Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (51 page)

I tried to write a poem about all of this seven years ago, before I had learned
I was not a poet, and although the poem was unsuccessful, the occasion of it was not. It helped to crystallize my awareness of a ritual as enduring as that of
eating the fruit of the vine in the rueful light of fall-organizing in words the
yearning blend of sensation, story, and memory that this place and others like
it stir up in me. I began to learn that the shape a story assumes in your mind
and the way it is transmuted into words can become parts of your life that you
are unwilling to trade for anything. The touch of that lean, scarred hand on
your shoulder, whenever it comes, should be heeded, as the seller of donkey
colts in Jerusalem knew to heed the disciples' plea. When the call comes, you
offer yourself to carry, or to be carried, without knowing where you will be
going, whether you will be abandoned, or whether there is anything in the
rush of that first flood of taste in the bitten grape beyond the taste itself. The
sadness of scuppernongs in their antiseptic box in a grocery store in North
Carolina, the sadness of eating them from that box at your desk in a world that
seems antiseptic compared to the orchard twenty years before, the sadness of
knowing that the era that produced the family stories you try to recreate is
now beyond you-all of these come from the same place, as the richness of the
scuppernong taste and the richness of the stories in your ears and the gentleness of that touch on your shoulder come from the same place. This is a place
to struggle for, to keep alive in a strange land, as you have to do now. As we all
have to do.

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 8o percent 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 rit ualistic 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 LT) 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-anddevelopment 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 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 nu clear 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 to turducken, which it makes by taking
the bones out of a chicken and a duck and a turkey, 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 Mcllhenny 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 pro duce 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 waterbased 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."