Brown Shrimp
The shrimp we gather from local waters are of such fantastic quality that we're safe in calling them the best in the world. For years, they were the standard of all America. In most of the of the country, when people ate shrimp they were probably eating our shrimp.
I guess it's a measure of how little importance quality holds when it competes against price that imported shrimp of substantially lower goodness have all but taken over. Even in supermarkets in the New Orleans area, you really have to work to find local shrimp. And that's really crazy. We ought to raise hell about that. (I know I do.)
Not all is disaster, though. During shrimp season, restaurants have a hard time getting fish, because all the boats are out catching shrimp. Shrimp remain the most valuable single seafood commodity in the country, with Louisiana leading the league.
Three kinds of shrimp are on our seafood countdown. River shrimp, good but rare, showed up at #32. White shrimp will appear in a few days on this list. The main shrimp species that we boil, fry, and barbecue, however, is brown shrimp.
There are two seasons for brown shrimp, in the spring and the fall. During the season, trucks can be seen on roadsides all over the area selling shrimp out of ice chests. The Shrimp Lot in Westwego is the best place of all to find them, because these are the shrimpers themselves, selling the decapods they just caught.
The rest of the year is not bereft of shrimp, of course. Fortunately, of all seafood shrimp are most amenable to freezing. Even refreezing them doesn't seem to destroy them--although, of course, there's nothing like getting them when they're still moving.
Few food items inspire more culinary creativity than shrimp. You can cook shrimp just about any way you can think of, and thousands of ways haven't been invented yet. But for my money the two greatest shrimp dishes are New Orleans-style barbecue shrimp (which, of course, have no barbecue aspect) and shrimp remoulade. I can't get enough of either of these two dishes. I think a greatly underrated and little-served dish is broiled shrimp--butterflied or not, with perhaps some garlic butter but certainly a nice hit of salt and pepper. Shrimp scampi is a great pan-sauteed version of that.
On the other hand, I think fried shrimp are boring (I accept that I am in a minority in holding that view, and that it represents a major taste eccentricity). And to my palate shrimp Creole is the worst dish in the entire Creole cuisine. Again, there are many disagreements, but I don't think tomatoes and shrimp go together.
The biggest drawback to shrimp is peeling them. For most dishes, this is essential. But in some the shell is not a problem--especially at certain times of year, when the shells are very soft. For example, I almost always eat barbecue shrimp unpeeled, which is much less messy. You can go to most Japanese restaurants and order fried shrimp heads--which are exactly that--and find that they're wonderful. As are shrimp "spiders"--the complex of legs, with the meat attached at the top.
We could go on endlessly on the ways in which Louisiana brown shrimp are delectable.\
