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Mar. 13th, 2002 08:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wickedfleaI'm all excited about the NCAA tournament starting tomorrow. (Shaddup!) Mississippi State is in it, and that's exceedingly rare. Actually, I think their having a good team this year has something to do with my moving away from Starkville. I moved to Virginia in August 1994. The next March, MSU made the sweet sixteen. The next year, with me still in VA, they made the final four. I moved back in late '96, and they haven't been back to the big dance 'til now, and here I am in Connectimus. Crazy.
We're doing a pool at work, too, and I'd really like to win that. 240 bucks in the pot so far. Won't happen, though, because I don't know anything about many of the teams. And I haven't figured out a way to cheat.
I burned a set of a Neil Young compilation for Peter, one of my bosses -- his birthday was Friday. He was really excited about it. He's had kind of a rough time of it lately. His wife has been laid up with a bad back, so he's been in and out of work because they have two young boys and don't have anyone to help. Plus, he got a phone call last week from his father, who went in for rectal cancer surgery and only told Peter about it the day of the surgery. Peter's a good guy -- I hope things get better for him and his family.
Talked to Dad tonight. He ended up not going to Texas -- his doctor told him it probably wouldn't be a good idea because he's recovering from a badly sprained ankle. Dad didn't sound bummed out about it, which I was glad to hear. Sometimes he'll plan trips like that and then just sort of wuss out, but this time he had a legitimate reason, which made him happy because he didn't have to think of an excuse. Does that make sense? Probably only to me and my Dad. :) Anyway, he wants to go to Texas sometime this spring or summer, so I'll try to nag him to do that and to come visit me.
In other parental news, Mom called me at work from the Acme Oyster Bar on Monday. How's that for rubbing it in? :) She'd better bring me some boudin, by god.
(If you don't know what boudin is (or even if you do), read this article. God, I love Lexis-Nexis.)
Copyright 2002 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
The New Yorker
January 28, 2002
SECTION: DEPT. OF GASTRONOMY; Pg. 46
LENGTH: 3039 words
HEADLINE: MISSING LINKS;
Boudin, anyone? In praise of the Cajun foodstuff that doesn't get around.
BYLINE: CALVIN TRILLIN
BODY:
Of all the things I've eaten in the Cajun parishes of Louisiana- an array of
foodstuffs which has been characterized as somewhere between extensive and
deplorable-I yearn most often for boudin. When people in Breaux Bridge or
Opelousas or Jeanerette talk about boudin (pronounced "boo-DAN"), they mean a
soft, spicy mixture of rice and pork and liver and seasoning which is squeezed
hot into the mouth from a sausage casing, usually in the parking lot of a
grocery store and preferably while leaning against a pickup. ("Boudin" means
blood sausage to the French, most of whom would probably line up for immigration
visas if they ever tasted the Cajun version.) I figure that about eighty per
cent of the boudin purchased in Louisiana is consumed before the purchaser has
left the parking lot, and most of the rest of it is polished off in the car. In
other words, Cajun boudin not only doesn't get outside the state; it usually
doesn't even get home. For Americans who haven't been to South Louisiana, boudin
remains as foreign as gado-gado or cheb; for them, the word "Cajun" on a menu is
simply a synonym for burnt fish or too much pepper. When I am daydreaming of
boudin, it sometimes occurs to me that of all the indignities the Acadians of
Louisiana have had visited upon them-being booted out of Nova Scotia, being
ridiculed as rubes and swamp rats by neighboring Anglophones for a couple of
centuries, being punished for speaking their own language in the
schoolyard-nothing has been as deeply insulting as what restaurants outside
South Louisiana present as Cajun food.
The scarcity of boudin in the rest of the country makes it all the more
pleasurable to have a Louisiana friend who likes to travel and occasionally
carries along an ice chest full of local ingredients, just in case. I happen to
have such a friend in James Edmunds, of New Iberia, Louisiana. Over the past
twenty years or so, James's visits to New York have regularly included the
ritualistic unpacking of an ice chest on my kitchen table. His custom has been
to bring the ice chest if he plans to cook a meal during the visit-crawfish
etouffee, for instance, or gumbo or his signature shrimp stew. On those trips,
the ice chest would also hold some boudin. I was so eager to get my hands on the
boudin that I often ate it right in the kitchen, as soon as we heated it
through, rather than trying to make the experience more authentic by searching
for something appropriate to lean against. In lower Manhattan, after all, it
could take a while to find a pickup truck.
