Crayfish
Saturday, September 21, 2002
Our landlord just returned from a couple days of fishing -- for crayfish. Crayfish parties are pretty big in Sweden during August. So here at the end of September it's getting a bit late in the season, but still not over yet. And our landlor asked us over to his house tonight to try it.
[If you don't know what a crayfish is, you may recognize it by another name: crawfish, crawdads, and probably others. In Swedish it is kräfta. You can find a picture here.]
We actually ordered crayfish when we were here on our survey trip back in August, but we didn't know how to eat them properly, and we didn't have anybody to teach us, so it was a bit of a frustrating experience. But tonight we were able to get some lessons.
I think the crayfish is boiled, and then it is soaked in salt water with dill weed. This makes it pretty salty.
We started with a more normal meal -- apparently this is typical, as you have to work pretty hard to eat crayfish and don't actually get a lot of meat out of them, so you have to eat something else in order to actually get full.
Normally, eating in Sweden is rather proper -- you eat everything with your fork and knife, and not with your hands. Crayfish is a different matter -- there is a lot of sucking and biting and it's generally rather messy.
Apparently there is some kind of small hat that is usually worn to crayfish parties, but we skipped that this time. We were given a small knife to eat with, and they had napkins with crayfish on them -- napkins were rather important.
You start by tearing the claws off. You suck the juices out of the claw, and then break off one piece of the claw and suck out of that part too. Then you break the remainder of the claw open and eat the meat out of there. And you do the same with the other claw.
Next you twist the tail part off from the head. You break off the bottom of the tail, and bend the sides backward to break the ribs and remove the shell from the meat. Then you have to remove a black tube along the back -- Sara says it was a vessel or something. Then you can eat the rest of the meat from the tail.
After this you suck out the bottom of the head part. Then hold it in one hand and pull the legs away from the top shell, taking the meat with the legs. If the crayfish was female, there are a bunch of eggs in this section, which you eat. (Like caviar I guess.) Then you can eat the rest of the meat that isn't black.
I think we ate 4-5 crayfish each, and our landlor had more than that. He said that on this trip he caught something like 200-300 of them.
The meat tastes pretty good once you find it. Kind of a fishy taste -- sort of like really salty crab. Probably not something we will add to our regular diet. But not bad for a couple times per year.