NJ Crawfish Fest has Mike Arnone’s Jambalaya as its secret ingredient

Jambalaya is a classic one-pot meal.

Not, however, when Michael Arnone makes it.

“We’ll probably cook five 45-gallon pots per day,” said Arnone, founder and namesake of Michael Arnone’s Annual Crawfish Fest, which bills itself as the biggest Louisiana food and music festival outside of Louisiana. Generally it attracts between 15,000 and 18,000 people each spring to the Sussex County fairgrounds in Augusta.

“I’ve never said it’s the best jambalaya in the world, because you would have to have eaten every single jambalaya in the world,” Arnone said modestly. “But it’s really, really, really good. We go through a lot of it at the show. We have some people who might eat four plates.”

They need it. It takes energy to get through two days of non-stop partying, to non-stop music.

An all-star lineup of Louisiana talent

Samantha Fish, From Good Homes, Rebirth Brass Band, Kenny Neal, Cowboy Mouth, Bonearama, Rocking Dopsie Jr & The Zydeco Twisters, John Papa Gros, Joe Krown Trio +1 Papa Mali, and the Ocean Avenue Stompers are among the down-home acts playing on the two festival stages on May 30 and 31 (there will also be musical performances on the evening of May 29 for campers).

Meanwhile, jambalaya isn’t all that’s on the menu. There’s other food too.

Crawfish, naturally — 6,000 pounds worth, driven up directly from the Pelican State, not to mention 300 additional pounds of tail meat. “For the étouffée,” Arnone said.

Some 10 food booths will be vending grilled oysters, boudin balls, alligator sausage, po-boys (oyster, shrimp or catfish), red beans and rice, fried chicken, and much more, including good old fashioned burgers and dogs. There’s beignets for dessert, and a variety of beer, wine and mixed drinks.

But the jambalaya is something special. It’s personal.

This dish is a family tradition

The recipe comes from Arnone’s own family. It was a feature of his very first crawfish boil in 1989, in Riverdale: more like a small afternoon picnic, with a couple of bands, than the massive two-day event it turned into.

“At the first crawfish boil we cooked one pot of jambalaya that fed 100 people,” Arnone said. “It was in a No. 20 pot. That was about 20 pounds of rice. Now we’re doing almost a thousand pounds of rice.”

A few years ago, Arnone’s jambalaya became commercially available in a boxed mix. This year, for the first time, it has gone national, available through Amazon. Rice and spice: you add the meat.

Unpacking the mysteries of jambalaya

Rice, by the way, is the “ya” of “jambalaya.”

At least that’s the myth. “Ya” or “yaya” is supposed to be a Creole, African-derived word for “rice,” although there is scant evidence of this.

“Jambon,” on the other hand, is definitely French for ham. Whatever the word “jambalaya” derives from, the dish itself always has rice. It usually has pork — preferably andouille sausage. It generally has chicken, or shrimp. And it has a whole Mississippi riverboat-load of spices.

“You just start out with good sausage and lots of veggies and chicken,” Arnone said. “Jambalaya started out as a peasant meal, a one-pot meal. And back in the Cajun days, whatever they killed or whatever they grew, that’s what went into the jambalaya.”

Whatever’s in it — and sometimes, that might be uncertain — jambalaya has a mystique.

It’s a dish that embodies the magic, and mystery, of Louisiana cuisine. Hank Williams made it nationally famous: “Jambalaya, crawfish pie and filé gumbo…” he sang.

In the Arnone house in Baton Rouge, where Michael grew up — with his mother, Phyne, his dad, Vince, brothers Jerrell, Randall and Paul David and sister Donna — jambalaya was a staple.

“Jambalaya was on our menu at home maybe once every three weeks,” Arnone said. “Growing up, mama made it for dinner. Daddy later.”

The family recipe comes north

The family recipe was always a hit. Daddy Vince, an electrician, used to make pots of it for his company picnics. “If there were big parties, it was a go-to thing,” Arnone said. “I wouldn’t say it’s cheap, but it’s economical to cook for big events.”

And when their son Michael, who moved to New Jersey in the 1980s, began to do his crawfish events, both mom and dad would fly up north each year to do the honors at the family food booth.

Over the years, they became a familiar, friendly sight to festival-goers, stirring the big pot and saying hello to the (usually repeat) customers.

“Mama came up till she died, in 2012,” Arnone said. “And daddy until about four years ago, until he was about 80” (he has also now passed, as has Michael’s brother Paul David).

Now his nephew Justin — brother Jerrell’s son — is carrying on the tradition. He flies up every year. “He’s the third generation,” Arnone said.

And so the family recipe lives on. And don’t just take Michael’s word that it’s good.

The Louisiana acts that come to his festival have endorsed it in the most decisive way possible. They eat it.

Picky eaters pick Arnone’s food

Louisiana folks are, no surprise, connoisseurs of their own food. “When I first moved up here, people would serve jambalaya and we’d go, damn, what is that?” Arnone said.

Musicians are no exception.

Musical artists, when they tour, have contracts. And in the contracts are “riders” — conditions. Sometimes cranky ones. Van Halen’s contract famously specified “no brown M&Ms.”

Louisiana acts have conditions too. And one of the most common is, “No Cajun food.”

“People will try to impress them, and they make up dishes,” Arnone said. “They’ll put in a lot of cayenne pepper and say, ‘Oooh, that’s Cajun.’ So a lot of the artist’s riders say, ‘No Cajun food.’ I asked (fiddler) Michael Doucet from Beausoleil about that. He said, ‘You ever eat Cajun food in Waterloo, Iowa?’

“But he ate my food,” Arnone said. “These musicians have been on the road for months. When they get to our show, they eat like they’re at home.”