The question in my mind when I arrived at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival was whether to enter the official crawfish-eating contest or content myself with acts of free-lance gluttony. The idea of entering the contest came from Peter Wolf, an old friend of mine who grew up in New Orleans and returned to Louisiana from New York for the festival this year, having concocted some sort of business conference in Houston to serve as an excuse for flying in that direction. Peter was brought up to appreciate what Louisiana has to offer. His father was the man who put the state government in perspective for me a dozen years ago, just after I had returned from watching the Legislature in Baton Rouge stage some particularly bizarre entertainments in anticipation of the imminent desegregation of the New Orleans schools. “What you have to remember about Baton Rouge,” he said, “is that it’s not southern United States, it’s northern Costa Rica.” Peter’s sister, Gail, who still lives in New Orleans, has been able to participate in a lot of serious crawfish eating in the Cajun area of southern Louisiana since she decided that it was the most convenient place to visit with friends who live in Houston—the spot of precise equidistance being, as far as I can interpret Gail’s calculation, an area bounded by the Vermilion restaurant, the L. & L. Seafood Market (suppliers of fresh crawfish), and a race track called Evangeline Downs. Despite being isolated in New Orleans, miles away from the Atchafalaya Basin—a swampy wilderness that is to crawfish what the Serengeti is to lions—Gail is so accustomed to crawfish eating that the word “crawfish” is understood rather than expressed in her discussion of restaurants. “They have a great étouffée,” she may say of a place, or “They don’t serve boiled there.”
Peter had simply assumed we would enter the eating contest. Not entering, he told me while we were safe in New York, would be like going to the festival at Pamplona and not running with the bulls. My hesitation was based on practical considerations. The contest is conducted with boiled crawfish, and if I had to pick my sport I would say étouffée or bisque rather than boiled. (Crawfish étouffée means smothered crawfish, and is otherwise indescribable; crawfish bisque is indescribable.) Also, I had learned in advance of the festival that, whatever a contestant’s capacity, the amount of crawfish he can eat is governed by the amount of crawfish he can peel. (Only the tail of a crawfish is eaten, although people who are not under the pressures of official competition sometimes take the time to mine some fat from the rest of the shell with their index fingers.) Through geographical circumstances over which I have no control, I have little opportunity to keep in practice at peeling crawfish. There are crawfish (or crayfish, or crawdads) all over the country, but outside of Louisiana they are all but ignored—lumps of clay lacking a sculptor. A New York crawfish craver who couldn’t make it to the Atchafalaya Basin would have to settle for Paris, where crawfish are called écrevisses, except by people from Louisiana, who always call them inferior. The world record at crawfish eating—the record, at least, according to Breaux Bridge, which is, by resolution of the Louisiana Legislature, the Crawfish Capital of the World—was set by a local man named Andrew Thevenet, who at one Crawfish Festival ate the tails of thirty-three pounds of crawfish in two hours. My doubts about being able to peel that much crawfish in two hours—not to speak of eating it—were increased by some stories I heard about tricks contestants have used in the past. One man was said to have perfected a method of peeling a crawfish with one hand and popping it into his mouth—a process that was described as “inhaling crawfish”—while reaching for the next crawfish with his other hand. Somebody told me that one contestant had spent the evening before the contest “lining his stomach with red beans and rice”—although that sounds to me at least contradictory and maybe suicidal. A pharmacy student who triumphed at the Crawfish Festival two years ago (festivals are held only every other year) drank orange juice with his crawfish instead of the traditional beer, and Gail had heard that the orange juice was laced with exotic chemicals (known only to people like pharmacy students) that somehow provided the same service for crawfish in the stomach that an electric trash-compacter provides for trash. In fairness, I should add that a former contestant from Lafayette told me the pharmacy student had used no tricks at all and was “just a hungry boy.”
