‘FEARLESS LITTLE CRAWFISH’

Brad Goins Wednesday, May 14, 2014 Comments Off on ‘FEARLESS LITTLE CRAWFISH’
‘FEARLESS LITTLE CRAWFISH’

A New Book Shows How The Crawfish Embodies Key Features Of Cajun Culture

    

Louisiana Crawfish: A Succulent History of the Cajun Crustacean by Sam Irwin. Foreword by Marcelle Bienvenu. American Palate (The History Press): Charleston, S.C., 2014, 157 pp., $19.99.

A Review By Brad Goins

In the beginning, not everyone in Louisiana was in love with the crawfish.

In the early 20th century, in Tammany Parish, crawfish were seen as nuisances that ate away at the levees. The levee board used carbolic acid to kill them. One St. Tammany Farmer headline of the day read “Death To Crawfish.”

And it was rumored that oil men coming in from outside the state often dismissed crawfish as “mudbugs.” After all, the oil men were accustomed to seeing crawfish in waste water, and may have thought of them as waste and nothing more.

But in his new book, Louisiana Crawfish: A Succulent History of the Cajun Crustacean, journalist and freelance writer Sam Irwin argues that such negative views of the crawfish have been aberrations in modern South Louisiana. He feels that once a Louisianan — or anyone else, for that matter — tastes a properly made crawfish bisque or crawfish pie, the delicious flavors immediately transform the diner into a crawfish fan.

Positive endorsements of crawfish dishes were in circulation in South Louisiana at least by the beginning of the 20th century. One high-falutin’ Lafayette newspaper report of the time stated that at Mr. and Mrs. S.J. Breaux’s “social dinner,” food was “served a la francaise as follows: red and white wines, red fish, quail, teal duck, crawfish salad with aspic.”

And a whimsical 1915 newspaper story reported on the “Eatmore Club” of the Baton Rouge Elks, famous for their “Bohemian luncheons.” The reader of the day was told that “crawfish bisque will be the principal attraction.”

In the 1920s, many of the restaurants in New Orleans served a daily variety of crawfish dishes. And they did this even though the only crawfish production industry that existed at the time was a small number of New Orleans children who collected crawfish in their flooded back yards.

New Orleans diners were happy and the children were glad to get coins for candy and movies.

But, as Irwin convincingly demonstrates, the crawfish industry in Louisiana was constantly changed by the development of technology in the 20th century.

As Louisiana undertook a great effort to make the state modern and give it the fast, efficient infrastructure of modern highway culture, the waterways that supported crawfish were repeatedly altered.

With their alteration, the growing crawfish industry altered in turn, with the centers of crawfish population shifting as often as the waterways did.

As Louisiana made a large-scale, complicated and problematic drive for modernization, the crawfish industry grew from a few children in New Orleans in back yards to 77,000-acre crawfish farms 50 years on.

The first big move to modernization put the backyard New Orleans crawfish catchers out of business. City leaders undertook a concerted effort to drain back yards to create new land for new development in the city.

 

CRAWFISH BOOK COVER

The Flight From The Atchafalaya

This move shifted crawfish harvesting east to the Atchafalaya River. But modernization soon changed the picture again. In its efforts to control coastal flooding, the federal government created the Atchafalaya Basin.

The new basin brought extreme flooding every spring to the small Atchafalaya towns that had been the new fertile centers of crawfish production. Irwin relates that one small town school simply opened its front and back doors every day so the flood waters could flow right through.

Homeowners often did the same. With each spring, homeowners found themselves shoveling out piles of silt that were full of snakes.

When the great migration from the Atchafalaya Basin eventually took place, it wasn’t just to get away from the snake-infested flood mud. It was also to get access to the benefits of modern civilization, such as easily accessible health care … and refrigeration.

One of the leaders of the migration from the Atchafalaya Basin was Henry Guidry, who used mules to move his rural restaurant with him to the new town he started and named: Henderson.

Working in tandem was fellow restaurateur Pat Huval, the first and greatest publicist of the crawfish-serving restaurant. As he founded Pat’s Fisherman’s Wharf in Henderson, and worked to develop the prosperous restaurants that grew from it, Huval informed South Louisiana that Henderson was the place where the new, modern, restaurant-oriented crawfish industry in Louisiana began.

Henderson was such a small town it wasn’t even incorporated until 1971. But by that date, it had four crawfish restaurants that seated three thousand patrons. Many big city restaurant staffs would be thrilled with such numbers.

