A Crawfish Cook Calamity

A Crawfish Cook Calamity, Piper Cub, deep-South cuisine, jaybird, A gale of laughter replaced dumbstruck silence when Jaybird quipped, “Well, famed flyboy, at least you didn’t knock over the cooking pot.

That warm, spring Mississippi Delta Saturday was ideal for doing anything outdoors, but the calamitous way it turned out was far from ideal. Nobody outperformed my lifelong best friend and mentor Jaybird in preparing delicious, deep-South cuisine, especially crawfish. When my friends and I asked the old black man to boil several hundred pounds of them, he said, “Boys, that will be a great way to spend this glorious day. Y’all load up my big cooking pot; let’s enjoy some country-style cutting up.”