Casual Food

Many of the essentials in a well-rounded New Orleans eating regimen are the most informal of dishes. The best demonstration of this is provided at the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, where vendors sell more than 100 different dishes that are best eaten without tables, and sometimes even without plates or utensils.

The most celebrated of these dishes is boiled seafood, particularly boiled crawfish. The advent of live crawfish by the sack in the spring triggers a wave of crawfish boils all across South Louisiana. Everybody who boils crawfish has his own special way of doing it. I offer my version for first-timers.