Ian McNulty: Why don't we celebrate the Louisiana shrimp boil the way we do crawfish?

By Ian McNulty

NOLA.com

Louisiana shrimp are abundant, and we know that when they’re treated right there’s no comparison with their taste. They are integral to so many dishes that speak of Louisiana, of traditions bound to a sense of home through generations of families.

So why can’t Louisiana shrimp get any respect?

Why have prices slipped to the point that some fishing families can’t make it worthwhile to harvest them?

The flood of cheap, frozen, manifestly inferior imported shrimp is the main issue. But that shrimp doesn’t buy itself. At least part of the problem is treating seafood like an interchangeable commodity, rather than an expression of place, and taking a local resource for granted.

But then consider the crawfish; especially as we encounter it around a crawfish boil. This most humble mudbug becomes the basis for what’s practically a pageant of Louisiana pride.

What if we decided to give local shrimp the same kind of reverence?

Louisiana produces practically all of the country’s domestic crawfish harvest. There’s plenty of foreign-produced crawfish in the market, but this is generally tail meat packaged and frozen and used in recipes.

The live crawfish that goes into crawfish boils comes to us through the farms and wild harvest areas of Louisiana, and when the season that is just now gearing up hits its perennial springtime stride it comes in torrents.

Crawfish have been on my mind lately because I’ve been craving them, because it’s been many months since the last boil I bellied up to, and because I know I’ll start seeing them at parade parties this Carnival season. I know passionate backyard boilers who are cracking their knuckles, ready to get back at it.

The limited seasonality of crawfish contributes to their appeal. So do the parameters of that season. It coincides with the best weather we get in Louisiana, when just being outside feels like a blessing, and when the framework of a boil works like social magic, gathering people not just to eat, but to be together around the trappings of the ritual.

We will look forward to the first crawfish of the season and very often mark their last. Tourists seek out boiled crawfish like it was the reason for their trip, and these are worthy trips indeed.

Local shrimp can stoke the same kind of excitement and culinary gusto if we see it for what it really is – a valuable but vulnerable resource and piece of the food culture.

Everywhere, but for how long?

Gulf shrimp, with varying seasons for type and their areas of harvest, can be in season year-round. This shouldn’t diminish our appreciation for it. We don’t have to muster much civic duty to get behind this. We just have to look after our own standards of taste.

Shrimp may seem to be available everywhere, all the time. Yet local shrimp has become the exception to the rule in the American marketplace.

The National Fisheries Institute, a trade group, reports that roughly 90% of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. are imported, and the majority are farm-raised. The group lists China, Thailand, Vietnam, Brazil and Ecuador as leading suppliers of shrimp.

The suppliers of the best shrimp you’ll ever eat are right down the road in Louisiana, relatively speaking. They are people working local waterways in small scale operations, often family-run. They are up against more headwinds.

According to recent reporting from my colleague Tristan Baurick, production of oysters and shrimp in Louisiana is likely to be slashed in the future as a consequence of the state’s largest coastal land-building program, the $2.5 billion Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion in the Barataria Basin (the same fisheries would be devastated by land loss with the diversion, the report notes, though on a different timeline).

Consider this to be a plea to better look after and elevate what we still have.

As with crawfish, the peak of the Louisiana shrimp experience is the boil. For this, you want larger shrimp. Obviously they will be shell on. There is no substitute for local shrimp in this case, and the boil experience shows them in all their glory, folding in the social aspect that it gets to the best of Louisiana food.

Cooking shrimp takes nuance. It’s easy to overcook. You want the right texture to the tail and also the shell, so that it slips off easily. Mastering it should be a mark of pride.

Matters of seasoning, sides and beverage pairings, such a compulsion for crawfish hounds, apply just as much to the craft and pursuit of boiled shrimp.

When you are up to your elbows in this ritual —  so tied to the landscape and lifestyle  that make Louisiana so rewarding, despite its many challenges — you don’t need to make much of a case about provenance and local sourcing and supporting your neighbors. You’re already doing it. You just need to keep digging in.