 

 

The New Iberia Phenom

If Henderson was the place where the crawfish restaurant business really took off, New Iberia was, at least as far as Irwin is concerned, the place where restaurant crawfish reached their apex of influence.

Irwin relates that as early as the 1920s, Beaumont newspapers carried reports of day-long train trips made by those who wanted to eat crawfish in Breaux Bridge. The two establishments that drew the most tourists were the Hebert Hotel and Guidroz’s. The Beaumont Enterprise reported that President Herbert Hoover dined on “Mother Hebert’s crawfish bisque” at Hebert Hotel.

A Baton rouge Morning Advocate column in 1935 listed the crawfish offerings at Hebert Hotel as “crayfish cocktail, crayfish salad, crayfish pie, crayfish stew, crayfish patties, crayfish soup gumbo and crayfish bisque.”

Also serving crawfish dishes in Breaux Bridge at the time were Mim’s Café, the Rendezvous Club, Mulate’s, Theresa’s and Thelma’s.

Irwin devotes many pages of his narrative to the decision of Breaux Bridge to use the 1959 centennial celebration of its incorporation to declare itself the Crawfish Capital of the World (Capitale Mondiale de l’Écrevisse). And he devotes many more pages to the Breaux Bridge crawfish festivals that took place in subsequent years.

Irwin rightly argues that the first festival was a marketing coup for Louisiana crawfish. Early on, the notorious Louisiana Gov. Earl K. Long got behind the move to name an official crawfish capital in the Louisiana Legislature.

That maneuver was only one of many clever marketing ploys put together by the Breaux Bridge group. To promote the centennial, more than 700 local men grew beards and wore stovepipe hats and silk vests and other items of 19th century clothing. They called themselves “Les Braves Barbes,” and participated in beard judging contests. Women wore 19th-century style sun bonnets. Everyone wore crawfish pins.

These marketing schemes must have generated quite widespread media interest in the event. Pope John XXIII sent a papal greeting to the festival and President Eisenhower wrote a congratulatory note that said Breaux Bridge had “helped to preserve a great tradition for America.”

At the festival, Long gave a rambling speech about “dope peddlers” and other crucial topics. In reference to N.O. mayor “Chep” Morrision, he said “I’m hoping and praying that Delussups [an apparent mispronunciation of the politician’s name] Morrison in New Orleans will run. With your help I want to give that little squirt another beating before I die.”

After the dust settled, Times-Picayune editor Pete Baird wrote, “The big question at the Breaux Bridge crawfish festival was what Ole Earl’s head is stuffed with.”

In the early 1960s, the Iberia crawfish fest seemed to gain some serious traction, attracting such celebrities as Amy Vanderbilt, Bill Dana, Jose Jimenez and Dan Rather.

Irwin grew up in Breaux Bridge, and the dozens of pages he devotes to its crawfish festivals may be an indication of his strong allegiance to his area. And it’s obvious that he understands the importance of marketing a product that’s not widely known to the population as a whole.

 

Sam Irwin at Crawfish boil

Author Sam Irwin at a crawfish boil

 

The Eternal Crawfish King

But one wonders if marketing is quite as important as the amount of coverage devoted to it in this book indicates. One sign of Irwin’s extreme dedication to the Breaux Bridge festivals is the fact that he devotes an entire chapter to one of Breaux Bridge’s primary promoters: Leon Leo Breaux, who declared himself “Eternal King Crawfish” in 1961.

There’s no doubt that Breaux worked hard to promote the crawfish. But just how much media attention could have been attracted by such stunts as presenting the owner of the Houston Astros with a crawfish on a plaque.

Probably of more interest than his marketing ability was Breaux’s eccentricity. He commissioned a local painter to create a mural in his crawfish restaurant. The painting depicted a “new planet” that Breaux had imagined. It also showed the “old planet” of earth being destroyed by a nuclear explosion — with the Eternal King Crawfish escaping to his alternative world.

 

 

The Étoufée Story

Part of the Breaux Bridge story is the role of Mrs. Charles Hebert — matron of the Hebert Hotel — in serving what may have been the first crawfish étouffé — a dish Hebert called “courtbouillon” at the time.

Although she ran the Hebert Hotel until it closed, Mrs. Hebert never served her étoufée there. It was first served in a restaurant by her daughter Aline, who began to prepare and eat the dish just for herself when she and her sister ran The Rendezvous Club in Breaux Bridge in the 1940s and ‘50s.

