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5. Catching, Cooking, and Eating Crawfish
- University Press of Mississippi
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5Catching , Cooking, and Eating Crawfish Unlike the Anglo-Americans who settled in much of the southern United States, the French who settled in south Louisiana brought with them to the New World a tradition of eating crawfish, which were also eaten by the local Indians (Comeaux 1972:63-65). By the time the Acadian refugees began to arrive in Louisiana, crawfish were important enough to the colonists that they took steps to ensure a ready supply. A military officer who traveled in Louisiana before 1770 observed that "The crawfish abound in this country; they are in every part of the earth, and when the inhabitants chuse a dish of them, they send to their gardens, where they have a small pond dug for that purpose, and are sure of getting as many as they have occasion for" (Pittman 1973:5). Another observer of the same period noted that the colonists also caught wild crawfish: "The whole levee part of the river abounds in crayfish. Upon my first arrival in the colony, the ground was covered with little hillocks, about six or seven inches high, which the crayfish had made for taking the air out of the water, but since dikes have been raised for keeping off the river from the low grounds, they no longer show themselves. Whenever they are wanted , they fish for them with the leg of a frog, and in a few moments they will catch a large dish of them" (Le Page Du Pratz 1774:277). Thus the Acadian refugees entered a physical environment in which crawfish were 83 84 Cajun Foodways plentiful, and a social environment in which methods for procuring crawfish were known to local inhabitants,among whom the crawfish was an accepted and common food item. Although we do not know the details of the early Acadian settlers' first encounters with the abundance of Louisiana crawfish, there is no reason to presume that they avoided crawfish as food. Those Acadian farmers who moved into the swamps during the nineteenth century probably increased their crawfish consumption, as hunting and gathering activitiescame to take precedence over agriculture (Comeaux 1972:17-21). By the late i88os there was a small but established commercial crawfish industry within market distance of New Orleans , and in the 1920$ commercial exploitation of crawfish in the Atchafalaya Basin began (Comeaux 1972:64). T H E C R A W F I S H I N D U S T R Y For over two centuries Cajuns have lived in a region that is one of the world's most productive sources of crawfish. Each year between December and May the streams, ponds, swamps, and ditches of south Louisiana yield an abundance of crawfish. The Atchafalaya Basin swamp is the primary source of wild or deep-water crawfish, and crawfish farms greatly add to the region's commercial crop. Over 80 percent of the world's supply of commercial freshwater crawfish come from Louisiana, and the state is the world leader in crawfish cultivation (Huner 1990; 1991). Figures compiled by the Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board (n.d.) show healthy growth in the crawfish industry during the 1980$. By 1987 there were 135,000 acres of crawfish ponds, up from 50,000 acres in the late 19708. Louisiana's 3,OOO crawfish farms, mostly located in Acadiana, account for over 90 percent of the nation's crawfish pond acreage. In 1978 the combined commercial harvest of wild and pond-raised crawfish was 45 million pounds (McSherry 1982:8). By 1987 the combined harvest had grown to 100 million pounds, nearly three-quarters of which was pond-raised. In 1987 the crop was worth 37 million dollars, the industry employed 15,000 people, and its estimated annual economic impact on the state was 135 million dollars.l No one has i. Unless otherwise noted, the source of data on the crawfish industry in this paragraph is The Louisiana Seafood Promotion and Marketing Board. [18.208.172.3] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:58 GMT) Catching, Cooking, and Eating Crawfish 85 made a reliable estimate of the amount of additional crawfish caught and eaten by noncommercial, Sunday crawfishermen, who scour roadside ditches and swampy areas for personal consumption. Both the major natural crawfish-producing areas and most of the commercial crawfish ponds are located in Cajun parishes, and Cajuns dominate these industries. The fishermen who work in the Atchafalaya Basin catch wild crawfish in homemade traps (see Comeaux [1972]; G. Guirard [1989...