Then there came the day when I was sentenced to what I think of as medium-
security cholesterol prison. (Once the cholesterol penal system was concessioned
out to the manufacturers of statin drugs, medium-security cholesterol prison
came to mean that the inmate could eat the occasional bit of bacon from the
plate of a generous luncheon companion but could not order his own B.L.T.) James
stopped bringing boudin, the warders having summarily dismissed my argument that
the kind I particularly like-Cajun boudin varies greatly from maker to maker-was
mostly just rice anyway.
I did not despair. James is inventive, and he's flexible. Several years ago,
he decided that an architect friend of his who lives just outside New Iberia
made the best crawfish etouffee in the area, and, like one of those
research-and-development hot shots who are always interested in ways of
improving the product, he took the trouble to look into the recipe, which had
been handed down to the architect by forebears of unadulterated Cajunness. James
was prepared for the possibility that one of the secret ingredients of the
architect's blissful etouffee was, say, some herb available only at certain
times of year in the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin Spillway. As it turned out,
one of the secret ingredients was Campbell's cream-of-mushroom soup. (Although
crawfish etouffee, which means smothered crawfish, is one of the best-known
Cajun dishes, it emerged only in the fifties, when a lot of people assumed that
just about any recipe was enhanced by a can of Campbell's cream-of-mushroom
soup.) During ensuing etouffee preparations in New York, there would come a
moment when James said, in his soft South Louisiana accent, "I think this might
be a good time for certain sensitive people to leave the kitchen for just a
little while." Then we'd hear the whine of the can opener, followed by an
unmistakable glub-glub-glub.
A few years after my sentence was imposed, James and I were talking on the
telephone about an imminent New York visit that was to include the preparation
of one of his dinner specialties, and he told me not to worry about the problem
of items rattling around in his ice chest. I told him that I actually hadn't
given that problem much thought, what with global warming and nuclear
proliferation and all. As if he hadn't heard me, he went on to say that he'd
stopped the rattling with what he called packing-boudin.
"Packing-boudin?"
"That's right," James said.
I thought about that for a moment or two. "Well, it's got bubble wrap beat,"
I finally said. "And we wouldn't have to worry about adding to this country's
solid-waste-disposal problem. Except for the casing." The habit of tossing aside
the casing of a spent link of boudin is so ingrained in some parts of Louisiana
that there is a bumper sticker reading "Caution: Driver Eating Boudin"-a way of
warning the cars that follow about the possibility of their windshields being
splattered with what appear to be odd-looking insects. From that visit on, I
took charge of packing-boudin disposal whenever James was carrying his ice
chest, and I tried not to dwell on my disappointment when he wasn't.
Not long ago, I got a call from James before a business trip to New York
which was not scheduled to include the preparation of a Louisiana meal-that is,
a trip that would ordinarily not include boudin. He asked if he could store a
turducken in my freezer for a couple of days; he was making a delivery for a
friend. I hesitated. I was trying to remember precisely what a turducken is,
other than something Cajuns make that seems to go against the laws of nature.
James, perhaps thinking that my hesitancy reflected some reluctance to take
on the storage job, said, "There'd be rental-boudin involved, of course."
"Fair's fair," I said.
What led to my being in Louisiana a couple of weeks later for something that
James insisted on calling a boudin blitzkrieg is rather complicated. As a matter
of convenience, James had picked up the rental-boudin at the same place he'd
bought the turducken, Hebert's Specialty Meats, in Maurice, Louisiana. Hebert's
is a leading purveyor of turducken, which it makes by taking the bones out of a
chicken and a duck and a turkey, stuffing the chicken with stuffing, stuffing
the stuffed chicken into a similarly stuffed duck, and stuffing all that, along
with a third kind of stuffing, into the turkey. The result cannot be criticized
for lacking complexity, and it presents a challenge to the holiday carver almost
precisely as daunting as meat loaf.
The emergence of turducken, eight or ten years ago, did not surprise Cajuns.
When it comes to eating, they take improvisation for granted. Some people in New
Iberia, for instance, collect the sludge left over from mashing peppers at the
McIlhenny Tabasco plant and use it to spice up the huge pots of water they
employ to boil crawfish. When Thanksgiving approaches, they fill the same huge
pots with five or six gallons of lard instead of water and produce deep-fried
turkey-a dish that is related to the traditional roast turkey in the way that
soupe au pistou in Provence or ribollita in Tuscany is related to the vegetable
soup that was served in your high-school cafeteria. James's wife, Susan Hester,
who works at the Iberia Parish Library, once heard a deputy sheriff who was
lecturing on personal defense recommend buying water-based rather than oil-based
pepper spray not only because it comes off the clothing easier but because it is
preferable for flavoring the meat being grilled at a cookout.
