Have you heard the Cajun legend of Pierre the Redtail? Here’s how crawfish came to be

When life hands you lemons, boil crawfish.

As my Cajun Uncle Alphonse taught me, the best way to prepare crawfish is in a big boiling pot with slices of lemon, fresh cloves of garlic, a quartered onion, handfuls of salt and one bag of boiling spices.

Note: just one bag. He convinced me that crawfish have such a fantastic flavor of their own that we don’t need to hide it behind seasoning so hot our lips blister.

The lemon analogy for the 2021 crawfish season isn’t a huge stretch.

After all, the COVID pandemic has tossed out proverbial lemons of varying sizes, depending on individual impacts and lifestyle changes. So why not boil crawfish? T’is the season, mes amis.

We also mustn’t forget the tale of Pierre the Redtail, as worthy of retelling each Easter season as is the story of the egg-delivering rabbit, Peter. More on our Pierre later.

Much of the world has no big, juicy crawfish crop worthy of boiling pots. That makes the Mississippi Coast and the rest of the Gulf South advantageous places to be from February to early July, when the crawfish run. Or sing. Or do whatever it is these prehistoric critters do to survive.

But why the advantage? We are neighbors to Louisiana, not only in location but in culture and foodways. Louisiana happily shares its 60 to 80 million-pound annual crop with us.

The Bayou State has perfect natural growing conditions for this freshwater crustacean — from its swamps and marshlands to its shared use of flooded rice fields. That’s why Louisiana produces about 93% of this country’s crawfish crop.

In modern times, as crawfish popularity spread in Europe and other U.S. sections, Asian farms began giving crawfish production a run for the money. In my humble taste-bud opinion, though, there’s no competition and the clay mud that gives the Louisiana “mudbug” its nickname is unmatched.

Rest assured, it’s not necessary to have French or Creole bloodlines to appreciate a good crawfish etouffee. Anyone can — and should — spend hours with family and friends shoveling their way through a mess of boiled crawfish piled high newspaper. Flavor is definitely enhanced if we peel the tails and suck the good juices ourselves.

This “crawfish boil” ritual is commonplace in the Gulf South during spring holidays, as any Coast seafood market can attest this Easter weekend. In non-COVID times, the spring holidays include my crawfish-heavy April birthday, but thanks to the travel-dampening pandemic, I’m ensconced in the Virginia Piedmont where crawfish are minuscule.

This year it doesn’t matter if I do have lemons. BTW, “When life hands you lemons, boil crawfish” is a popular saying in crawfish country.

A misleading history

Some food histories claim a love of crawfish didn’t crawl outside of Louisiana until the 1980s when Chef Paul Prudhomme popularized Cajun food for the masses. That’s not so.

From the beginning of statehood in 1812, the unique flavors of the Bayou State could not be self-contained. I attribute this to the food survival techniques of Native Americans, followed by the French, Africans, Spanish and other hungry immigrants faced with food shortages.

Question: What’s the difference between a Louisiana zoo and a zoo in another state?

Answer: There’s a recipe card beside every animal.

Some of those recipes were known elsewhere in the early days because Louisianans migrated to work in the seafood industry or to partake of the cooler, less muggy, less buggy weather of a coastal resort. As luck would have it, their food preferences came with them as cultural baggage.

Certainly, restaurants and seafood markets in Gulfport, Biloxi and other Coast towns were advertising crawfish by the early 1900s. One later 1942 advertisement in The Daily Herald for “Bozo’s Place” on East Beach Biloxi makes me want to grab a fork and step through a time machine:

“Boiled crabs, boiled shrimp, boiled crawfish, crawfish gumbo, crawfish spaghetti, crawfish stew with steamrice, soft-shell poor boys, broiled or fried flounders, French fried potatoes, 35 cents. We also sell green crawfish.”

That was near the time when my Cajun father and his eight siblings grew up on a small Bayou Blue farm when crawfish were considered “the poor man’s food.”

My aunts recall how mudbugs were so plentiful crawling across roads that driving became dangerous from so many slippery, smashed bodies. Their sheer numbers in those days also offered up easy-to-catch, free meals.

Today, you’ll likely have to buy them from markets and restaurants at varying prices related to lateness of season, weather and crop size. A check with Coast prices comes up with market ranges from $3.39 to $4.49 per pound boiled but take off 20 to 30 cents per pound for 10 or more. Admittedly, one pound isn’t satisfying for this tell-tail addiction.

Now to Pierre himself

This brings us full circle to Pierre the Redtail and his tale of how the crawfish came to be in Louisiana. Admittedly his name comes from my imagination because I’m determined he will be as much a part of our spring holidays as his Easter rabbit competition, Peter.

Keep in mind I’m only putting a name to a story that’s already a well-recorded Cajun legend.

Pierre’s tale begins in 1755 during The Expulsion, when the victorious British expelled Acadians from Nova Scotia in eastern Canada after the French and Indian War.

Many of the French Acadians forced off their land were lobster fisherman. As word spread along the bottom of the sea that their favorite people were being forced out, the lobsters vowed to follow these “Cajuns.”

As the boats sailed, the loyal lobsters crawled, under water and over dry lands. Food was scarce and each time the lobsters molted, as is their natural way, they grew smaller instead of bigger. Smaller. And smaller. And smaller.

By the time they reached the Louisiana marshes, Pierre and all his kin were very small indeed. The diminutive lobster today is known as the crawfish.

Kat Bergeron, a veteran feature writer specializing in Gulf Coast history and sense of place, is retired from the Sun Herald. She writes the Mississippi Coast Chronicles column as a freelance correspondent. Reach her at BergeronKat@gmail.com or at Southern Possum Tales, P.O. Box 33, Barboursville, VA 22923.