Louisiana’s Exquisite Indigenous Sausage Makeover
It wasn’t so long ago that if you wanted some boudin, Louisiana’s tasty and versatile pork-liver-veggie-and-rice sausage, you had to live in or visit Louisiana to get some.
In fact, through the early 2000s, if you craved boudin either your Cajun/Creole maw-maw or paw-paw had to make some for you or perhaps your best bet was to go to a gas station a few miles down the road where some entrepreneurial boudin chef had set up a boudin stand, say, back by the Coke machine. Early commercial boudin vendors were mom-and-pop operations and most didn’t have the money or inclination to open a restaurant. So, instead they rented space in a friend’s filling station/convenience store, setting up their offerings on a hot plate or in a rice cooker. (And gas stations are, in fact, where a lot of Louisiana boudin is sold even today.)
Or, if you were lucky enough to live in Eunice, La., you could on Saturday mornings drop by Johnson’s Grocery, a dry-goods store opened in 1937 by Arneastor Johnson and his daughter Marie Johnson Fruge. Arneastor would buy fresh pork from area boucheries—a Cajun/Creole tradition involving the communal slaughtering of hogs—and make two thousand pounds of boudin that he would sell hot to his customers. Lines formed around the block, and the boudin sold out by 10 a.m. Johnson’s, alas, couldn’t compete with the explosion of full-service supermarkets and went out of business in 2005.
And while it is certainly true that most of the thousands of tons of boudin made annually in Louisiana is still consumed in Louisiana (and a good deal of that consumed in the parking lots of boudin vendors before the drive home) what’s changed is that you no longer have to live in or visit the state to get your boudin fix. The vast majority of Louisiana’s boudin makers these days recognize that there is a huge and growing outside market for boudin and, taking their cues from Amazon, have learned how to ship it to pretty much anyone anywhere.
A pause of explanation here for outsiders: Boudin wasn’t invented in Louisiana. The primal form, blood sausage, or boudin noir, was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and virtually all other cultures of antiquity. The most popular form of Louisiana boudin owes its roots to the refined pork boudin blanc or white boudin that came out of continental French kitchens. I found recipes in French cookbooks dating from the 1600s. But in Louisiana boudin has undergone an exquisite indigenous makeover—earthier, spicier, a more creative mixture of vegetables; pork, yes, but the Louisiana protein can be beef, duck, chicken, crawfish and even alligator. Rice—not found in classic French white boudin—is clearly a game changer in terms of the taste profile and texture. A lot of Louisiana boudin is also spending time in the smokehouse to a rapturous reception by boudin aficionados.
The catalyst for boudin’s growing outside popularity can be traced to a single magazine story. In 2002, acclaimed New Yorker writer Calvin Trillin went on a quest to find an authentic example of remarkable American cooking. He could’ve sampled New York City’s famous delicatessens, Chicago’s treasured Italian American pizzerias, the Tex-Mex food trucks of Austin, or San Francisco’s innovative Asian American fusion food offerings. Instead, encouraged by frequent reporting trips to Louisiana and the advice of a food-savvy Louisiana journalist and friend, Trillin headed for Breaux Bridge, New Iberia, Lafayette and Scott, towns in the state’s southwest Cajun country. He wanted to sample some Louisiana boudin.
He finally got his first bite at a Mardi Gras celebration in the tiny southwest Louisiana town of Church Point and it made quite an impression—so much so that he absolutely rhapsodized about it in a long piece that he wrote for the New Yorker that same year. I suspect the Louisiana fan base for the New Yorker is modest but among certain well-read and well-traveled types the magazine is an urbane must-read. And, of course, spilling a food secret to the rest of the country—telling people that there is this dish you’ve probably never heard of that’s so damned tasty you can’t believe you haven’t tried it—well, that’s catnip to New Yorker readers. And, by the way, you can’t get it without traveling to Louisiana!
It’s not as if overnight boudin became a national sensation (nor is it quite a national sensation just yet but I’m convinced that’s coming.) But the article put boudin on the radar of some goodly number of the estimated twenty to twenty-five million tourists a year who visit the south Louisiana cities where boudin is ubiquitous. And they all seem to come to eat. According to data compiled by the National Restaurant Association, Louisiana’s 11,275 eateries, most of them in the twenty-two south Louisiana parishes that form what I call the Boudin Belt, generate about $15 billion in annual sales.
Even as the state’s boudin makers, most of them family-owned and run enterprises, began to take notice, there was early resistance. Until the e-commerce model became easy and widely adopted, ordering and shipping boudin out of state was clunky and expensive. And, well, in the back of many boudin-making minds there was a concern that we were exporting our goodness to people who might not quite understand that there’s a kind of boudin-eating etiquette and method to assure full enjoyment. You don’t just chomp on Louisiana boudin as if it’s some ordinary sausage. Most people cut the link in half and squeeze the filling into their mouths. Many people don’t eat the casing. (There are YouTube videos that show you how to properly do this.)
