All photos by Lucie Monk Carter
Country Roads is proud to profile the four outstanding chefs who won the 2016 Small Town Chefs Awards. Made possible through a special collaboration with the Louisiana Culinary Institute, the chefs were honored at a five-course dinner at the Tin Roof Brewery on June 26, 2016.
A fat moon hung buoyant in the thick cloudless air over the one road that essentially is Grand Coteau, pressing a refracted glow on the pavement. Directions to Toby Rodriguez’s place were vague, like I should’ve known where it was already. Everybody knows where Toby’s is. A fundamental destination. They might as well have said “follow the moon.”
Or follow the aroma. Or the laughing. They were the only things cutting into the still night. Inside Toby’s precisely arranged apartment, a party was already simmering. Toby hovered over two massive cast iron pots, making magic on his kitchen island. The chattering room would come to a momentary pause when he’d pull up one of the heavy lids and the aroma would fill the air.
The first of these contained what Toby called a “butcher’s stew”—an infinitely deep brown concoction of pig parts: spleen, kidneys, heart, and who knows what that seemed to have been smothering down since pigs evolved. The stew was less a recipe than a reading from the periodic table of pork, an exploration of the essences that set pigs apart in the panoply of beasts.
Toby is the nucleus of Lâche Pas Boucherie et Cuisine, a specialty catering service that tours the full boucherie experience around the country; but with the spectacle of hog killing and the food it produces, he also brings a sense of poetry. From his website:
We are an undissolved morsel in a melting pot of watered-down culture. A speck of color in a sky of grey, A rebel race with the right to defy today’s generic giants. We have refused to speed up and comply, We will not conform to the leading lamb. Our language is not on lay-away. This South is not for sale.
Toby is a boucherie chef in high demand, but this gathering was an impromptu supper for a gaggle of friends. I caught the drift that he does this a lot. Folks would pop in with six-packs, bottles of wine—one charming Acadian lass had whiskey in a mason jar. Another ran back to her house nearby for cornmeal. It couldn’t have been more welcoming; I felt like a distant cousin finally making it to a family gathering.
The deal with a boucherie is it brings everyone together to butcher and process the entirety of a pig. Toby muses in his company bio:
We reap what we sow and eat what we cook. We sing, we dance... We laugh and cry. We celebrate life and honor death, We are both the funeral and the festival.
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The walls of Toby’s apartment are papered with vellum mechanical drawings of the tools he uses: knives for cutting the skin of the pig, rasps for removing the hair, the gun used to kill the pig. One member of the party explained that Toby is designing his own set of boucherie knives. She hands me an artist’s book of these drawing juxtaposed with vivid color photos from a boucherie. The book breaks down the mechanics and tools of the boucherie as methodically as the boucher does a pig. The book is bound by two pieces of fence post from the property where the boucherie took place, riveted with the spent shells of the bullets used on the pig.
This sense of full utility extends onto his spacious balcony, where a moonlit beehive was revealed in an old window box in one corner. Toby said it was there when he moved in and that he’d harvested honey from it.
Toby lifted the lid of the second pot and we descended eagerly. This pot contained black-eyed peas simmering into plasma among tasso and garden vegetables. One is tempted to say he elevated the homey dish, but I feel he more revealed the mystery of the ingredients. Chefs are, if one may generalize, either P.T. Barnum or Carl Sagan, and Toby is the latter, letting the universe reveal itself in a crucible of cast iron.
He was roasting whole pork cheeks in the oven to add to the butcher’s stew. When he pulled the blackened cheek out of the oven and rushed it to the balcony to cool a little, it was as titillating as seeing a neighbor run naked across their yard.
For dessert, he roasted figs stuffed with candied cracklins that lay upon fresh whipped cream which itself lay upon a mound of toasted couche-couche. I may have been caught up in the intricacy of it, but I jotted in my notes: “Faberge was commissioned by God to arrange a little snack.”
Toby worked a head of cabbage through a microplane, rendering it into filament; and when he added spices to the resulting coleslaw, his arm was cocked over his head like the neck of a dutiful crane. I watched the salt and herbs fall from his fingers, having never felt such romance and intimacy in the preparation of coleslaw.
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The butcher’s stew and black-eyed peas were plated over white rice next to the coleslaw and a criminally simple salad of cantaloupe, cucumber, mint, and a little cayenne—so effortless and delicious that it made me mad at every dish I’d ever attempted.
The chirping camaraderie gave way to the scrape of forks, the occasional groan, and more than one exhortation to the heavens. Toby served everyone before he fixed a plate for himself and when he did, a quiet calm came over him. It was unclear whether it was due to the incredible food he was now tasting or the happiness in the room. Given the community of food in which Toby lives, where the killing and the cooking and the eating all blur into one, it doesn’t really matter. You might as well ask that big, fat moon.
