I went to a little gathering of folks last week, and the main course was crawfish.

Let me tell you, the first guy who ate a crawfish must have been pretty dern hungry, that’s for sure.

They’re ugly, they’re hard to peel, and after all the work of peeling ‘em you only get one little bitty bite.  They’re also messy, and as if that weren’t enough, they’re bottom dwellers.

You know what I mean … they live in the mud and stuff.  Heck, some people even call them “mud bugs”.  Think about that … if someone offered you a tidbit of “dirty slugs”, would you even think about it?

When I was a little girl, all us neighborhood kids would go down to the nearest creek and catch them.  We called them crawdaddies back then, and nobody ever considered eating them.  They weren’t served in restaurants, either.

But I guess that was before the Cajuns got ‘hold of them, because Cajuns can make just about anything taste good.  The guy who cooked them was named ‘Ceaux (pronounced “so”), he was Cajun, and they were yummy.  And so eat them I did … a lot of them. 

At first I was an obvious rookie, struggling with every one, slicing a few fingers in the process.  I got it down to a five step process:  break, pull, peel, squeeze, eat.  But I was starving.  At this rate, I’d be fainting from malnutrition any minute now.

‘Ceaux came and stood next to me and in the time I peeled one of the little suckers, he had peeled five.  I knew a professional was in my midst, so I asked for some pointers.

Well, he taught me I was leaving out a very important “push” and after that a “twist”.  Then you follow that with the “squeeze” and “eat”.  It was much faster.  I wasn’t going to starve after all.

Some of the little buggers had this nasty brown stuff running down their backs.  Before I would eat one, I was carefully wiping each one as clean as you can with hands covered in crawfish juice.

Well, along came ‘Ceaux again and explained that this stuff was actually the fat from the crawfish and it was great to eat.  I looked at him, then down at the brown stuff again.  It didn’t look good to eat.  As a matter of fact, it looked a whole lot like baby you-know-what. No matter what he said, I couldn’t put it in my mouth. 

(We won’t go into the sucking of heads that some of the more experienced crawfish-eaters at the table were doing.  It made crawfish fat look pretty good.)

But I’ve come a long way.  From the little girl who never would have eaten a crawdaddy to a woman who knows how to peel her own. 

And they were ‘CEAUX good!