Where Has All the Moonshine Gone?

About seventeen years ago, not long after my wife and I first started working with Country Roads, we spent what might be described as a lost night in Breaux Bridge. It was the evening after our magazine’s press deadline which in those days meant that the two of us had spent the best part of a week working around the clock, camped out at our desks and sleeping under the production room table. So we were tired; ready for a break. But we’d heard a lot about this funky little town on Bayou Teche in St. Martin parish, and the restaurant on its main street that served great French Creole cuisine and Zydeco music out of a historic storefront. So the prospect of a nice meal in pretty surroundings, followed by an early night and a sleep-in at a B&B around the corner, seemed like the ideal way to rest and recuperate, while acquainting ourselves with a corner of the region about which we didn’t know nearly enough. It didn’t work out that way. In the hours following our introduction to Café des Amis, which was at the height of its culinary powers, we made the acquaintance of various bons vivants, were plied with a galaxy of creative cocktails, devoured bowls of sublime barbecue shrimp and got marinaded in homemade sauce up to the elbows, pushed our table together with several others, made paper hats out of napkins, joined (or possibly started) a singing competition, and formed an abiding fetish for roast duck that remains with me to this day. The evening (or early morning depending on how you judge the passage of time) went downhill after someone cleverly suggested going for a wade in Bayou Teche—a decision that led to one of us getting locked out of the B&B and having to go and sleep on the couch of our new friends, which I woke up sharing with an unfamiliar catahoula. It wasn’t even Mardi Gras. How did this happen to two exhausted, generally timid publishers of a small local magazine just looking for a quiet evening away from the office? One word: Moonshine. Back in the late nineties, Edwin “Coe” DuPuis was an old, old man. But in St. Martin parish the man and the moonshine he had been making since Prohibition times were considered a local treasure. His name was invoked with near reverence and his whiskey—a preternaturally smooth, amber elixir suffused with notes of caramel, smoky oak and the small wild local cherries with which it was fermented—was credited with everything from being a source of artistic inspiration to a cure for insomnia, to a solution for the revival of flagging love lives. Somewhere between the bread pudding and the third bottle of wine a bottle of Coe’s whiskey materialized upon our collective table, and as the liquid found its way from glass to glass something happened to the tone and timbre of our evening. The stories grew taller, their tellers more animated. Other locals, drawn by the presence of the revered liquor and the Breauxs’ infectious hospitality, joined our group. And the bottle went around, strewing stories like unfurling flowers in its wake in the way that only magical things can do. A spirit of participation in something unique spread between those gathered, as if what the bottle contained was not home-brewed liquor made by an old man in a shack, but some kind of liquid instant community that distilled not just corn and sugar cane, but also the sense of bonhomie and belonging that make life in a vibrant small town special, and bottled it up for sharing. Truly, it was one of my favorite things. Coe is long gone now. And if Breaux Bridge locals still have any bottles of his legendary moonshine squirrelled away, they’re not saying. A Saturday morning Zydeco Breakfast at Café des Amis still captures some of that former magic but without the possibility that someone will produce a bottle of Coe’s moonshine a dimension of the spell is somehow broken. This is a pity, but while some things change, others really do stay the same. This spring we have two families coming to stay—old friends from England and Australia—and I would love nothing more than to be able to uncork a bottle of that singular, inimitable essence that animates a warm South Louisiana night and let them feel it the way we did on that evening long ago. Fortunately there are other ways to get that feeling. You can get it watching an artist like Trombone Shorty electrify the crowd at Jazz Fest. You can feel it in the excitement of a little boy taken night fishing on the Grand Isle pier. You can feel it in the dappled shade of a centuries-old live oak. You can taste it rising from a platter of tender chargrilled oysters at Acme. And you can feel it when the dancefloor crowd whirls around you on a Sunday afternoon at Angelle’s Whiskey River Landing. So, in the absence of Coe DuPuis and his singular ability to distill the magic at eighty proof and put it in a bottle, we offer a few of our Favorite Things in the pages that follow, in the hope that they’ll give you a few more experiences, destinations, and flavors worth sharing. We’ll drink to that.