By this time most years, crawfish for boiling purposes have begun to appear in the seafood markets. The season runs roughly from Thanksgiving to the Fourth of July, which would seem to indicate that they're coming in right now. In fact, the mudbugs haven't turned up in any consistent way. And when they are available, the price is running around six dollars a pound--an extraordinarily high point for live crawfish. The standard wisdom on crawfish as that the cheaper they are, the better they are. These must be horrible.
The cause is obvious: the relentlessly cold weather, punctuated not by warm periods but by ridiculous freezing lows. Like you and me, crawfish don't like getting up on a cold morning, and stay down in their holes.
The strange thing is that crabs--which are strictly wam-weather actors--heve never really stopped being available this year. Several purveyors and buyers say that they're almost all females right now--for what reason, nobody knows.
To quote Commander's Palace's longtime food buyer Jill Rauch: "Mother Nature knows what she's doing. Don't try to force the season start. It will start when it starts."
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