Fork In The Road: Mudbugs

Crayfish. Crawfish. Crawdad. Whatever you want to call them, there are over 500 species of these little crustaceans, a relative of the lobster. Drooling enthusiasts from Louisiana to Oregon to New Jersey and points in between eagerly await the “season” each year.

When I was young and living in Louisiana, every gas station or corner store would sell lunch sized paper bags full for a dollar – a heck of a profit considering the owner and their entire family would harvest the shrimp-like critters from the bayous along the back roads so there was only an investment of time and some spices and the bag of course. A favorite past time was grossing out the tourist by sucking the heads. We would laugh at the look on their faces as they turned away to discuss this act with their traveling companions, sure that we were indeed backwards in some way. Those days are long gone. Now, everyone knows what these little beauties are and vie for their fair share when that time of year arrives.

Here in the Texas/Louisiana area we call them crawfish, and they are found in more places than most of us even realize. There are festivals celebrating the consuming of the little devils all the way to New Zealand.

Think “crawfish festival” and a lot of us in this part of the woods think “Breaux Bridge, Louisiana”.

But guess again – since 1951, (that’s right 55 years!) there has been the annual Tualatin Crawfish Festival, “The Nation’s Oldest Crawfish Festival”, in Tualatin, Oregon. In 1961 Tennessee Ernie Ford declared the Tualatin Crawfish Festival “the only crawfish festival in the world”. Fifteen years later the city of Breaux Bridge got wind of the claim and fought back sending Tualatin a letter informing them that in 1960 the Louisiana State legislature declared Breaux Bridge the Crawfish Capitol of the World. A Louisiana Voodoo Queen even got involved and placed a curse on the Tualatin Festival threatening them with bad “gris-gris” for trying to steal Louisiana’s claim to crawfish superiority.

I guess the gris-gris must have worked because the following year a near riot broke out following the Tualatin Festival and reinforcements had to be called in (you don’t mess with those Voodoo Queens) and the future of the event hung in jeopardy for a while. The local businesses decided to keep on and 29 years later the event is still going strong.

Most crawfish live in freshwater like lakes and streams, but a few varieties survive in salt water. If it makes you feel any better as you suck them down, crawfish live normally less than two years.

While it may be easier to frequent your area restaurants that know how to prepare crawfish with just the right mix of spices, if you are adventurous, don’t mind the work that it entails (no pun intended) and are ready to astound friends and family with your own crawfish boil you need to start with the right paraphernalia. Stock up on newspaper. You can use it to cover the table with numerous layers so that as they get wet and full of shells, they can be peeled up a few pages at a time and tossed. Tons of paper napkins should be in easy reach of the eaters. It’s much...

We hope that you enjoyed reading this excerpt from "Mudbugs". If you would like to read the entire article and more, you can order a back issue of May / Jun 2006 where this article was originally published.

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