Mudbugs by the ton, people by the thousand flow at Rosewood Crawfish Festival

Ten thousand pounds of crawfish traveled 868 miles from Louisiana to Columbia for this weekend, and Malanie Morella drove 100 miles herself just to eat them.

A Louisiana native now living in Moncks Corner, Morella said the Rosewood Crawfish Festival in Columbia is the only place she knows she can get a taste of home every year.

“They have them in Oriental restaurants and things, but it’s not the same,” she said. “The spices aren’t the same. The size of the crawfish aren’t the same.”

Here, Morella said, it’s “traditional, like home.”

Some 12,000 people were expected to attend Saturday’s neighborhood festival celebrating the Rosewood community and, you know, crawfish. And by the way, Morella noted, it is, in fact, crawfish, not “crayfish,” as some are known to say.

Sitting at a long community picnic table with a box of four to-go trays by her feet – to take home to share with her husband – Morella lent her crawfish-eating expertise to Danny Skinner and Maria Piroli, who weren’t exactly crawfish novices, but not exactly veterans, either.

“We ate it” in the past, Skinner said. “Would I say properly? Ahh, no.”

Morella showed the pair how to twist the tail from the crawfish body and break apart the shell to get to that delicious tail meat. She showed them, too, how to suck or scoop the extra-flavorful meat and fat from the head of the animal, an extra step that Skinner and Piroli didn’t particularly care for.

All the effort it took for each small bite of meat was fully worth it, they agreed.

“It makes it better when you have to work for it,” Skinner said.

The key to good crawfish is a good boil, or seasoning, said Mike and Ellen Stollar, also Louisiana transplants now living in Columbia. Mike, who cooks crawfish himself, said he likes them spicy, but not so spicy that the seasoning overpowers the flavor of the meat.

“I call them pure heaven,” Mike Stollar said.

The Stollars made friends with Tim and Kim Flaherty and their 12-year-old son, Quinn, as they bonded over trays of the steamy critters.

It was the Flahertys’ first time at the festival, having moved to Columbia from near Syracuse, N.Y., only a couple months ago. But it was not their first time digging into a pile of mudbugs.

“We love crawfish,” Kim Flaherty said. “A day with my family and a big bucket of crawfish is a great Mother’s Day present.”

This story was originally published May 7, 2016 at 9:15 PM.