A lot of people around Breaux Bridge were happy to discuss the question of whether or not Peter and I should enter the crawfish-eating contest. They like to talk about crawfish in general. Once the subject came up, they were likely to spend some time talking about an evening they once spent with some particularly tasty boiled crawfish, or a dish they once had that was somewhere between an étouffée and a stew, or a woman in town who used to make crawfish beignets. (I don’t mean we talked about nothing other than eating crawfish. I spent a lot of time, for instance, discussing a restaurant in Opelousas named Dee Dee that specializes in oyster gumbo, roast duck, and a marvel called dirty rice.) The Cajun parishes of Louisiana constitute just about the only section of the United States in which good food is taken as the norm in any kitchen; I once asked a serious New Orleans eater who was familiar with the area where I should eat while staying in Iberia Parish, and he said, “Anywhere.” (Taking his advice, my wife and I had lunch one day in the first tacky-looking bar we came to in a small town not far from New Iberia. There were two ketchup bottles on the table. One held ketchup; the other one contained the best rémoulade sauce I have ever tasted. I had the blue-plate special, which happened that day to be shrimp sauce piquante. My wife ordered boiled crawfish, and was brought a tray holding what we estimated to be about a hundred of them. We stayed the afternoon.) A few days before the festival, I asked a local citizen named Woody Marshall—who can list among many accomplishments the invention of crawfish racing as we know it today—whether or not Peter and I could expect to face Andrew Thevenet, the world-record holder, if we entered the eating contest. Marshall said that Thevenet, a man of about seventy, had been so ill that serious eating was over for him. When I expressed my sympathy, Marshall told me about having recently heard Thevenet describe a lifetime of eating—the fresh oyster, the well-aged venison, the crawfish prepared in ways a crawfish fancier dreams about. “You know what he told me?” Marshall said. “He told me, ‘There have been kings who didn’t eat as well as I did.’ ”
What surprises the devout eater about the current effort to preserve the Cajun atmosphere of southwestern Louisiana is its concentration on the French language as the basis of Cajun culture. Even with the new emphasis on teaching French in primary school and exhorting Cajuns to speak it to their children at home, the language is likely to disappear from Louisiana eventually through lack of use. (The language preservationists have to contend not only with television and Anglo newcomers but with the stigma French has always represented for Cajuns—an echo of all the bad jokes about ignorant swamp-dwellers named Boudreaux who speak with comical accents.) Most of the people in Breaux Bridge who grew up before the war grew up speaking French—including Woody Marshall, despite his Anglo name—but the young people rarely speak it now. When Marshall told me about Andrew Thevenet’s royal history of eating, it occurred to me that those in charge of what people in Louisiana sometimes call the French Renaissance might not be concentrating on the strongest element of the culture. Marshall and I were having lunch at the time—a splendid chicken étouffée and some French bread for me—at a tiny Breaux Bridge restaurant called Schwet’s. (It was meant to be called Chouette—a pet name that means “screech owl” in French—but Marshall, who serves as the town sign painter, was, like most Cajuns of his age, raised speaking French rather than spelling it.) It occurred to me that the posters of the kind the state commission for the French Renaissance furnished for the window of Schwet’s should not say “Parlez français avec vos enfants à la maison” or “Aidez vos enfants à parler le français” but “Transmettez vos recettes à vos enfants”—“Hand down your recipes to your children.”
I am a confirmed festival and fair attender. I routinely drive out of my way for the most pedestrian county fair. If I happened to be in the right part of the state at the appropriate time, I know I would attend, say, the North Louisiana Cotton Festival and Fair at Bastrop, or even the Louisiana Brimstone Fiesta at Sulphur—although, as far as I know, neither of the products celebrated in those places is edible. These days, of course, the festive atmosphere is always dampened a bit by the inevitable discussion about whether the festival I am enjoying is likely to be the last of its kind to be held. The impending demise is always blamed on young people from outside—young people who seem to travel from one event to another, behaving more or less the way a horde of dropped-out fraternity boys might be expected to behave at their first rock festival. The cultural forces that produced this band of celebrants have lately included a merchandising milestone—the development of what are sometimes called “soda-pop wines.” Although a lot of citizens in places like Breaux Bridge would have been hard put a few years ago to find anything good to say about a lot of mindless young people roaming the streets carrying beer cans, they now realize that beer is less inebriating than wine and that a gutter full of beer cans is not nearly as dangerous as a gutter full of broken glass. From what I was told by the organizers of the Crawfish Festival—who banned drinking from glass containers this year—I am justified in holding the idea man who developed soda-pop wines personally responsible for the fact that the Cochon de Lait Festival in Mansura, Louisiana, ended before I had a chance to sample the cochon. May the next belt-tightening in the wine industry (or the advertising industry, if that is where he’s harbored) find him in an expendable position.