Although I didn't want to appear ungrateful for the rental-boudin, I reminded
James that his buying boudin in Maurice, which is more than twenty miles from
New Iberia, flies in the face of the rule promulgated by his old friend Barry
Jean Ancelet, a folklorist and French professor at the University of Louisiana
at Lafayette: in the Cajun country of Louisiana, the best boudin is always the
boudin closest to where you live, and the best place to eat boiled crawfish is
always extraordinarily inconvenient to your house. James is aware that this
theory has a problem with internal consistency-it means, for instance, that for
him the best boudin is at Bonin's meat market, in New Iberia, and for Barry Jean
Ancelet it's at The Best Stop Supermarket, in Scott-but he reconciles that by
saying that Barry, being a folklorist, has a different notion of objective truth
than some other people.
We had never talked much about the source of the boudin James brought to New
York, except that I knew it had changed once, some years ago, when a purveyor
named Dud Breaux retired. Once his purchase of boudin in Maurice raised the
subject, though, James assured me that under ordinary circumstances he follows
the Ancelet Dictum: before leaving for New York, he stocks up at Bonin's,
assuming that the proprietor happens to be in what James called "a period of
non-retirement." The proprietor's name is Waldo Bonin, but he is known in New
Iberia as Nook. He is a magisterial man with white hair and a white mustache and
a white T-shirt and a white apron. Nook Bonin has not retired as many times as
Frank Sinatra did, but he is about even with Michael Jordan.
Like one of those boxers who bid farewell to the ring with some regularity,
Bonin comes back every time with a little less in his repertoire. For nearly
fifty years, he and his wife, Delores, ran a full-service meat market that also
included a lot of Cajun specialties. The first time they came out of retirement,
they had dropped everything but boudin and cracklins (crunchy pieces of fatback
that are produced by rendering lard from a hog) and hogshead cheese, plus soft
drinks for those who weren't going to make it back to their cars with their
purchases intact. The second time, when the Bonins started appearing only on
Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, they had dropped the cracklins. As a
matter of policy, James doesn't actually eat cracklins-"I just think it's good
to know that there's a line out there you're not going to cross," he has
said-but, as someone who depends on Nook Bonin's boudin, he had to be disturbed
by what appeared to be a trend. "I wouldn't mind losing the Cokes," he has said,
when envisioning what might be dropped in the Bonins' next comeback. "But it is
getting kind of scary."
The recipe for the boudin sold at Bonin's is a secret. In fact, it has
occurred to James that the proprietor himself may not know the secret: people
customarily speak of Nook Bonin's boudin, but it is actually made by Delores
Bonin, who goes heavy on the rice and uses an array of spices that, I would be
prepared to testify under oath, owe nothing to the test kitchens of the
Campbell's Soup Company. Although the Bonins have two daughters, neither of them
chose to go into the family business. Anna is an administrator in a
special-education program, and Melissa is an artist. James and Susan happen to
be longtime admirers of Melissa's work-some years ago, they bought the first
painting she ever sold-but James can't help thinking that if she had chosen to
put her creative energies into boudin-making rather than art, the community
would not now be beset by the tension brought on by her parents' stairstep
retirements. At this point, James and Susan have pinned their hopes on the
Bonins' only grandchild-Melissa's son, Emile. Unfortunately, Emile is only ten
years old. James was cheered, though, when we walked into the Bonins' store on a
Saturday morning and Delores Bonin reached over the meat case to hand us a
photograph of Emile posing behind the device that stuffs boudin into sausage
casing. Emile was smiling.
Even assuming that Emile decides to cast his lot with boudin, though, it will
be a number of years before he's old enough to take over the business. James and
I discussed that situation in the sort of conversation I can imagine a working
team from State and Defense having about whether sufficient steps have been
taken to guarantee that this country maintains a secure and unbroken supply of
cobalt in the face of any contingency. We decided that, just in case the Bonin
family line of succession does get broken, I should sample some of the
possibilities for what I suppose you'd have to call replacement-boudin. This is
why Susan, who was carrying a cutting board and a kitchen knife, and James and I
were driving around on a sunny weekend, tasting what Nook Bonin had to offer and
testing out, in a judicious way, the work of other purveyors. At least, that's
what I would tell the penal authorities if the question ever came up.