James Edmunds, a New Iberia, La., journalist now semi-retired, is the person who introduced Trillin to boudin. He recalls shortly after Trillin’s New Yorker piece ran he actually tried to ship some boudin to Trillin at his Greenwich Village apartment. The proprietor was having none of it. “He told me, ‘If he wants some boudin, he has to come here. They would charge you $20 to ship that and that’s too much money,’” Edmunds recounts, laughing.
How times have changed. Consider, for example, the Best Stop Supermarket enterprise founded and run by the Cormier family since 1986. From a tiny one-shop operation the size of the average 7-Eleven, it now makes tons of boudin a day in a cavernous USDA-approved factory and ships to scores of wholesalers, as well as huge numbers of individual customers, throughout the United States. Consider, too, the Richards (pronounced REE-shards) of Richard’s Cajun Foods of Church Point and the Savoies of Savoie’s Sausage and Food Products of Opelousas. Products of both companies are sold in hundreds of supermarkets and shipped by online retailers all over the country. Smaller operations such as Bourgeois Meat Market, the state’s oldest boudin maker, near Thibodaux, La., have also developed brisk online businesses.
Meanwhile, online outfits like Cajungrocer.com and Creole Foods of Louisiana have sprung up as third parties to ship boudin practically everywhere. You live in Hawaii or Alaska? You can get your boudin in two days via Fed-Ex air. Between them, they carry boudin products from about fifteen boudin makers. Cajungrocer will even ship boudin abroad, although a Parisian wanting boudin must order it by email instead of through the company’s website. And, of course, almost all the major boudin makers these days sell their products on Amazon and many sell on Walmart.com.
Some big outside players are paying attention and entering the market. For example, RealTree Co., the giant Columbus, Georgia maker of camouflage clothing and hunting and fishing gear, has started a RealTree sausage line that includes Louisiana-styled boudin in its offerings. RealTree’s boudin is made by Uncle John’s Pride, a Tampa, Florida sausage maker with no connection to Louisiana. Then there’s Zummo’s Meat Co., a Beaumont, Texas operation whose Cajun-styled boudin sells retail in twenty-seven states and competes in Louisiana Walmarts with brands like Best Stop and Richard’s. Disclosure: I haven’t tried RealTree or Zummo’s and I can see Louisiana boudin lovers rolling their eyes. But, as they say, imitation always has an element of flattery.
A growing number of out-of-state boudin eaters also don’t need to order it from Louisiana online operators. Locally made Louisiana-style boudin is now popping up in unexpected places: on restaurant menus all over south and central Texas, for example, and far more surprising, in the cold case of a storied Chicago butcher shop. When I returned to my home in Chicago from my travels around the Boudin Belt to report my book on boudin, on a whim I Googled “Chicago and boudin.” I got a hit—Paulina Market, an old-line city butcher shop in business since 1949 in the leafy Lake View neighborhood.
Surely, I’m thinking, Paulina is carrying some form of imported Louisiana boudin. But no, its website clearly states that it makes its own “Cajun Boudin” with pork, rice, pork liver, onions, green peppers, celery, jalapeno, green onions, garlic, sage, and thyme. It also makes its own Cajun-style andouille. I live about fifteen minutes away. I couldn’t resist and hopped in my car to investigate. I came home with a four-pack of Paulina-made boudin. Near dinner time, I put the links in the oven on a nonstick pan basted with olive oil for twenty minutes. At this point, I’m still skeptical but, hmm, the aroma: it’s starting to smell like a Louisiana kitchen. I take them out, slice a link open and squeeze out a bite.
Damn! Okay, I’m not saying they’ve totally cracked the code, but I am firmly convinced that in a blind tasting in the Boudin Belt, Paulina Market’s Cajun Boudin—made from scratch in Chicago—would be warmly received. Surely these examples point to a burgeoning awareness that this extraordinary Louisiana creation deserves—and will soon achieve—an iconic place at the greater American table just as gumbo and andouille have done before it.
This is all the more remarkable given the origin story. The very recipes that fuel today’s commercial boudin boom were perfected on the humble home stoves of Cajun and Creole cooks looking not to make a fortune but simply to make something tasty, filling and satisfying for their families. Boudin—from the long-ago kitchens of Louisiana’s maw-maws and paw-paws to America and the world with love.
Ken Wells grew up on the banks of Bayou Black in Cajun Louisiana. He’s a former Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of six novels of the Cajun bayous and four works of narrative non-fiction, including Gumbo Life: A Journey Down the Roux Bayou. His latest, Boudin, is now available from LSU Press as part of its Louisiana True series.
