Crawfish

I’m surprised that crawfish (and I have never heard them called “crayfish”) cookery never reached the heights in the Lowcountry that it has in Louisiana—the rice fields surely must have been filled with them. Perhaps the slaves whose job it was to keep the fields cleaned of pests threw the crawfish into their pots with the turtles and eels. Or perhaps they were simply destroyed, since Africa is the only continent where these “mudbugs” are not indigenous.

Having been born in Louisiana before moving to the Lowcountry, I have well known how to eat “crawdads” all my life. But only recently, with the advent of Lowcountry crawfish farms, have they entered the local culinary tradition. Locally we now can obtain crawfish even as soft-shells.