In Louisiana, where some mildly legitimate cultural basis can actually be found for some of the festivals, there is a kind of pattern that transforms an informal local celebration into one of the stops along the route from Fort Lauderdale. The festival becomes primarily a business proposition, great efforts are made to attract the visitors who are later deplored, the local citizens lose interest or retreat to those events that are unaffected by outsiders (events usually having to do with naming queens, or at least princesses), there is a lot of talk about the outside kids “taking over,” and then the discussion turns to whether or not having a festival is worth the trouble after all. The transformation of the New Orleans Mardi Gras took more than a century, but Breaux Bridge seems to have telescoped the whole process into a dozen years. The Crawfish Festival grew out of the town’s centennial, in 1959, and everyone agrees that the first few festivals were joyous occasions—townspeople costumed in old-fashioned Acadian dress, everyone dancing the fais-dodo in the streets, jollity at the crawfish races in the afternoon and at the local dance hall at night. The remarkable increase in fame and attendance seemed to be a blessing at first, except to motorists trying to get to Breaux Bridge from Lafayette, the nearest city with a motel. (Even becoming hopelessly stuck on the road could be seen as joyous: Thelma’s, a restaurant between Lafayette and Breaux Bridge, is a sort of crawfish festival in itself.) Merchants in Breaux Bridge welcomed the opportunity to remove the glass from their storefronts and peddle as much beer or boiled crawfish as they could stock. In the last dozen years, the area has developed a sort of crawfish industry that is enhanced by the festival publicity—peeling plants to service the restaurants, rice farmers “growing” crawfish in ponds to supplement the supply known as “wild” crawfish, even a modern plant whose owners believe that they have a freezing method that will make it possible for people to go into restaurants in St. Louis or Dallas and eat crawfish meat that actually tastes like crawfish meat rather than like balsa wood.
But the popularity of the festival with outsiders—particularly young outsiders—made it less popular with a lot of Breaux Bridge citizens. A quiet town on the Bayou Teche, Breaux Bridge has only five thousand people, a remarkable number of them named Broussard or Guidry or Hebert. In the last couple of festivals, lack of civic interest has meant dispensing with the parade of boats down the Teche and, alas, with the cooking bee. Some Breaux Bridge citizens, greatly offended by the behavior of some visitors, have said that they would just as soon not have the festival at all—except, of course, for the ceremony and tableau necessary for the coronation of the Crawfish Queen, an event that is carried on even in off-years, when no tourists are around. The Crawfish Festival association has insisted that everyone will be happy with the festival if only it can be controlled and can eventually acquire the reputation of a “family event.” It is hardly appropriate, of course, for organizers of a festival to preach sobriety. Woody Marshall, who often uses the same flourishes in speech that are necessary in sign painting, explained it to me as a matter of moderation. “We would appeal to the beautiful youths to practice a degree of restraint so that they are not wantonly drunk, if you know what I mean,” he told me a couple of days before the festival. “If the youths persist in conducting themselves in such manner as they have conducted themselves, they will destroy the very festivals they like. But, as we say here, ‘Laissez le bon temps rouler’—‘Let the good times roll.’ ”
This year’s festival was to be an experiment in control—an attempt to hold the main events of the festival in a sort of pasture a mile or so from the business district. The conditions of the experiment were not perfect, since a few of the bars had refused to move their operations to the pasture, but the officers of the festival association believed that the results in Breaux Bridge might show the future for Louisiana festivals. I told them I would be happy to attend the festival wherever they held it. I had not been offended by the criticism of outsiders. My wife would be at the festival, so, in a way, we were one of the families attending a family event. Also, in all of the discussion about excesses—about beer cans being thrown and immoral acts being committed in the churchyard and people walking half naked in the street—nobody had said a word about gluttony.