By Sunday night, we had tried the boudin from, among other places, Legnon's
Boucherie, in New Iberia, and Bruce's U-Need-A-Butcher, in Lafayette, and
Poche's Meat Market and Restaurant, in Poche Bridge, and Heleaux's Grocery, also
in Lafayette, and, of course, The Best Stop, in Scott. We hadn't by any measure
exhausted the supply of even highly recommended boudin purveyors. For instance,
we hadn't tried Johnson's Grocery, in Eunice, or Billeaud's, in Broussard, a
town near Lafayette that used to have an annual boudin festival. A friend of
mine in New Orleans, Randy Fertel, after tracking down the source of the boudin
that he looks forward to eating every year at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, had
recommended Abe's Cajun Market, in Lake Charles, which is practically in Texas,
but there hadn't been time. Still, I had tasted enough contenders for
replacement-boudin to tell James that I hoped Nook and Delores Bonin truly
understood that for people who have been active all their lives retirement can
be a trap.
I had to admit to Barry Jean Ancelet, who joined us at The Best Stop, that
his local purveyor makes a distinguished link of boudin-moderate, shading toward
meaty, when it comes to the all-important rice/meat ratio. Lawrence Menard, who
opened The Best Stop in 1986, told us that he now sells between sixty-five
hundred and seven thousand pounds of boudin a week. In a conversation that
began, appropriately, at The Best Stop and continued later that evening in a
restaurant called Bubba Frey's, Barry explained the Ancelet Dictum to us in more
detail. A link of boudin, he said, is a clean food, essentially treated by
Cajuns as "an enclosed lunch"; it's even cleaner if you eat the casing, which
Lawrence Menard himself always does. Boiled crawfish, on the other hand, is
notoriously messy, leaving a table piled with shells and crawfish heads. It
stands to reason that you'd want to leave that kind of mess far from your lair.
He pointed out that for boiled crawfish he and James both favor a place called
Hawk's, whose location is inconvenient to both of them and to practically
everybody else. In a book called "Cajun Country Guide," Macon Fry and Julie
Posner wrote that the reason Hawk's is so good is that Hawk Arceneaux puts his
crawfish through a twenty-four-hour freshwater purging process, but, then again,
they're not folklorists.
Since the "e" in Frey is silent, Bubba Frey's sounds at first like a succinct
description of Southern cooking rather than a restaurant. It is a restaurant,
though-a bright, knotty-pine place with a Cajun combo that, on the night we were
there, included Bubba Frey himself as one of its fiddlers. We went there after a
performance of "Rendez-vous des Cadiens," a Cajun radio show that Barry m.c.s
every Saturday at the Liberty Theatre in Eunice-a town in an area known as the
Cajun Prairies. For some time, Bubba Frey has run a general store in a nearby
hamlet called Mowata-a name I don't intend to investigate, just in case it is
unconnected with a flood or the discovery of a particularly capacious well-and
not long ago he decided to add a restaurant next door. Boudin balls were listed
as an appetizer. Boudin isn't commonly served by restaurants, although Cafe des
Amis, in Breaux Bridge, offers something called oreille de cochon-beignet dough
that is baked in the shape of pigs' ears, covered with powdered sugar, and, for
an extra dollar, stuffed with boudin. It's a dollar well spent.
Boudin balls are made by rolling boudin into balls, coating them with
something like Zatarain's Fish Fry, and frying away. At Bubba Frey's, they were
delicious, and the proprietor, who came over to our table between sets, told us
that the boudin was made at his store next door. I told James that the next time
he happened to be on the Cajun Prairies he might consider finding out what
Bubba's boudin tasted like unfried. Then it occurred to me that if James liked
it better than he liked Nook Bonin's boudin he might feel obligated to move to
Mowata. James did not seem enthusiastic about that prospect. He and Susan have
both lived in New Iberia virtually all their lives, and have a lot of friends
there. Also, James subscribes to the theory that, perhaps because the French
settlement of the Cajun Prairies included a strong admixture of Germans, people
there are a bit stiffer than the people who live in the Cajun bayous. I don't
know how stiffness in Cajuns would manifest itself. Maybe they use only two
kinds of stuffing in their turduckens.
