SUCKIN’ HEADS
Crawfish Tales
A SPICY PILGRIMAGE DOWN THE BAYOU
Story and photos by Alexandra Kennon
I
t’s that time of year, again: when the smell of cayenne pepper and seafood wafts on the breeze throughout Louisiana; when boil pots are pulled from their storage sheds and given a baptismal rinse from the hose; when two, three, even half a dozen hand-washings can’t erase the spice from your fingers, the smelly beacon of pride letting everyone you encounter know that your last meal was superior. It’s crawfish season, folks. Pushing against the assumption that authentic crawfish and Cajun cuisine requires a drive to Louisiana’s prairie parishes, Houma Travel welcomed this year’s crawfish season with its initiative, the Bayou Country Crawfish Trail, which highlights over thirty businesses serving Louisiana’s prized crop. After an afternoon spent roaming the Trail myself, I can confirm that the experience is sure to leave you and your vehicle coated in that coveted “new craw” scent. While Terrebonne Parish has always been seafood-centric, Melissa Durocher, Head of Destination Development and Marketing for the Houma Area Convention & Visitors Bureau, noted that the statewide crawfish obsession is a somewhat more recent development. “If you look at when even I was growing up, you didn’t have crawfish everywhere, like you have it now,” she said. Her father, who she described as being “from a crawfish family,” was somewhat of an exception, simply because they lived on the bayou and it made practical sense. “They actually caught crawfish and ate it as just a staple in their house because of where they lived. They lived near the swamp,” Durocher explained. “And he couldn’t believe when we were growing up how that changed. I mean, now everybody’s going crawfish crazy, everybody wants crawfish. Whereas before it was kind of like it’s a mudbug … now it’s almost like it’s famous.” That Terrebonne translates to “good earth,” in French is somewhat ironic, considering that a huge percentage of the parish is comprised of water, meaning it is highly likely that there are actually more crawfish than people in Houma and its surrounding areas. While Breaux Bridge and the rice fields of the prairie Cajuns tend to get the glory this time of year, the good people of the parish named “good earth” want us to know that they have an impressive bounty and variety of the crawly, spicy critters, too.
Before crawfish took off, Melissa told me, boiled shrimp or crabs were—and still are, in addition to crawfish—favorite staples in the Houma area, because they were available fresh locally. “My parents would have to take the crabs and put them in our platters because I would get so upset if my brother had a crab that was heavier than mine,” Durocher chuckled. “And so, we grew up with that kind of craziness. But we ate what was fresh—so we would catch shrimp and boil shrimp, we’d catch crabs, boil crabs, we’d have crawfish day…it’s just what we had that was local. We all grew up like that.”
Crawfishing in Terrebonne Parish is considerably different than the more controlled methods of crawfish farming in the central part of the state. Mitch Aucoin, co-owner of A&B Seafood and tugboat captain “by trade,” has been fishing, boiling, and selling seafood since he was in high school. He described the Lower Atchafalaya crawfishing as “wild caught fishing”. “We’re not like the farmers,” he said. “The farmers can control the water, they can pop ‘em out the ground by draining the water, they got ‘em at their fingertips. We’ve gotta kinda wait ’til it comes.” Wild caught crawfishermen usually hold off on harvesting until late in the spring, when the snowfall up the Mississippi has melted, allowing enough water for their mud-motored boats to enter the necessary parts of the Basin. “Wild caught [crawfishing] is very fragile, you could say, with Mother
Nature,” explained Aucoin. “If we don’t get the water, we don’t get the crawfish.” When the water levels in the Basin are too low, Aucoin sources crawfish from a farmer he knows personally in Welsh, Louisiana. By around midto-late-March, however, all of the crawfish Aucoin sells are caught right in Terrebonne. One more thing to note before embarking on the Crawfish Trail: the folks around Houma are big proponents of sauce, so for an authentic experience, don’t skimp on it. Crawfish dipping sauce is usually a pink, mayonnaisebased sauce that’s varying degrees of sweet, spicy, and/or smoky depending on where you get it. It’s a reliable Southern edict that mayonnaise-based sauce improves most foods, and I must admit that in my opinion, crawfish is no exception.
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