Shaggy is a pro crawfish boiler, so somewhat of a master of the art of cooking up a vast (and I mean seriously vast) batch of crawfish in a huge pot with corn on the cob, mushrooms, potatoes and an incredible number of different spices. The food is fished out of the massive pot with a net and served directly onto the table where everyone tucks in with a gusto pretty much unseen in the UK. There is an art to eating crawfish which seems to yield a ridiculously small amount of crawfish meat - you pull the tail off the body and pretty much the whole body is discarded after sucking the 'juice' out of it, which is a delicate operation akin to trying to get the sherbert out of a flying saucer because if you suck too hard the spicy mix of crawfish innards and hot boil mixture shoots straight in to the back of your throat causing you to choke. The tail is then peeled leaving a piece of crawfish roughly the size of a small prawn, which is squeezed out of the hard tail shell and eaten.
I had eaten some pre-peeled crawfish while we've been here and tried to encourage the Boy Wonder to try some on the grounds that apart from his distaste at their appearance he would probably quite like the taste and wouldn't be put off by the texture, yet he had steadfastly refused to even countenance the idea. However, 20 minutes of badgering from Sam and a couple of demonstration runs, he was all over the mud bugs, eating not just one but several.
I think part of the appeal is the sociable element that comes with a crawfish boil - because you spend most of your time peeling the things, there's plenty of time to chat whilst you do it, and because you need to eat quite a lot (one tiny woman we met said she could easily eat five pounds), you end up sitting at the table together for quite a while, with people rotating in and out, mixing up the combinations and generally making for a very convivial atmosphere. You also get covered in crawfish boil mixture anywhere from the fingers to the elbows which breaks down some of the boundaries of what is normally considered proper eating etiquette and requires you to make friends with anyone who hasn't yet eaten or has washed their hands if you need anything passed or touched without wanting to get it covered, which is a handy conversation starter
All in all, the appeal of a crawfish boil goes well beyond the pleasure of actually eating the crawfish themselves, which even the locals admit is a high maintenance chore clearly originated by people with way more persistence than is currently necessary in procuring food - we're hoping that we will be able to find some kind of equivalent back home which will serve as a suitable substitute, but so far the only thing that I can come up with that even comes close is shelling peas, which I would enjoy, but I suspect would be a bit of a flop amongst our friends.
