Food: Crawfish Have Always Been

¶ … Food: Crawfish

Crawfish have always been one of my favorite foods, but I honestly don't remember the very first time that I tasted crawfish, because my mother has always included it, in various forms, in several of her traditional Cajun recipes.

On the other hand, I do remember, very vividly, the day that hunting for them with my father became one of our most cherished family rituals, especially for me.

My father has set his crawfish traps out in the river behind our house since before I was born, and many of my mother's dishes, such as her jambalaya and gumbo depended on the success of his morning harvest. It was ever something that

I participated in, or even gave all that much thought to, frankly, until the last day of school at the end of third grade.

That spring, my father's birthday, May 22nd, happened to be my last day of school, before my summer vacation. At my mother's suggestion, we bought him two brand new crawfish traps, complete with bait trays. Lately, he'd been complaining about his poor luck in the river, and my mother had suggested that he should get himself some of the new, fancy looking traps from the bait shop, but he said that his father and grandfather had always built their own, and that if that was good enough for them, it was good enough for him.

We decided to get him some of those new traps for his birthday, and the man at the bait store gave us two new bait boxes at no extra charge. According to him, one of the reasons my father's traps were coming up empty is that he still used glass jars for bait. He said that glass jars worked fine if you happened to drop your traps in the perfect spot, but otherwise, bait boxes work much better, because they're designed with little holes to let the scent of the bait carry through the river, which helps the crawfish locate the traps much better than the old-timers'

bait jars. So, we brought home two brand new traps for my dad's birthday present, each with a new bait box inside. The next morning, my dad was thrilled when he saw them in the kitchen, together with the birthday card from my mom and me.

Still, he seemed saddened by the prospect of giving up his old traps, several of which had been passed down from two generations of crawfishing in his family.

I suggested that he could still use his old ones too, and even, that he could make a scientific "experiment" out of it, by using one of his old traps with a new bait box, a new trap with his old bait jar, and the other new trap and bait bow together, to see if the man at the bait store was right, after all.

My dad was already happy with his birthday present, but he seemed even more thrilled that I was taking an interest in his hobby. I got ready for the last day of school, and we decided to go to the river together the next morning to check the traps together, and he went out to set them late that night, long after my bedtime. I always liked waking up (without any alarm clock) on the first morning of summer vacation anyway, but that year was even better, because I

was really looking forward to spending the day with my dad. Science was my favorite subject in school, so I also wanted to see the results of our little trapping experiment that I thought of the day before.

Sure enough, both the traps (one old and one new) with the new bait boxes inside were filled with crawfish; the rest of the traps (including the new one)

that had the old bait jars inside had only a few crawfish, each. My dad admitted that he was as happy to find out that it was the jars all along, and not the traps themselves, because that meant he could continue using his father's old handmade traps, too. He decided right there to go get new bait boxes the next time we went into town, for all his traps. That day, my father also taught me some of the basics of crawfishing, such as never setting too many traps in the same place until June, because that is the end of their mating season; catching too many in one place in May could deplete the river for the rest of the season. When we finished pulling all the traps and dumping the entire catch into buckets of ice water, we put all the traps back in the truck and drove home to let mom turn our catch into her famous crawfish jambalaya and gumbo.

Usually, my dad cooked all the crawfish for her behind the house by himself, but this time I joined him to help, and with dinner following shortly thereafter, my dad and I ended up spending his entire birthday together. We boiled them until they were bright red, the familiar aroma of cooked crawfish spreading through the yard and into the house. Since then, my dad and I have spent every one of his birthdays together the same way, and it has become a very special day for both of us, and for our entire family, ever since.