European settlement in Louisiana, crawfish thrived in the creeks, lakes, and bayous of south Louisiana. Local Native Americans caught bushels of the crustaceons by baiting wooden reeds with vension and dipping them into the water. The crawfish would latch onto the meat and dangle off the reeds, providing locals with their dinner. When the Acadians arrived in Louisiana in the 1750s, they quickly learned the value and deliciousness of this local delicacy. These French settlers, who had been expelled from Canada by the English during the Seven Years War, began incorporating crawfish into the cuisine. Over the ensuing decades, crawfish became a staple of Cajun cuisine. Local Cajun legends offer their own history of how crawfish arrived in Louisiana. Lobsters, a culinary staple of the French settlers in their native Canada, followed the Acadians from the cold waters of the Atlantic to the Mississippi basin. According to legend, when the lobsters entered the warmer waters of the gulf, they shrank to their present, diminutive size.

Watch out... it'll get you. 

          The commercial sale of crawfish began only in the late 1800s with the first recorded harvest in 1880. The crawfish, raised in the Atchafalaya Basin, resulted in a  harvest of 23,400 pounds, worth about $2,140 (about $51,000 in today’s money). In 1908, the U.S. Census Bureau recorded that Louisiana produced about 88,000 pounds of crawfish per year, worth about $3,600 (about $93,000 today). The Great Depression of the 1930s drove the price of crawfish down to as low as 4 cents per pound. Technological advancements, including trucking, railroads, and refrigeration, fueled the movement of live crawfish from the rural bayou to urban centers like Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The introduction of traps and nets allowed for the collection of greater numbers of crawfish. In the 1930s, Louisiana began to cultivate the production of crawfish on farms. Rice had long been a staple of bayou farmers. In order to gain more income, rice farmers began re-flooding their fields in order to produce harvests of crawfish in the winter and early spring. This practice soon spread across Louisiana wherever low-lying ponds and marshland could be found.

There's entire memes devoted to crawfish. 

          The process of farming stabilized crawfish production. Before farming, the harvest in any given year depended on the water levels in the Atchafalaya Basin. Thus the market fluctuated wildly from year to year. By the mid-1960s, over 10,000 acres of farms were spread across Louisiana. In the decades since, crawfish farms have only continued to grow to approximately 120,000 acres. Louisiana accounts for 85%-95% of total U.S. crawfish production. In 1960, the community of Breaux Bridge was named the crawfish capitol of the world and every year since has held yearly crawfish festival.  With the increasing consumption and availability of crawfish its profile began to grow. Restaurants began serving crawfish on their menus giving birth to the famous crawfish etouffee. The process of eating crawfish then passed in the local consciousness as a way to celebrate local food and served as another way for Louisianans to come together and celebrate their home.  Today the industry accounts for 7,000 jobs and about 300 million dollars in revenues.

The end result. 

The process for cooking crawfish has stayed the same (and this may attest to the longevity of crawfish consumption); get a pot of water boiling (seasoned of course), add the live crawfish, let cook for several minutes. Then eating the crawfish on newspaper covered tables until you can’t eat them anymore. It’s a tradition that we look forward to upholding on March 12.