Calvin Trillin article on Breaux Bridge

The New Yorker's food issue was this week, and they evidently re-ran the Trillin piece from 1972. I thought some of you might enjoy it:

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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.”

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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.

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LINK

Bonus Trillin article on Mosca's from just before old man Mosca died in 2011.

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