A couple of weeks later, I heard from James: the boudin at Bubba Frey's store
was, as we suspected, excellent-"a commendable second place to Nook," James
wrote, "but still not with the transcendent special taste." Moving to Mowata was
not on the table. Also, he and Susan and the Bonins' daughter Melissa had gone
to dinner together and, as it happened, had fallen into a little chat about the
future. "I told her that if Emile learned the recipe and learned how to make
boudin he'd never starve," James said. "And neither, it goes without saying,
would we." (c)
LOAD-DATE: January 28, 2002
We're doing a pool at work, too, and I'd really like to win that. 240 bucks in the pot so far. Won't happen, though, because I don't know anything about many of the teams. And I haven't figured out a way to cheat.
I burned a set of a Neil Young compilation for Peter, one of my bosses -- his birthday was Friday. He was really excited about it. He's had kind of a rough time of it lately. His wife has been laid up with a bad back, so he's been in and out of work because they have two young boys and don't have anyone to help. Plus, he got a phone call last week from his father, who went in for rectal cancer surgery and only told Peter about it the day of the surgery. Peter's a good guy -- I hope things get better for him and his family.
Talked to Dad tonight. He ended up not going to Texas -- his doctor told him it probably wouldn't be a good idea because he's recovering from a badly sprained ankle. Dad didn't sound bummed out about it, which I was glad to hear. Sometimes he'll plan trips like that and then just sort of wuss out, but this time he had a legitimate reason, which made him happy because he didn't have to think of an excuse. Does that make sense? Probably only to me and my Dad. :) Anyway, he wants to go to Texas sometime this spring or summer, so I'll try to nag him to do that and to come visit me.
In other parental news, Mom called me at work from the Acme Oyster Bar on Monday. How's that for rubbing it in? :) She'd better bring me some boudin, by god.
(If you don't know what boudin is (or even if you do), read this article. God, I love Lexis-Nexis.)
Copyright 2002 The Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
The New Yorker
January 28, 2002
SECTION: DEPT. OF GASTRONOMY; Pg. 46
LENGTH: 3039 words
HEADLINE: MISSING LINKS;
Boudin, anyone? In praise of the Cajun foodstuff that doesn't get around.
BYLINE: CALVIN TRILLIN
BODY:
Of all the things I've eaten in the Cajun parishes of Louisiana- an array of
foodstuffs which has been characterized as somewhere between extensive and
deplorable-I yearn most often for boudin. When people in Breaux Bridge or
Opelousas or Jeanerette talk about boudin (pronounced "boo-DAN"), they mean a
soft, spicy mixture of rice and pork and liver and seasoning which is squeezed
hot into the mouth from a sausage casing, usually in the parking lot of a
grocery store and preferably while leaning against a pickup. ("Boudin" means
blood sausage to the French, most of whom would probably line up for immigration
visas if they ever tasted the Cajun version.) I figure that about eighty per
cent of the boudin purchased in Louisiana is consumed before the purchaser has
left the parking lot, and most of the rest of it is polished off in the car. In
other words, Cajun boudin not only doesn't get outside the state; it usually
doesn't even get home. For Americans who haven't been to South Louisiana, boudin
remains as foreign as gado-gado or cheb; for them, the word "Cajun" on a menu is
simply a synonym for burnt fish or too much pepper. When I am daydreaming of
boudin, it sometimes occurs to me that of all the indignities the Acadians of
Louisiana have had visited upon them-being booted out of Nova Scotia, being
ridiculed as rubes and swamp rats by neighboring Anglophones for a couple of
centuries, being punished for speaking their own language in the
schoolyard-nothing has been as deeply insulting as what restaurants outside
South Louisiana present as Cajun food.
The scarcity of boudin in the rest of the country makes it all the more
pleasurable to have a Louisiana friend who likes to travel and occasionally
carries along an ice chest full of local ingredients, just in case. I happen to
have such a friend in James Edmunds, of New Iberia, Louisiana. Over the past
twenty years or so, James's visits to New York have regularly included the
ritualistic unpacking of an ice chest on my kitchen table. His custom has been
to bring the ice chest if he plans to cook a meal during the visit-crawfish
etouffee, for instance, or gumbo or his signature shrimp stew. On those trips,
the ice chest would also hold some boudin. I was so eager to get my hands on the
boudin that I often ate it right in the kitchen, as soon as we heated it
through, rather than trying to make the experience more authentic by searching
for something appropriate to lean against. In lower Manhattan, after all, it
could take a while to find a pickup truck.
Then there came the day when I was sentenced to what I think of as medium-
security cholesterol prison. (Once the cholesterol penal system was concessioned
out to the manufacturers of statin drugs, medium-security cholesterol prison
came to mean that the inmate could eat the occasional bit of bacon from the
plate of a generous luncheon companion but could not order his own B.L.T.) James
stopped bringing boudin, the warders having summarily dismissed my argument that
the kind I particularly like-Cajun boudin varies greatly from maker to maker-was
mostly just rice anyway.