The day before the festival weekend began, a hard rain turned the pasture into a mudhole. The food booths and the festival events had to be moved back into the city. I tried to show some sympathy for the financial burden the sudden move had put on the festival association, but I have to admit to being pleased that the festival would take place where it had always taken place. Somehow, a festival that is known for inspiring dancing in the streets wouldn’t seem quite the same if it inspired dancing in a pasture. The rain seemed to have cut down the crowd, and the festival association—staggered by the move and by the spoilage of thousands of pounds of boiled crawfish it had intended to sell—seemed to forget about the issue of raucous behavior. By the time the festival started, the sun was out. Woody Marshall, looking spectacular in a bowler and a red vest and sleeve garters, stood next to the crawfish track he invented (which is shaped like a target, with the starting gate in the bull’s-eye—compensating, with brilliant simplicity, for the notorious reluctance of a crawfish to walk in the direction anyone expects it to walk) and formally entered the names of this year’s entries in the official logbook he made a few years ago by folding over several old “Allen Ellender for Senator” posters. At the baby contest, which drew a hundred entries, a king or queen and two alternates were named in each category, and the winners were awarded plaques that had silver-plated models of babies lying in the traditional bear-rug pose.
Naturally, the predictable merchandising efforts were visible—crawfish T-shirts, crawfish beer mugs, crawfish aprons—but Breaux Bridge could shine through almost any amount of commercialism as in fact the Crawfish Capital of the World. Breaux Bridge people are incapable of turning out the kind of cardboard junk food usually peddled to tourists even when they try. Woody Marshall, for instance, invented something called a crawfish dog—he is, as I have said, a man of many accomplishments—and although that may sound pretty awful, it happens to be delicious, except for the hot-dog bun. (The recipe in the official program says, “Make roux with shortening and flour, cook until light brown, sauté onions, add crawfish and fat and water and seasoning. Cook 20 minutes and serve on an open-face hot-dog bun.” If someone could figure out how to make hot dogs taste like crawfish dogs, he could bring back baseball.) The same booth that served beer and ordinary hot dogs sold, for fifty cents, something called a crawfish pattie, which is also known as crawfish pie, and which if served in some expense-account French restaurant in New York would keep that restaurant jammed on rainy recession Tuesday evenings. (“Six dollars is, of course, a lot to ask for an appetizer,” the review would say, “but the exquisite Écrevisses à la Teche at the Cajun d’Or happen to be worth every penny of it.”)
A crawfish pattie is what I happened to be eating when the time for the crawfish-eating contest approached. I was also drinking a glass (nonbreakable plastic) of non-soda-pop wine and sitting under an oak tree and listening to some fine music played by Celbert Cormier and the Musical Kings (a violin, an accordion, two electric guitars, and a drum) and discussing the logistics involved in timing our departure the next day in a way that would put us at a restaurant called the Yellow Bowl in Jeanerette around mealtime. Peter Wolf, who was doing all of those things himself, was saying that we had waited too late to register and would be unable to participate, since only ten contestants are allowed. (Otherwise, everyone would be up there gobbling up the free crawfish.) I happened to know that only nine people had registered, but I also knew that they included such formidable eaters as the oyster-eating champion of Louisiana, who had downed fifteen and a half dozen oysters in an hour at the Oyster Festival in Galliano—a festival that was somehow kept secret from me for years. (The oyster champion, a specialist away from his specialty, turned out to be the first to drop out. “I’m still hungry,” he said, “but these things don’t taste right.”) I also knew that we had been invited to dinner that evening at the home of Mrs. Harris Champagne, who, according to experts in Breaux Bridge, was the first person to serve crawfish étouffée in a restaurant, and I realized that sitting down to a plate of her legendary étouffée when already stuffed with boiled crawfish would be an act of irresponsibility. It had also occurred to me that if I did become full before approaching Mrs. Champagne’s table, I would prefer to become full of crawfish patties. Boiled, after all, is not my sport. I told Peter it was a shame we hadn’t registered in time. ♦
.