Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (52 page)

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 specialeducation 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 replacementboudin. 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, Le- gnon'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 Bil-
leaud'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
the 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 Arce-
neaux 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 "Rendezvous des Cadiens," a Cajun radio show
that Barry emcees 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 in vestigate, 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 Bonin's
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."

Not too long ago, I received a package from a village in Nepal, high in the
foothills of the Himalayas. It was from the brother of the shipping clerk in my
husband's office, and it contained, as clearly written on the outside, two kinds
of mud: red and white. These are the muds that the inhabitants of that faraway
village use to plaster their houses, red for the bottom and white for the top.
They are also the muds that the women of that village are known to snack on,
especially during pregnancy. Victor Ghale, my husband's shipping clerk, knew
I was interested in people who include dirt or clay in their diet, and so he
asked his brother to send samples of these muds to me in New York.

The package arrived, fortunately, before fears of anthrax had made us all
suspicious of envelopes containing powdery substances. So I had no reservations about opening it and decided to give these two chunks of hardened clay
a try. The first was the white one, which was gritty and gummy-tasting as it
dissolved, very slowly, in my mouth. It was hard to swallow and seemed to give
me an almost instantaneous allergic reaction, since I itched all over for about
an hour. The red mud, which I waited a day to try, was also gritty and gummytasting. But in some ways, it was like a good wine. While it dissolved, I sensed
on the back of my palate the smell of fresh earth just after a rain.

As I savored the smell, I remembered the words that Victor had used when
he told me about this gastronomic habit from Nepal. "The clays smell so good
when it rains," he had said almost enviously.

"How handy to be able to snack on your own house," I had joked. "Every
woman has her own twenty-four-hour convenience store.

"Nobody gives it much thought," he said with a shrug. "It's just something
women do."

But the first thing that everyone should know about these women who eat
dirt-and about this widespread habit of snacking on special clays or muds
that has been reported among women in almost every part of the world-is
that it's not just women who eat dirt. Dirt- or clay-eating is more usual among women, especially pregnant women, in many parts of the world-in Nepal,
Africa, India, Central America, and the American South. But in other parts of
the world, and at other times in history, entire populations have been known
to consume dirt. In northern California and in Sardinia, where acorns used to
be the dietary staple, the traditional bread was made by mixing acorn flour
with clay and water, then baking the mixture in a slow oven. In Germany in
the last century, some of the poorer workers and their families used very fine
clays to "butter" their bread. In China, as in other parts of the world, clay was
eaten by much of the population during times of severe want. Some clays,
such as mectite, have a tendency to swell when they take up water, and these
clays are present in famine food samples from China.

The list goes on and on and should make those with a peculiarly "female"
explanation of dirt-eating ("geophagy," as it is known in scientific circles)
question their assumptions. Geophagy has often been attributed to mood
swings, hormonal rushes, magical and superstitious beliefs, and/or beliefs in
the fertility of the earth-causes more closely associated with the distaff population. But any cogent explanation of this behavior, any explanation that pretends to make real and lasting sense, must also account for these examples of
universal consumption.

The second thing that everyone should know is that it's not just humansmen, women, and children-who eat dirt. Dirt-eating is also widespread
among animals. It's been reported in many species of birds; many species of
herbivores (antelopes, elk, bison, elephants, and the like); and many species of
omnivores (porcupines, bears, rats, gorillas, and chimpanzees). No strict carnivores have ever been reported eating dirt (for reasons I will come to), but
carnivores do hang around the dirt sites used by other animals because of the
hunting opportunities they present.

Many of us are familiar with dirt-eating in the animal kingdom, at least
with such descriptive place-names as Licking Hollow, Elk Lick, and Three Bed
Lick, which portray the activity of animals at specific dirt sites. So many of us
don't find anything surprising about this behavior in other animals. But dirteating in animals can shed a lot of light on dirt-eating in humans. And it can
help us to question our assumptions about diet and the nature of what should
and should not be eaten.

Like humans, animals are very selective about the dirt they eat. No adult
animal, it seems, eats just any dirt-a kind of indiscriminate, exploratory behavior seen only in very young animals, including children. A troop of gorillas or a herd of elephants concentrates on just a few sites that they return to
again and again. East African elephants routinely excavate the caves of certain hillsides where they are able to access iodine-rich salt deposits. According to
some scientists, elephants are particularly prone to iodine deficiency, and even
their familiar, elephantine habits of wallowing in mud and throwing dirt on
their hides are attempts to absorb iodine through the rich blood supply in
their skin.