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Coot Stew
To stew coot, place the bird in a kettle of water with red building brick free of mortar and blemishes. Parboil the coot and the brick together for three hours. Pour off the water, refill the kettle, and again parboil for three hours. For the third time throw off the water, for the last time add fresh water, and let the coot and the brick simmer together overnight. In the morning throw away the coot and eat the brick.
From Kenneth Roberts's Trending into Maine.
Crawfish: A friend in Des Moines wrote recently: "Every Iowa creek abounds in small crawfish, and all Iowa urchins enjoy fishing for the chubs and suckers that may be caught in these creeks. When we played hooky from school and went fishing we often caught a mess of crawfish and cooked them for our lunch. "The head, body, and legs of the crawfish are removed, the tails being all that are eaten. Boiled in water, then peeled and the flesh seasoned with a little salt, they are fully as delicious as shrimps. "After boiling they may be fried in butter, made into a salad with mayonnaise, used for a cocktail with Worcestershire sauce, tomato catsup, lemon juice, and a drop of Tabasco, or substituted for shrimps in any recipe."
The coot entry is a tall tale, not a method — the punchline is that a coot is not worth eating. The usable cooking directions on this page are the crawfish notes, and they hold up well.
- The brick is the jokeThree rounds of parboiling plus an overnight simmer is a stock gag about tough, fishy waterfowl, ending with the instruction to discard the bird. Nothing in the coot passage is meant to be followed.
- Coot, if you do cook oneAmerican coot is dark, strong-flavoured meat that responds to being skinned, breasted out, and either braised or ground rather than boiled for hours. It is a legal game bird in the United States under migratory bird seasons and bag limits, so it requires a hunting licence.
- Buy or catch crawfish liveCook them alive or straight from the killing boil; discard any that are limp or dead before cooking, since the flesh spoils fast. Rinse in several changes of cold water to shed creek silt.
- Boiling timeWhole crawfish need only 3 to 5 minutes in hard-boiling salted water once they turn red, then a rest off the heat to absorb seasoning. Longer boiling toughens the tail meat, which is the only part the recipe keeps.
- "A mess" and yieldWhole crawfish give roughly 15 percent of their weight in peeled tail meat. Reckon on 3 pounds live per person for a picking meal, or about 3 1/2 pounds to produce a half pound of tails for a salad or cocktail.
- Season the water, not just the meatBoiling plain and salting the meat afterwards is a spare treatment. Salt the water heavily, and add lemon, cayenne, bay or a commercial crab boil if the tails are going into a cocktail or salad.
- Substituting for shrimpCrawfish tails are sweeter and firmer than shrimp of the same size and are already cooked once they are peeled. Add them at the very end of any recipe that calls for raw shrimp.
- Where you may gather themRules on taking crawfish from public water vary by state, and several states restrict transporting live crawfish because of invasive species. Check local regulations before collecting from a creek.
Coot has a long reputation as the bird nobody wants: it is a rail rather than a duck, it feeds on pond vegetation and small animals, and its dark flesh carries the muddy flavour of its habitat. The brick story attached to it here is a piece of camp humour that has been told of other rank-tasting birds as well, and it was picked up by the Maine novelist Kenneth Roberts in Trending into Maine (1938). The crawfish note beside it is more earnest and more typical of outdoor cookery writing of the period, which took pains to tell readers that ordinary creek animals were worth eating. Freshwater crawfish seem to have been treated more as bait or boys' amusement than as food across much of the Midwest, and were most prized in Louisiana; the correspondent's insistence that they are "fully as delicious as shrimps" was an argument that still had to be made outside the Gulf South.