I did not despair. James is inventive, and he's flexible. Several years ago,
he decided that an architect friend of his who lives just outside New Iberia
made the best crawfish etouffee in the area, and, like one of those
research-and-development hot shots who are always interested in ways of
improving the product, he took the trouble to look into the recipe, which had
been handed down to the architect by forebears of unadulterated Cajunness. James
was prepared for the possibility that one of the secret ingredients of the
architect's blissful etouffee was, say, some herb available only at certain
times of year in the swamps of the Atchafalaya Basin Spillway. As it turned out,
one of the secret ingredients was Campbell's cream-of-mushroom soup. (Although
crawfish etouffee, which means smothered crawfish, is one of the best-known
Cajun dishes, it emerged only in the fifties, when a lot of people assumed that
just about any recipe was enhanced by a can of Campbell's cream-of-mushroom
soup.) During ensuing etouffee preparations in New York, there would come a
moment when James said, in his soft South Louisiana accent, "I think this might
be a good time for certain sensitive people to leave the kitchen for just a
little while." Then we'd hear the whine of the can opener, followed by an
unmistakable glub-glub-glub.
A few years after my sentence was imposed, James and I were talking on the
telephone about an imminent New York visit that was to include the preparation
of one of his dinner specialties, and he told me not to worry about the problem
of items rattling around in his ice chest. I told him that I actually hadn't
given that problem much thought, what with global warming and nuclear
proliferation and all. As if he hadn't heard me, he went on to say that he'd
stopped the rattling with what he called packing-boudin.
"Packing-boudin?"
"That's right," James said.
I thought about that for a moment or two. "Well, it's got bubble wrap beat,"
I finally said. "And we wouldn't have to worry about adding to this country's
solid-waste-disposal problem. Except for the casing." The habit of tossing aside
the casing of a spent link of boudin is so ingrained in some parts of Louisiana
that there is a bumper sticker reading "Caution: Driver Eating Boudin"-a way of
warning the cars that follow about the possibility of their windshields being
splattered with what appear to be odd-looking insects. From that visit on, I
took charge of packing-boudin disposal whenever James was carrying his ice
chest, and I tried not to dwell on my disappointment when he wasn't.
Not long ago, I got a call from James before a business trip to New York
which was not scheduled to include the preparation of a Louisiana meal-that is,
a trip that would ordinarily not include boudin. He asked if he could store a
turducken in my freezer for a couple of days; he was making a delivery for a
friend. I hesitated. I was trying to remember precisely what a turducken is,
other than something Cajuns make that seems to go against the laws of nature.
James, perhaps thinking that my hesitancy reflected some reluctance to take
on the storage job, said, "There'd be rental-boudin involved, of course."
"Fair's fair," I said.
What led to my being in Louisiana a couple of weeks later for something that
James insisted on calling a boudin blitzkrieg is rather complicated. As a matter
of convenience, James had picked up the rental-boudin at the same place he'd
bought the turducken, Hebert's Specialty Meats, in Maurice, Louisiana. Hebert's
is a leading purveyor of turducken, which it makes by taking the bones out of a
chicken and a duck and a turkey, stuffing the chicken with stuffing, stuffing
the stuffed chicken into a similarly stuffed duck, and stuffing all that, along
with a third kind of stuffing, into the turkey. The result cannot be criticized
for lacking complexity, and it presents a challenge to the holiday carver almost
precisely as daunting as meat loaf.
The emergence of turducken, eight or ten years ago, did not surprise Cajuns.
When it comes to eating, they take improvisation for granted. Some people in New
Iberia, for instance, collect the sludge left over from mashing peppers at the
McIlhenny Tabasco plant and use it to spice up the huge pots of water they
employ to boil crawfish. When Thanksgiving approaches, they fill the same huge
pots with five or six gallons of lard instead of water and produce deep-fried
turkey-a dish that is related to the traditional roast turkey in the way that
soupe au pistou in Provence or ribollita in Tuscany is related to the vegetable
soup that was served in your high-school cafeteria. James's wife, Susan Hester,
who works at the Iberia Parish Library, once heard a deputy sheriff who was
lecturing on personal defense recommend buying water-based rather than oil-based
pepper spray not only because it comes off the clothing easier but because it is
preferable for flavoring the meat being grilled at a cookout.
