Tony the Crawfish officially opens the season
Get the fixin’s ready, Crawfish Season has officially begun. As has happened on the first Tuesday after Mardi Gras since 2017, Lt. Gov. Billy Nunguesser and a host of seafood dignitaries gathered, this year at Tony Chachere’s Creole Foods in Opelousas, for the annual Pardoning of the Crawfish and celebration of the critters that have become a symbol of the life and culture of south Louisiana.
The lucky crustacean, named Tony after the Chachere company founder, was caught in a pond near Kaplan and brought to Opelousas, where Nungesser formally gave him a reprieve from the boiling pot. Tony the Crawfish was then taken in a regal parade to Ville Plate, where he will live out his days burrowing in the mud at Chicot State Park, swimming in the bayou, and doing whatever it is that crawfish do for fun.
“Crawfish [aren’t] just a meal in Louisiana,” Nungesser said. “[They are] a way of life and a cornerstone of our economy. That’s true. We harvest about 150 million pounds each year. They provide jobs and money for lots of people, and about this time each year also provide fun for even more folks at fairs, festivals, and backyard boils.
“Sparing one lucky crawfish and officially pardoning Tony before he could end up on someone’s tray [ls] a fun Louisiana tradition,” Nungesser said, “but it also highlights the pride we have in an industry that helps feed our people, fuel our economy, and showcase our culture to the world.”
We’ve been cultivating and enjoying them a lot longer than you might expect. English cartographer Philip Pittman visited Louisiana in 1770 and wrote, “The crawfish abound in this country; they are in every part of the earth, and when the inhabitants chuse [sic] a dish of them, they send to their gardens, where they have a small pond for that purpose, and are sure of getting as many as they have occasion for.” (The Present State of the European Settlements ln the Mississippi, 1770).
Those little ponds were probably in New Orleans, not Breaux Bridge, where we celebrate not only crawfish caught in the Atchafalaya Basin, but those from the big ponds that now supply most of our harvest.
The first record of a commercial crawfish harvest in the entire United States was in 1880, when 23,400 pounds with a value of $2,140 were taken from the Basin. In those early times harvesting them was too much work for too little money. In 1908, a U.S. Census report listed Louisiana’s production at 88,000 pounds with a value of $3,600, That’s less than a half-penny per pound, and prices didn’t get much higher for a good while.
In the years following the Great Depression, crawfish on the hoof were up to only four cents a pound, according to a study by the LSU AgCenter, but things were about to get better. Improved roads and the development of cold storage began to expand the market. Quick delivery opened markets in Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and eventually introduced Louisiana crawfish to other places that were farther away.
Until then, most of the crawfish had been consumed in smaller communities close to where they were caught, and there weren’t many places outside of south Louisiana interested in, or even aware of the little critters that would one day become famous. In lots of places where people did know about them, crawfish were denigrated as a lowly “mudbug” that was good for nothing but “poor man’s food.”
The idea of pond-raised crawfish first got a bit of attention in the 1930s, but it was the 1950s before farmers and processors began to realize that crawfish farming was a good way to have a supply practically all year long. By the middle 1960s south Louisiana sported some ten thousand acres of managed ponds. They produced enough crawfish for a fledgling picking and packing industry to begin, and that led to more aggressive marketing both inside and outside the state.
More restaurants began featuring them in their menus, dishes such as crawfish étouffée became known worldwide, and all of that reinforced the renaissance of a dying culture that began to gather steam in the 1970s. According to the Louisiana Crawfish Promotion and Research Board, crawfish farming has developed into the largest freshwater crustacean aquaculture industry in the United States. Today, if Tony had not been pardoned he could have ended up on a tray halfway around the world and considered a delicacy.
Crazy winter weather and a few other things cut into last year’s crop, but I am told by a crawfishfarming friend that warmer weather this year is promising a good season with plenty of not-too-pricey crawfish just in time for Good Friday, when lots of folk “fast” by feasting on them.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@ gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.
