White shrimp

The Gulf of Mexico's first commercial fishery—now in decline

This morning, the Bitter Southerner published my latest essay, an ode to both Rachel Carson and all things coastal. To accompany that essay, here’s a quick dive into one more reason to love the Southern coastline: some very good eating.

Shrimp came first. That much seems clear.

Historian Jack Davis, in his excellent, Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Gulf, suggests that commercial fishing emerged along the southern coast on some now-lost day in the early nineteenth century. Though he himself notes one problem with this way of marking the date: shrimp had been sold already for at least a hundred years.¹ Perhaps this crustacean’s outlier status comes from the ease with which it was caught; two men could drag a seine net through the marsh grass and pull out plenty.

A few months ago, I introduced you to brown shrimp, or Farfantepenaeus aztecus. But the initial shr…