Although I didn't want to appear ungrateful for the rental-boudin, I reminded
James that his buying boudin in Maurice, which is more than twenty miles from
New Iberia, flies in the face of the rule promulgated by his old friend Barry
Jean Ancelet, a folklorist and French professor at the University of Louisiana
at Lafayette: in the Cajun country of Louisiana, the best boudin is always the
boudin closest to where you live, and the best place to eat boiled crawfish is
always extraordinarily inconvenient to your house. James is aware that this
theory has a problem with internal consistency-it means, for instance, that for
him the best boudin is at Bonin's meat market, in New Iberia, and for Barry Jean
Ancelet it's at The Best Stop Supermarket, in Scott-but he reconciles that by
saying that Barry, being a folklorist, has a different notion of objective truth
than some other people.
We had never talked much about the source of the boudin James brought to New
York, except that I knew it had changed once, some years ago, when a purveyor
named Dud Breaux retired. Once his purchase of boudin in Maurice raised the
subject, though, James assured me that under ordinary circumstances he follows
the Ancelet Dictum: before leaving for New York, he stocks up at Bonin's,
assuming that the proprietor happens to be in what James called "a period of
non-retirement." The proprietor's name is Waldo Bonin, but he is known in New
Iberia as Nook. He is a magisterial man with white hair and a white mustache and
a white T-shirt and a white apron. Nook Bonin has not retired as many times as
Frank Sinatra did, but he is about even with Michael Jordan.
Like one of those boxers who bid farewell to the ring with some regularity,
Bonin comes back every time with a little less in his repertoire. For nearly
fifty years, he and his wife, Delores, ran a full-service meat market that also
included a lot of Cajun specialties. The first time they came out of retirement,
they had dropped everything but boudin and cracklins (crunchy pieces of fatback
that are produced by rendering lard from a hog) and hogshead cheese, plus soft
drinks for those who weren't going to make it back to their cars with their
purchases intact. The second time, when the Bonins started appearing only on
Friday afternoons and Saturday mornings, they had dropped the cracklins. As a
matter of policy, James doesn't actually eat cracklins-"I just think it's good
to know that there's a line out there you're not going to cross," he has
said-but, as someone who depends on Nook Bonin's boudin, he had to be disturbed
by what appeared to be a trend. "I wouldn't mind losing the Cokes," he has said,
when envisioning what might be dropped in the Bonins' next comeback. "But it is
getting kind of scary."
The recipe for the boudin sold at Bonin's is a secret. In fact, it has
occurred to James that the proprietor himself may not know the secret: people
customarily speak of Nook Bonin's boudin, but it is actually made by Delores
Bonin, who goes heavy on the rice and uses an array of spices that, I would be
prepared to testify under oath, owe nothing to the test kitchens of the
Campbell's Soup Company. Although the Bonins have two daughters, neither of them
chose to go into the family business. Anna is an administrator in a
special-education program, and Melissa is an artist. James and Susan happen to
be longtime admirers of Melissa's work-some years ago, they bought the first
painting she ever sold-but James can't help thinking that if she had chosen to
put her creative energies into boudin-making rather than art, the community
would not now be beset by the tension brought on by her parents' stairstep
retirements. At this point, James and Susan have pinned their hopes on the
Bonins' only grandchild-Melissa's son, Emile. Unfortunately, Emile is only ten
years old. James was cheered, though, when we walked into the Bonins' store on a
Saturday morning and Delores Bonin reached over the meat case to hand us a
photograph of Emile posing behind the device that stuffs boudin into sausage
casing. Emile was smiling.
Even assuming that Emile decides to cast his lot with boudin, though, it will
be a number of years before he's old enough to take over the business. James and
I discussed that situation in the sort of conversation I can imagine a working
team from State and Defense having about whether sufficient steps have been
taken to guarantee that this country maintains a secure and unbroken supply of
cobalt in the face of any contingency. We decided that, just in case the Bonin
family line of succession does get broken, I should sample some of the
possibilities for what I suppose you'd have to call replacement-boudin. This is
why Susan, who was carrying a cutting board and a kitchen knife, and James and I
were driving around on a sunny weekend, tasting what Nook Bonin had to offer and
testing out, in a judicious way, the work of other purveyors. At least, that's
what I would tell the penal authorities if the question ever came up.
