The crawfish boil is not a restaurant experience. It is a social structure. You need a table — a long one, covered in newspaper. You need a pot, at least 60 quarts. You need a propane burner and a crawfish basket and a cooler of beer and more people than you have chairs for. You dump the cooked crawfish directly onto the newspaper. Everyone eats with their hands. The crawfish — boiled with corn, potatoes, onions, garlic, lemons, and enough cayenne to require a moment of quiet reflection before the first bite — are eaten by twisting off the tail, pinching out the meat, and sucking the head. Sucking the head is not optional. That is where the seasoning lives. The season runs roughly January through June, peaking in March, April, and May. The size of the harvest varies with rainfall in the crawfish ponds of the Atchafalaya Basin. A poor crawfish year is discussed in the same tone as a drought or a flood. The Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival, held the first full weekend of May, is the annual civic celebration of the crustacean that built the spring social calendar of an entire region.