Crawfish, paqueing & sweet dough pies

There are across south Louisiana some religiously observed Easter week rituals that have little, if anything, to do with religion. They were birthed in the solemnity of Eastertide but they also reflect a native irreverence about gospels of any sort, be they religious, political, or social.
It’s not nearly as common as it once was, but you can still find a few adherents of the old custom of women coming together on Holy Thursday to make tartes a la bouillie – sweet dough pies filled with tomato, coconut, or blackberries – to be eaten on meatless Good Friday. Gathering to make the pies became a social occasion itself, but what usually chafed under the Roman collars was that a lot of folks neglected church on Friday to go from house to house to visit relatives and taste their pies.
Good Friday was a holiday in most south Louisiana communities because farmers believed it was bad luck to break the soil on the day – unless they were planting parsley. I never knew what exempted it, but there is an old tradition that it is best to plant parsley on Good Friday if you don’t want it to go to seed.
The day off from farm work meant families had time for a big meal together, and folks who worked as hard as they did to scrape out a living seldom neglected the opportunity. In earlier times the meal usually consisted of a big fish fry, but in more recent years so many of us have turned instead to a family crawfish boil that the days leading up to Good Friday are the busiest and most profitable in the south Louisiana crawfish business.
By the time the corn on the cob and sausage and other good stuff is mixed in with the crawfish the meal probably becomes something a little bit different from what the Church contemplated when it made Good Friday a day of abstinence from meat. It’s also a pretty good bet you won’t find anything in the catechism about the ice cold beer that invariably accompanies the steaming hot crawfish.
In old days, Holy Saturday was the day to begin preparing the big Easter Sunday dinner and to dye Easter eggs. Before we could buy them at the dime store, dyes were made from coffee, moss, and an assortment of plants, but beauty was only shell deep. What a good Cajun wanted to find on Easter Sunday was a strong egg fit for paqueing (pronounced "pocking").
In most places, paqueing was a child’s game in which I tapped the end of my boiled egg against the end of yours until one of them broke. The person with the unbroken egg won the broken egg.
But in Acadiana paqueing wasn’t just for kids. The late author and authority on things Cajun Mary Alice Fontenot once told me about grown men “who used to meet after High Mass with their eggs in their pockets, ready to fight for the championship of the paqued egg.” Most often there was more than bragging rights involved; more money changed hands in the egg breaking contest than had just been put into the collection basket.
Some men cheated – for example by sneaking in a guinea egg, which is usually tougher than a chicken egg. Some wily veterans sought out eggs from older hens that laid fewer eggs each day. Each of those eggs has more calcium in the shell, making it stronger than ones from a younger, more productive hen.
Real cheats have been known to go so far as to paint a rock to look like an egg, but, on the other end of the spectrum, practical jokers sometimes sneaked uncooked dyed eggs into your basket before making a challenge. This time, when your egg broke, you got to keep it.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.