If you visit Sweden in August there is a real risk you will encounter a crayfish party. Grown adults in conical paper hats and plastic bibs, sitting outdoors in the dark, sucking loudly on small red creatures by lantern light and periodically bursting into short, aggressive songs about liquor. Then they drink the liquor. Then they sing again. It is not a cult. It only looks like one.
I grew up with this. In Dalsland, where I come from, a small province of forest and lakes in western Sweden, just west of Lake Vänern, we fished our own crayfish, and they were the real thing: flodkräftor, the noble crayfish, native to Swedish lakes since forever.
As a boy I went along to bait the traps with mört, small roach we had caught with a simple rod and float earlier in the day, and then out again to lift them. Like many children, I ate only the claws.
My mother and father held big crayfish parties every August. The crayfish were boiled at home in the kitchen, with krondill, the flowering crowns of the dill plant, harvested as the flowers fade and the seed heads begin to form, not the soft green dill you put on salmon. This distinction is not negotiable.
Then the buckets were carried down to the root cellar to rest overnight. One night, said everyone. Two, said my father, always.
The August timing exists because of a ban. In the late 1800s Sweden began restricting crayfish fishing to protect the stocks, and for decades the season opened at five o’clock on 7 August. In 1982 the premiere moved to the first Wednesday in August. The national rule disappeared in 1994. Nobody told the Swedes. The whole nation still descends on crayfish in the same month, as if fired from a starting pistol.
The crayfish’s finest hour came in 1922, when Sweden held a referendum on total alcohol prohibition and the artist Albert Engström painted a poster for the no side: a crayfish, and the slogan “Kräftor kräva dessa drycker”. Crayfish demand these drinks. Sweden voted no, but it was close. It remains possibly the only national referendum in history swung by a shellfish.
Albert Engström’s famous 1922 referendum poster.
But the crayfish Engström painted, the one I fished as a child, is nearly gone. The crayfish plague reached Sweden in 1907 and devastated noble crayfish populations across the country. The fix, in the 1960s, was to import the signal crayfish from North America.
Here the villain enters.
The signal crayfish looks almost the same, tastes roughly the same, and carries the plague but rarely dies from it. Sweden did not know this when the species was introduced. It seemed like an excellent idea at the time.
Once established, the disease could travel not only with crayfish but with water, traps, boots and boats. Even a canoe moved from one lake to another could carry the spores. The lakes had become Trojan horses.
Today the noble crayfish is critically endangered, while its American replacement dominates the Swedish catch.
The economics follow. What we fish out of a Dalsland lake for free now sells at around 1,000 kronor a kilo at a good fishmonger, and the grading has quietly inflated along the way: the crayfish that were once normal-sized are now sold as jumbo, and what is sold as normal would once have been thrown back, with an apology.
Shrinkflation with claws.
At those prices the country imports, and has done for as long as I can remember. Frozen crayfish from Turkey began appearing in Sweden in the 1960s. American crayfish followed, and later China became one of the major suppliers.
Nothing says Swedish tradition quite like a crayfish that has crossed a continent to get there. More than half of what lands on Swedish tables has travelled further than the guests.
And it lands in quantity. A widely cited Swedish estimate puts August consumption at around five million kilos, roughly half a kilo for every man, woman and child. Sweden has even claimed the world record per capita. In absolute numbers, China leaves everyone behind.
The more interesting comparison is cultural. Sweden and Louisiana are two places where crayfish become an event: one boils with Cajun spices and eats them hot, the other with krondill, cold, and a songbook.
Nowhere is the ritual more public than in Malmö, where a giant crayfish party on Stortorget has opened Malmöfestivalen since 1985. People claim their tables absurdly early.
This year, the first arrived at 6.40 in the morning for a crayfish party starting at 5.05 that afternoon. Everyone brings their own crayfish these days, and the record year of 1994 saw 91,500 eaten on one square.
Should you be invited: the hat is not optional, the bib is not optional, and the shell-sucking is expected. Doing it quietly is considered suspicious.
There will probably be Västerbottensostpaj too, a rich cheese tart, the traditional rescue for anyone who is not entirely convinced by crayfish. Or, in my case as a child, anyone still eating only the claws and the occasional tail.
Beer keeps things moving. Snaps arrives with the songs.
A crayfish is a great deal of work for a modest amount of meat, which is precisely the point. A food this slow forces a party to last.
And somewhere between the songs, when the lanterns glow and the August darkness settles over the table, I think of the root cellar in Dalsland, and my father insisting on the second night.
The crayfish demand these drinks. Who is anyone to argue.