Aline’s étouffée was a simple dish, made only with — as she put it — “a little cooking oil, parsley, onion tops and onions.”

She eventually began serving the dish to friends, who were enthusiastic about it. In 1950, it appeared on the Rendezvous menu for the first time — called both “Crayfish E’tau-fait” and “Écrivesse Étouffée.” The price was $1.50 a plate. (Irwin notes that Aline was the daughter of Henderson founder Henry Guidry.)

 

 

  The ‘Wayside Industry’ Grows

By 1932, a business in Pierre Part (the last remaining town on the Atchafalaya River) canned crawfish bisque for resale. Louisiana canned crawfish bisque developed a following throughout the country, becoming the meal of choice for residents as far away as Minnesota and Wisconsin by the 1950s.

The Times-Picayune recognized a growing industry in such commercial developments. A lengthy 1932 feature bore the headline “Fearless Little Crawfish Supplies Wayside Industry and Affords Family Sport.”

A key factor in the restaurant crawfish business was always the very labor-intensive work of preparing the crawfish meat. Irwin says the migration of Atchafalaya River residents to such places as Henderson and Breaux Bridge provided a labor force that made the work viable.

Irwin calls 1989 “the height of the crawfish peeling industry.” In that year, he says, there were 20 different crawfish peeling plants within a 2-mile radius of Henderson.

If the labor could be made available, rice fields could make available a means of vastly enhanced production of crawfish. In 1948, Voorhies Trahan became “the first to commercially rotate a rice crop with crawfish,” writes Irwin. In 1963, the LSU Agricultural Extension Service released its first publication promoting the practice.

Initially, farmers had concerns about what they saw as an overlap between the best time to trap crawfish (March or April) and the best time to plant rice — the exact same period.

But the technology was developing at such a rate that it was just a matter of time before the sticking points were ironed out and the new farming system was adapted. LSU had already started a graduate program in crawfish and rice farming rotation. And in 1963, the Wall Street Journal published an article on the phenomenon, quoting a farming expert from Crowley. The Louisiana crawfish industry was on the map — and for something bigger than Iberia’s festival.

In the last year (2012-2013), Louisiana’s crawfish industry produced more than 93 million pounds. The business — now called an “aquaculture” — presently brings more than $160 million to the state.

 

 

  Culture And  ‘The Sacred Ritual’

Irwin’s book isn’t a chronological history. It doesn’t move straight from the beginning to the end of the crawfish story. Much of it is a series of meditations or observations about crawfish or Cajun culture in general.

I think a narrative that moved from beginning to end would have worked better — for me, anyway. As it is, there are flashbacks; earlier historical events are (sometimes) mentioned a second time; and there is, at times, a jumbled chronology, as the narrative moves rapidly back and forth between earlier and later times.

But that’s not to say that the book isn’t an enjoyable read. It is. One of the book’s real strengths is Irwin’s ability to explain the Cajun way of life patiently, simply and enthusiastically. His obvious fondness of his heritage gives the book a powerful charm that will keep readers turning pages.

As well as an informative history of Louisiana’s coastal crawfish industry, the book is a thorough introduction to Cajun culture in general. Just to take one example, Irwin always provides pronunciation keys for Cajun names. He defines and provides pronunciation for all Cajun phrases he uses.

He makes a crucial and insightful point about Cajun culture when he says the crawfish boil “approaches the level of sacred ritual.” That only makes sense when one considers the work that must be done both to prepare and eat boiled crawfish. He notes that similar rituals developed ages ago in Sweden and Finland and are still common in those countries.

For Irwin, crawfish aren’t just a part of Cajun culture. Crawfish give substance to the culture; they fill it out. His view of the matter is probably very similar to the one he quotes from Revon Reed’s book Lache Pas la Patate:

“The crawfish symbolized many things for the Cajun: money in the bank, the food in his belly, bravery, and power for the politician. The crawfish affects the whole Cajun culture.”

Editor’s note: I used the spelling “crawfish” throughout this review except for the occasions when Irwin quotes a media report that uses the spelling “crayfish.” Irwin claims that the proper spelling of the crustacean’s name is debated to this day in the editorial offices of the New York Times.

 

Louisiana Crawfish presently sells for $16.25 at Amazon.com. The Kindle edition is $9.99. 

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