Meat Market Mission
Fifteen years ago, had you told me there was anything, anything, worth getting out of bed for at 5 am on a Saturday morning, I would have assumed there was something wrong with you and hoped that you would go away. But that was before I was introduced to the extraordinary rewards of being in Breaux Bridge early enough to get a table at Café des Amis for the legendary Saturday morning Zydeco Breakfast. For those living two hours away, this requires a bit of an early start. But as anyone who has ever managed it will confirm, the experience of immersing oneself in that sublime combination of art, live music, great food, and exuberant dancing, more than makes up for the ephemeral hardship of getting out of bed. And the fact that you’ve already been awake for three hours somehow makes ordering a second Bloody Mary at eight in the morning seem almost reasonable. It’s Louisiana joie de vie at its finest—a completely authentic expression of the culture we have the good fortune to be surrounded by, not more than seventy miles from home. A couple of Saturdays ago I found myself there for the first time in ages—drinking, laughing, eating a boudin-stuffed omelette, dancing with strangers, and wondering why it had taken so long to come back. The answer is that there’s a new friend to show it all off to.
New friends are good for lots of things. But one of their highest and best functions is to make you stop taking your surroundings for granted. Recently relocated to St. Francisville after twenty years in the wider world, my new friend Rod is a preternaturally gifted writer who has built a career, and an enormous audience, writing for outfits including the Dallas Morning News, the New York Post, and the American Conservative. Which is to say, my new friend Rod writes about far more serious stuff than I do. He is extraordinarily prolific—as anyone who has happened upon his blog [theamericanconservative.com/dreher] will have noted—eternally inquisitive, shockingly well informed, and apparently capable of writing with authority about any topic under the sun.
Rod has moved back to St. Francisville in the aftermath of his sister Ruthie’s death from cancer last year, drawn home to the small Southern town of his upbringing by the overwhelming display of community support and kindness shown to their family in a time of terrible loss. This being an era in which a prolific and popular journalist can engage with his audience as effectively from Ferdinand Street as he can from Philadelphia, Rod is blogging, writing, researching for a book, and having a wonderful time rediscovering the Louisiana he turned his back on twenty years ago, but is now primed to appreciate with different eyes. So when Rod emailed, crazed with enthusiasm after hearing a piece on NPR about a Lafayette smokehouse and specialty meats restaurant named Johnson’s Boucaniere, it was easy to leap on the bandwagon. By Thursday the plan had mushroomed into a fully fledged meat market arms race to identify and collect specimens of Acadiana’s finest boudin. Since Rod had never heard of Café des Amis, and since I’m supposed to be an expert in such things and was already sensing that my authority is going to be short-lived, I upped the ante and proposed an early start. At 6 am, armed with a cooler the size of a coffin, we set off across the river in the dark.
I suppose that any day which begins with fried boudin stuffed into sugar-coated beignets washed down with a couple of Bloody Marys is likely to be a little short on natural grace. So perhaps any shortcomings in coordination experienced on the Café des Amis dance floor could be thus explained. Or maybe every anglo-saxon-hipped interloper into Cajun Country feels the same sense of inadequacy as he clumps gracelessly around the dance floor surrounded by gliding, twirling locals. The alarmingly prolific Rod, who had already published fifteen hundred lyrical and widely read words about our adventure before I had even slept off my meat hangover, wrote about the crowd, “… really, nobody was even a mediocre dancer here. There were old dancers, middle-aged dancers, young dancers, black dancers two-stepping with white dancers, dancers who looked like lawyers, dancers who looked like farmers. It was a “here comes everybody” kind of morning.” That’s hard to improve upon. So perhaps I should just point you to my new friend’s blog and leave it at that. Rod spikes his political and social commentary with observations about his Louisiana adventures at theamericanconservative.com/dreher.
What a way to start a day. It continued with a stop at Poché’s Meat Market in Breaux Bridge for stuffed chicken breasts, pork roasts, tasso, half a dozen sorts of sausage, and a link of the best pork boudin I’ve ever eaten in a parking lot. Johnson’s Boucaniere owner Greg Walls plied us with pulled pork, smoked brisket, ribs, and spectacular beef jerky, and gave us an introduction to the finer points of hot smoking during a tour of his smoke room. By the time we crossed the liquid border that separates English Louisiana from this gastronomic neverland we were transporting enough expertly prepared, richly spiced charcuterie to last sensible people for years. That, and the satisfaction of having experienced firsthand a little of the joie de vie that makes Acadiana absolutely unique. One last fact from Rod’s blog entry, gleaned from the 2000 census, is that Cajun country experiences less out-migration than any other region in America. As he observed, “When you see how you can spend a Saturday morning here, it’s not hard to understand why they remain.”