Memorial Day Crawfish Boil

Share this article

Do you have plans for this weekend?  Do you either live in the Gulf Coast or are you a monster at sourcing ingredients?  If your answers are no and then yes then I have an idea!  Let’s host a Louisiana Crawfish Boil!

The memory of my first New Orleans crawfish boils exist in a haze. A montage of scenes: a tub of live crawfish crawling on top of one another, hissing, spitting and snapping. A crawfish race with a young friend (crawfish make great, if short-term, pets). Large men carrying a pot of steaming hot crustaceans to a table made of saw horses and plywood. Plastic Mardi Gras Cups of beer and red wine. Later, my mother explaining to me that it was time for me to learn to peel my own crawfish and that she would no longer be peeling them for me. Piles of crawfish heads. Large black contractor bags for clean up. The smell, days later, of the escaped convicts, the crawfish that were pardoned from the boil, played with and discarded later. 

These memories were made in the diminutive concrete back patio of the rented apartment my mother and I shared in the working class neighborhood of Mid City in New Orleans where we moved when I was two.  Family friends, who would go on to become famed for their “Cochon de Lait Po-boys” at Jazz Fest, would come over to cater the crawfish boil, and my mother would set up the music, the drinks and the invitation list. The parties were famous and were held in the midst of Mardi Gras, on the Saturday of the Endymion parade. (The largest of the parades to roll during Mardi Gras, Endymion carries 2,700 masked riders through the streets of Mid City.) The air is electric the morning of the parade and during my childhood it lined up just two blocks from our house.  The parties brought together an eclectic mix of musicians, politicians, bartenders, drag queens, teachers and artists. They started early and ended late, and crawfish were the star.

Since then I’ve grown up and it is no longer my mom and her friends but now me and my friends hosting the crawfish boils.  As a matter of fact, Mom’s best friend’s son (who was in diapers when I was hosting crawfish derbys), is now in high demand, boiling crawfish all over New Orleans.  It is now our friends who make up the guest lists:  Academics, attorneys, artists and investors make up the audience.  Not enough bartenders, politicians, actors or drag queens show up at our boils so clearly they are missing a certain spice but we do our best.  

We spice, boil, peel and eat.  We visit, divide, burn, cry and clean up.  We do it all now – and it is a rare showing for a parent to guide our hands as we take this tradition forward.  We gather around the table and we peel the tails and suck the heads and drink our ice-cold beer.  We peel the tails for our children and warn them about how spicy the potatoes will be.  We look back and forth and think, wait, when did we become the grown-ups? When did we become the ones gathering up the escaped crawfish before they begin to decompose and making sure to use contractor bags for clean up so the claws don’t poke through?  And hot dog!  We’re actually doing it!

So yup, we are the grown ups now and we say put the beer on ice, break open the Diet Cokes and turn the music up.  Loud.  Because, you know why?  We can.  We’re in charge.  Monday is Memorial Day.  Have a crawfish boil.  

Share this article