INTRODUCTION

Sometime, shortly after the turn of the 20th century, crawfish etouffee was concocted in Breaux Bridge’s Hebert Hotel by Mrs. Charles Hebert and her two daughters, Yolie and Marie, by cooking crawfish tails in a lidded pot with crawfish fat, smothered down with onions and pepper. The Heberts passed on the recipe to their friend Aline Guidry Champagne, who opened the Rendez-Vous Cafe in Breaux Bridge in 1947 and introduced the dish to her customers. It is rumored that a french speaking patron asked Mrs Champagne what she was cooking and she responded by saying, in French, that she was “smothering crawfish”.

In the early 1930’s, this rich cajun delicacy reached it’s height of popularity in New Orleans, at the famed Galatoire’s Restaurant, when waiter Nelson Marcotte cooked up a pot of the buttery shellfish and rice dish for Galatoire’s proprietor David Gooch.

Surely, if you speak with a cross section of Cajun Cooks, each would dictate her or his own own particular recipe, but the basic ingredients of etouffee are onions, butter and of course, crawfish.

Historical side note: crawfish were not regularly consumed in the Crescent City in the late 19th century. Slaves and their descendants would boil them in lemon, salt and cayenne and use them as a protein source, on top of rice, according to Dickie Breaux, owner of Cafe des Amis in Breaux Bridge.