4.18.2007

Steam and Spice

Montclair, New Jersey -- This was no ordinary feast.
On Sunday afternoon, my friends Kristina and Brandon threw a crawfish boil at their gorgeous Colonial home in Montclair. Brandon hails from Louisiana, where these sorts of parties are a treasured tradition.
My dear friends lugged home 60 pounds of live crawfish (more than $300 worth!) from the Chelsea fish market in Manhattan.
The cooking process went like this: Brandon fired up a burner in their detached garage and filled a giant steel pot with water, spices, potatoes, lemons and cobs of corn. The crawfish wiggled around in a large cardboard box, awaiting their doom.
Outside, it was cold and soggy. A half-dozen children and adults huddled around the steamy pot in the garage.
Once the water was boiling, Brandon, with the help of two guys, carefully poured the dark red crustaceans into the pot. There was no whimpering, no leaping out of the cauldron. The crawfish went silently to their death.
(Side note: I didn’t know how I would react to this. While I eat fish, I don’t eat other meat and I’m not a fan of boiling things alive. But this was a cultural experience I didn’t want to miss.)
After 15 minutes of boiling, Brandon turned down the burner and let the critters soak for awhile. Next, they were put into a cooler, carried inside and dumped onto the kitchen counter covered with pages from The New York Times. After a dusting with seasoning salt, the party guests dug in with gusto, using only their hands.
Crawfish aren’t meaty critters. You’ll find edible bits in the tail and in the claws, but you have to maneuver around a not-so-appetizing anatomy. Keep in mind: these guys hang around in swamps and bear the nickname “mudbug.” Yum!
The native Southerners at the party had no problem extracting the flesh. But I’m not so skilled at ripping through exoskeletons and sucking meat out of claws. It’s a lot of work with little payoff. I ate the crawfish, but I found that stuffing my face with Cajun-spiked corn and potatoes was more gratifying. My friend Erin agreed (She's the blonde chomping on a crawfish).
After we call cleaned up – this is a messy affair, after all – we were served the best homemade carrot cake I’ve ever had.
And as it turns out, two crawfish miraculously escaped death, thanks to two little girls who adopted them as pets.
The final verdict: What an experience! I won’t be boiling my own live crawfish anytime soon, if ever, but it was great feeling the spirit of the bayou on a cold, rainy Sunday afternoon in Jersey. Thanks Kris and Brandon! (JM)

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2 Comments:

Blogger Manashi Mukherjee said...

Wow. That looks delicious, and it makes me wish I were back in Charleston. (Esp. after that nasty snowstorm Syracuse had earlier this week.)

8:49 PM  
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