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Paw-Paw's
EASTER CRAWFISH BOIL
Sunday, April 4, 1999 · Lafayette, Louisiana

Every Easter after church, my grandfather Thomas Boulware, who everybody in this family calls Paw-Paw, boils crawfish in his backyard for whoever shows up. Whoever shows up is usually about sixty people. Paw-Paw is 72. He worked 38 years at the sugar mill before he retired, and he has been running this boil since before I was born. I'm Tyrone, I'm 25, I'm an accountant here in Lafayette, and I have been his helper since I was big enough to drag a sack across the driveway. This year Easter fell right in the middle of tax season, and it was the only Sunday I took off between February and the fifteenth of April. Worth it.

Tyrone and his grandfather, an older man in a straw hat, apron and suspenders, holding up a red mesh sack of live crawfish in a driveway
Me and Paw-Paw with sack number one, right after church. Five more behind us.

By the Numbers
(I'm an accountant. I can't help it.)

Sacks of live crawfish6 (about 215 pounds)
Relatives, give or take60
Pots2 (Paw-Paw's 80-quart, Uncle Jerome's 60)
Batches6
Small red potatoes20 pounds
Short ears of corn5 dozen
Heads of garlic30
Propane tanks emptied2
Leftovers0

Paw-Paw's Method
Paw-Paw doesn't write anything down, so this is how I have watched him do it for twenty years.

  1. Buy them live the day before. We get ours from a man who farms crawfish in his rice fields out west of town. Keep the sacks in the shade, cool and damp, under wet burlap. Never seal them up in an ice chest full of water, or you'll drown them.
  2. Rinse them. Dump a sack into the big washtub and run the hose over them, swish them around, drain, and do it again until the water runs clear. Throw out any that are dead. Paw-Paw picks through every one.
  3. Get the water going. The 80-quart pot with its basket goes on the propane burner, about half full of water.
  4. Season it heavy. A bag of powdered crawfish boil, a good bit of salt, lemons cut in half and squeezed in, onions cut in half, and whole heads of garlic. Then Paw-Paw's secret, which everybody knows: more cayenne. More than you think. More than that.
  5. Potatoes first, then corn. Bring it to a rolling boil and put in the potatoes. When they're almost done, add the corn.
  6. The crawfish. Lower in the basket of crawfish, bring it back to a boil, and boil just a few minutes.
  7. Cut the fire and let them soak. Twenty minutes, more if you can stand it. This is where they take the seasoning. Paw-Paw says the soak is the whole secret, after the cayenne.
  8. Dump them. Lift the basket, let it drain, and dump the whole thing right down the middle of a newspaper-covered table. Stand back.
Paw-Paw stirring a big steaming aluminum pot on a propane burner with a long wooden paddle
Paw-Paw and the paddle. Nobody else touches the paddle.

With six sacks you're doing it six times, so the boil goes all afternoon, a batch about every forty minutes, with Uncle Jerome running the second burner. People eat in waves. Nobody minds waiting, because waiting is when you talk.

A newspaper-covered folding table heaped with red boiled crawfish, corn, potatoes, garlic and lemons, with hands reaching in
Batch number two hits the table.

How to Peel and Eat One
For my friends from up North who keep asking:

  1. Hold the head in one hand and the tail in the other, and twist. They come apart.
  2. Suck the head if you want. That's where the seasoning and the juice are. If you don't, nobody will think less of you. (They will, a little.)
  3. Peel off the first ring or two of shell from the top of the tail.
  4. Pinch the very end of the tail and pull the meat out with your teeth or your fingers.
  5. Pull out the dark vein if it's there. Eat. Repeat about a hundred times.

Why Spring?
Crawfish season runs from about January into early summer, and spring is the best of it, when they're big and full and the price comes down. That's why every church, school and family in Acadiana has a boil sometime between Mardi Gras and Mother's Day, and why Lent and Easter and crawfish all go together around here.

A big family of all ages laughing and peeling crawfish along a newspaper-covered table in a backyard
One end of one table. Maw-Maw in her Easter hat, aunts and uncles and cousins everywhere. My mother Lisa took this one, standing on a chair.

The Crawfish Races
Every year the kids pick the liveliest ones out of a sack before they go in the pot, draw a line on the driveway with chalk, and race them. Crawfish don't always go the direction you want. Sometimes they turn around and come at you with their claws up, and then the race is over because everybody is running. This year's champions were the brothers Derek, 11, and Rocky, 10, who everybody calls the twins even though they aren't, and their cousin Paris, 8, who was still in her Easter dress and didn't care one bit. The winning crawfish was named Big Daddy, and he was pardoned and let go in the ditch out back. The rest of the field went in the pot.

A girl in a pink Easter dress and two boys in dress shirts crouching on a driveway, shouting at three live crawfish crawling toward a chalk line
And they're off.

After Dinner: Dominoes
When the last batch is gone and the newspaper, shells and all, has been rolled up off the tables and hauled to the can, the card table comes out under the carport. Paw-Paw and Uncle Jerome take on all comers. They slap the dominoes down hard enough to rattle the table and count by fives, and Maw-Maw keeps score because she is the only one anybody trusts. They play until it gets too dark to see the spots. This year they lost exactly one game, to Aunt Colette and me, and Paw-Paw says he let us win. He didn't.

Thank you, Paw-Paw and Maw-Maw, for another one. Same time next year.

The pictures came off a disposable camera Aunt Colette Chiasson bought at the drugstore on the way over. It got passed around the yard all afternoon, and my mother had it developed. About half the roll is somebody's thumb or the back of somebody's head. These are the good ones.

Visitors since May 1999:
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Laissez les bons temps rouler. Write me at [email protected]

Last updated Saturday, September 4, 1999