Here in Space City, fancy steak houses sit comfortably beside soul food canteens and Japanese soba dens.
Grocery stores carry Chinese snacks, Indian spices, and Mexican produce.
It’s a colorful, sprawling culinary landscape.
Credit: Cedric Angeles
It’s my aunt, our family’s designated crawfish master, obsessing over the perfect amount of spice.
It’s loud conversations, sticky hands, burning lips, and heaps of discarded shells.
About Crawfish
Crawfishare known as mudbugs for a reason.
Author and family.
They live in freshwater lakes, swamps, and rivers.
They have a unique flavor thats not like lobster or crab.
The season runs from November to July, but that can depend on the weather.
Aunt prepping her recipes.
Warm, wet winters produce a better season.
Count on them for spring, often around Easter, through early summer.
For a backyard boil, plan on ordering a few pounds per person.
Eating them takes time, but it’s worth the effort.
There was some garlic, a little orange.
Around that time, your other aunt came up with the recipe we use today."
Like in Cajun or Lowcountry versions, the crawfish starts off boiled in a spice blend.
One thing that is different every time around?
“They were blown away.
Auntie is known for her perfectly seasoned Vietnamese.
It’s always exciting to introduce people to this recipe we have fallen in love with.
Now, when summer rolls around, everyone here knows that means crawfish.
It has itsown season.”
For Vietnamese people, foodand even more importantly, entertainingis perhaps the most salient expression of love.
“My mom is a mad scientist.
She loves to try new things,” says my cousin.
“That crawfish is basically perfect already, but she’s always thinking about how to make it better.
That’s where you see how much she loves everyone in the family.”
Of course, there’s also some friendly inter-family competition.
One of my fondest memories was a contest between my father’s sister and my mother’s brother.
“We did a very careful blind tasting,” said the aunt.
Our customers here are white, black, Latinoeveryone is so open-minded."
For dessert, we had blueberry pie.
The guests were as varied as the food, yet nothing and no one felt out of place.
What could look more like Texas, more like America, than that?
