Ecrevisses—Freshwater Crayfish or Crawfish

Appears in
top 1000The Robert Carrier Cookbook
The Robert Carrier Cookbook

By Robert Carrier

Published 1965

  • About
This freshwater shellfish used to abound in English streams, but it has almost died out now, and the British have stopped even thinking about it. Pollution and over-fishing have caused crayfish to begin to disappear from French streams, but the gourmets cannot be denied, and great tanks bring the crayfish in live from Eastern Europe to cope with the demand.

There are several kinds of crayfish, as I once saw dramatically demonstrated at the Restaurant Dubern in Bordeaux, where a shipment of écrevisses from Yugoslavia was unfortunately tipped into the ornamental pool inhabited by écrevisses from Poland, and a full-scale battle broke out between them.