By Sunday night, we had tried the boudin from, among other places, Legnon's
Boucherie, in New Iberia, and Bruce's U-Need-A-Butcher, in Lafayette, and
Poche's Meat Market and Restaurant, in Poche Bridge, and Heleaux's Grocery, also
in Lafayette, and, of course, The Best Stop, in Scott. We hadn't by any measure
exhausted the supply of even highly recommended boudin purveyors. For instance,
we hadn't tried Johnson's Grocery, in Eunice, or Billeaud's, in Broussard, a
town near Lafayette that used to have an annual boudin festival. A friend of
mine in New Orleans, Randy Fertel, after tracking down the source of the boudin
that he looks forward to eating every year at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, had
recommended Abe's Cajun Market, in Lake Charles, which is practically in Texas,
but there hadn't been time. Still, I had tasted enough contenders for
replacement-boudin to tell James that I hoped Nook and Delores Bonin truly
understood that for people who have been active all their lives retirement can
be a trap.
I had to admit to Barry Jean Ancelet, who joined us at The Best Stop, that
his local purveyor makes a distinguished link of boudin-moderate, shading toward
meaty, when it comes to the all-important rice/meat ratio. Lawrence Menard, who
opened The Best Stop in 1986, told us that he now sells between sixty-five
hundred and seven thousand pounds of boudin a week. In a conversation that
began, appropriately, at The Best Stop and continued later that evening in a
restaurant called Bubba Frey's, Barry explained the Ancelet Dictum to us in more
detail. A link of boudin, he said, is a clean food, essentially treated by
Cajuns as "an enclosed lunch"; it's even cleaner if you eat the casing, which
Lawrence Menard himself always does. Boiled crawfish, on the other hand, is
notoriously messy, leaving a table piled with shells and crawfish heads. It
stands to reason that you'd want to leave that kind of mess far from your lair.
He pointed out that for boiled crawfish he and James both favor a place called
Hawk's, whose location is inconvenient to both of them and to practically
everybody else. In a book called "Cajun Country Guide," Macon Fry and Julie
Posner wrote that the reason Hawk's is so good is that Hawk Arceneaux puts his
crawfish through a twenty-four-hour freshwater purging process, but, then again,
they're not folklorists.
Since the "e" in Frey is silent, Bubba Frey's sounds at first like a succinct
description of Southern cooking rather than a restaurant. It is a restaurant,
though-a bright, knotty-pine place with a Cajun combo that, on the night we were
there, included Bubba Frey himself as one of its fiddlers. We went there after a
performance of "Rendez-vous des Cadiens," a Cajun radio show that Barry m.c.s
every Saturday at the Liberty Theatre in Eunice-a town in an area known as the
Cajun Prairies. For some time, Bubba Frey has run a general store in a nearby
hamlet called Mowata-a name I don't intend to investigate, just in case it is
unconnected with a flood or the discovery of a particularly capacious well-and
not long ago he decided to add a restaurant next door. Boudin balls were listed
as an appetizer. Boudin isn't commonly served by restaurants, although Cafe des
Amis, in Breaux Bridge, offers something called oreille de cochon-beignet dough
that is baked in the shape of pigs' ears, covered with powdered sugar, and, for
an extra dollar, stuffed with boudin. It's a dollar well spent.
Boudin balls are made by rolling boudin into balls, coating them with
something like Zatarain's Fish Fry, and frying away. At Bubba Frey's, they were
delicious, and the proprietor, who came over to our table between sets, told us
that the boudin was made at his store next door. I told James that the next time
he happened to be on the Cajun Prairies he might consider finding out what
Bubba's boudin tasted like unfried. Then it occurred to me that if James liked
it better than he liked Nook Bonin's boudin he might feel obligated to move to
Mowata. James did not seem enthusiastic about that prospect. He and Susan have
both lived in New Iberia virtually all their lives, and have a lot of friends
there. Also, James subscribes to the theory that, perhaps because the French
settlement of the Cajun Prairies included a strong admixture of Germans, people
there are a bit stiffer than the people who live in the Cajun bayous. I don't
know how stiffness in Cajuns would manifest itself. Maybe they use only two
kinds of stuffing in their turduckens.
A couple of weeks later, I heard from James: the boudin at Bubba Frey's store
was, as we suspected, excellent-"a commendable second place to Nook," James
wrote, "but still not with the transcendent special taste." Moving to Mowata was
not on the table. Also, he and Susan and the Bonins' daughter Melissa had gone
to dinner together and, as it happened, had fallen into a little chat about the
future. "I told her that if Emile learned the recipe and learned how to make
boudin he'd never starve," James said. "And neither, it goes without saying,
would we." (c)
LOAD-DATE: January 28, 2002
