Recently, I helped out my friend Jesse Griffiths (Dai Due) at his Whole Hog cooking class. Jesse, who is a brilliant chef, and a local-food guru, demonstrated the glories of the pig in this class. We started with half a hog, basically intact, and spent the day breaking it down into its various cuts, brining, curing, and making sausage, rilletes, pate, and crepinettes. At the end of the day, we had a bounty of charcuterie, and about four ounces of garbage. It was a blast, and really turned me on to everything the pig has to offer. During every (brief) vegetarian phase I have gone through, I’ve always declared myself a vegetarian “except for bacon.” I know, not exactly defensible, but there you go. Until discovering the joys of pasture-fed meats, I could always take my leave of carnivory, but could never really let go of cured pork products—the lure was that strong.
After my all-too-brief foray into charcuterie and sausage-making, I decided that our brief anniversary trip (December 28th) should be a foray into that region that truly knows how to worship the swine: Cajun Country. We made reservations for base camp in Breaux Bridge, just east of Lafayette & set off on the boudin trail in search of the best, the pinnacle, the apex of what a pig has to offer humanity. I began an online search several weeks before we set off. I discovered a jewel of a website: www.boudinlink.com. Some swiny sage has reviewed every bait shop, every gas station, every Cajun café in Southwest Louisiana offering boudin for sale. The user can search the site by rating or by location. Knowing I only had 24 hours, I figured I could really only tackle three samplings, so I settled on Boudin King in Jennings (recommended by a friend and convenient to interstate 10), Poche’s, and Bayou Boudin, both in Breaux Bridge. This tiny town just outside of Lafayette is also home to Mulates (fais do do, chank-a-chank music, incredible atmosphere & so-so food) and Café des Amis, famous for a rowdy zydeco brunch on Saturday mornings.
Driving east from Texas, we held out as long as Boudin King in Jennings before beginning the eating orgy—the boudin here was not bad, I suppose, but not great either. The folks seem to be as into frying as they are into making boudin. I’ll have a shrimp or oyster po-boy in New Orleans, but I was here to focus on pork, so this was not such an auspicious beginning.
Breaux Bridge looks from the outside like any other struggling formerly rural and agricultural small town in the American South: a tiny precious main street reclaimed by antique shops, surrounded by strip malls of varying success, tanning salons, and the ubiquitous Wal-Mart. Once you talk to any citizen, however, that similarity dissipates like ***. It takes a little getting used to. Here’s a slice of America with cultural traditions thicker and deeper than swamp water. Within minutes of entering Bayou Boudin, we were greeted by Mr. Broussard, a colorful character with a thick Cajun accent and a pirougue-full of jokes involving Texas lawyers and coon-asses. His daughter and son-in-law Lisa & Randy Arcenaux run the boudin operation, as well as rent out adorable cabins right on Bayou Teche that we wish we had known about when we were making reservations. Lisa’s boudin was wonderful—very meaty and rich, with just the right amount of spice. She also makes an interesting white bean & tasso (dense cured & smoked ham) version that we threw in the cooler to take back to Austin. We ordered the sampler plate (boudin, hogshead cheese & cracklings) and washed it down with a couple of beers as we watched the squirrels outside ride a rigged-up propeller feeder with corcobs on each end. The squirrels calmly rode in huge looping circles, nibbling kernels as they swung around. We’re pretty easily entertained.
We made arrangements to meet friends for dinner at Café des Amis later in the evening, and spent the afternoon tooling along back roads through the sugar cane fields where cutting & refining were in full swing. “It feels like we’re in Cuba,” Thomas noted as we passed by a sugar plantation (not the take-a-tour, hear-about-how-life-was-lived kind of plantation, but the kind where people still live on the sugar plantation in the ancestral home kind of plantation—pretty crazy). It was impossible to imagine pure white sugar emanating from the sugar refinery—an industrial revoltion-era, Dickensian-looking place with white smoke pouring from every smokestack, edge, nook & cranny, sitting in the middle of a muddy, churned-up field of tire tracks and broken cane stalks. I didn’t get the feeling they offered tours or a gift shop.
As we curved under centuries-old oaks dripping with Spanish moss, I saw a sign pointing to Poche’s. It was really brilliant of me to set up a vacation under the auspices of “doing research.” In that paradigm, there’s really no such thing as over-indulgence, just exhaustive, responsible fact-gathering (right?). We spun the car around—what better way to while away the time before dinner than eating a little boudin and drinking a little beer?
Poche’s was the holy grail, the mecca, the valhalla of pork worship. A glorified convenience store with tables in the back, atmosphere is not its strong suit. We ordered a couple links of boudin at the cash register and took it to the back with our Abita ambers. There’s something to be said about food that registers as truly transcendent when it’s eaten out of a styrofoam box in a fluorescent lit room. Extremely meaty, with a definite note of liver, just the right amount of spice and a little green onion, Poche’s boudin somehow tastes more essentially of pork than pork does. How is this possible? I don’t know, and even as a chef, I don’t care. Sometimes people who cook know too much, and the opportunities for surprise, mystery, and delight are limited. I know friends who have fallen hard for molecular gastronomy—that Spanish sensation where food becomes ephemeral—vapors, foams, fois gras cotton candy. That never appealed to me—I like food to be satisfying and authentic—but I always envied the converted to molecular gastronomy the ability to experience food again for the first time—to be shocked by taste into a swoon of mysterious rapture. Well, I can tell you—it’s possible to be knocked over backwards in a gas station convenience store in the middle of BFE Louisiana, less than 10 miles from interstate 10. This is food that renews my faith in America (but somehow, Louisiana always does that).
The next morning, my first thought upon waking was,”I really, honestly, cannot eat another bite.” Coffee, however, is non-negotiable, so we stepped into the Coffee Break on our way out of town. I would love Louisiana for no other reason than that you can always get good coffee—café au lait made with Community coffee & blended with steamed milk and sweetened with sugar from those cane fields just down the road. To be able to just pick a place off the street (by the way, next door to a local outpost of my all-time to-die-for, favorite store in the world–Lucullus Culinary Antiques based in New Orleans), in this tiny town, and walk into a full-fledged Cajun folk music jam was just, as they say, lagniappe. Twenty or thirty men and women, of all ages, shapes and sizes were making music together just because they wanted to on Saturday morning. It was beautiful—fiddles, a washtub, harmonicas, guitars. The music filled me with love for a culture that we forget still exists. Food, music, community, a sense of place transcends the corporate sameness that dulls the senses and deflates experience in much of our lives. These people know how to live—and I have a cooler full of instruction to take home with me.
Our Cornish game hens this week are from Countryside Farm, a local poultry farm run by Hester and Sebastien Bonneu. Sebastien has recently set up shop at the downtown farmers market on Saturdays with beautiful duck, pheasant, chicken, and rabbit. If you ordered last week’s cassoulet, you tasted his delicious, fat, juicy ducks. 
