Friday night in New Orleans: Eating crawfish, sipping beer, telling lies

New Orleans residents lining up on Friday night to buy crawfish from a spicy boil at Rouses Supermarket on North Carrollton Avenue. Earlier, a friend bought more than 10 pounds to feed three for a reduced price of $2.29 a pound.

By VICTOR E. SASSON

EDITOR

NEW ORLEANS -- We're here for a four-day music festival, but can't ignore the incredible food in what is certainly the most distinctive city in the United States.

On Friday evening, while we were at the French Quarter Festival listening to Monk Boudreaux and the Golden Eagles, a friend rushed over to Rouses Supermarket before the boiled crawfish ran out.

An hour or so later we took the streetcar and met him there to pick up fixins -- a store-made Seafood Gumbo, potato salad with eggs and a six-pack of Abita Amber Beer.

Back in our hotel room, our friend dumped the crawfish into a tray in the center of a kitchenette table, and I divided the soup among three bowls and opened bottles of beer.

Then, in an eating ritual repeated hundreds, if not thousands, of times in New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana, we peeled crawfish tails, ate them, sucked the juice out of the bodies and sipped beer.

Crawfish look exactly like miniature lobsters, as if they crawled out of the mud in prehistoric times.

As we ate and drank, we caught up with our friend, a musician whom we haven't seen since 2009.

Or, as he put it, "Eating crawfish, sipping beer and telling lies."

'We're too small, so please throw us back'

Image via Wikipedia

As I was plowing my way through 25 or 30 crayfish Friday night at Ikea in Parmaus, I was struck by how, at three to four inches long, they looked just like miniature lobsters. Maybe they refused to grow up, thinking they would be hard to catch or get thrown back. No such luck.

The crayfish party is an end-of-summer ritual in Sweden, where they are washed down with plenty of beer. In the Paramus home-furnishing store, a pamphlet on the dining tables had beer-drinking songs, but the $9.99 all-you-can-eat admission ticket included soft drinks, not beer; Swedish meatballs and mashed potatoes, cheese and crackers, and desserts ($2.49 for kids).

Crayfish, also called crawfish, are served hot in New Orleans after cooking and turning red in a spicy, lip-smacking boil. The Swedes boil them and serve them cold -- on ice. Pretty much the only part you eat is the tail, and sucking on the cold bodies returns little flavor. This may explain why there were empty tables.

After two plates of crayfish, I joined the cafeteria line for the free meatballs and mashed potatoes (hold the cream sauce), but I didn't like the texture of the meatballs and started wondering where the meat came from. So I finished my meal with those delicious crayfish tails.