Boudin, Uncased
You can't butcher the boudin experience
As a Louisiana native now living just west of Denver, I cannot get boudin out of my head. (And unlike many other Cajun commodities sold in chain supermarkets nationwide, a search for it outside the South generally ends in frustration and cursing.) It’s not just boudin I long for, but the experience of eating it as well. The rice-dressing-like, oft livery, sometimes chunky sausage demands a ritual, doesn’t it? Wrapped in tinfoil, maybe paid for in cash, consumed sitting on the tailgate of a dad’s truck, after a fishing trip or barber shop appointment or something like that. The sun has to be either coming up or going down, because if you’re somewhere you can physically buy boudin, it’s probably too hot to eat it outside at noon. And you either buy enough to bring some home, or you eat it all and don’t tell anyone you went. Obsessed with this strange and perfect food, and not content with getting some shipped and skipping the ritual, I carved out time on a recent trip home for a boudin road trip to get my fill.
Known for its Mardi Gras tradition of chasing down livestock and other gumbo ingredients, Mamou, La., isn’t exactly on the way to anywhere you might be going. Nestled on the edge of that town is T-Boy’s Slaughter House, which contains the journey from live animal to award-winning boudin all in one building. Paul “T-Boy” Berzas has been operating in this spot for twenty-two years.
He took me on a tour of the place backwards, from the finished products on the shelves to the industrial boudin mixer in the kitchen, then to the slaughterhouse out back and finally, to the pen of live pigs, dozing in the morning mist. T-Boy Berzas doesn’t only butcher his own pigs; he also takes hogs, beef cattle, deer, and anything else his customers bring in to process. And he can make boudin out of them all, if that’s what they want.
Berzas describes his boudin as traditional, or in his words, “good and plain.” On some fronts, anyway. “It’s not PC these days to have liver in your boudin,” he said, “but there’s liver in mine because that’s how it was when I was growing up.”
Eight-hundred pounds of this “good and plain” boudin is sold every day, quite the feat in Mamou. Berzas sells even more during deer season; and he also gets a pop when the “Cajun Cookouts” episode of Cooking Channel’s Man Fire Food reruns. He’s featured on the episode, but he almost missed out on that opportunity. “I used to not answer the phone when people asked for Paul,” said Berzas. “I don’t do that anymore.”
About an hour and a half’s drive south of T-Boy’s, past Lafayette and approaching the pastoral salt dome of Avery Island, there is New Iberia. Before you get there, you ought to pick up your parents, and then drive to Legnon’s Boucherie. The maître de porc of these parts, Ted Legnon, flits back and forth behind his deli counter as a crowd begins to show up for lunch, and I begin to understand why he suggested we show up early.
He was able to take a few minutes for a tour, which took us into the huge fridge where all the meats are hung like ornaments on racks and the aromas could make any full person hungry again. The squeaky-clean kitchen, where the boudin mixing happens, leads to a back area where the meat cooks in a cauldron and a small army of rice cookers steam the fresh links.
He was very candid about the original boudin recipe: it wasn’t his own. “It was a woman in Opelousas, I got the recipe from her a long time ago,” he said. “I tweaked it a little over the last twenty years.” The mystery woman, named Everlee Robichaux, is responsible for the baseline of a recipe worthy of some hall of fame. Per boudin ritual, sparing the fact that it was noon by the time we ate Legnon’s boudin, my parents and I ate every last morsel of his traditional variety in my dad’s truck before we left the boucherie. Whatever skeptic shade my dad—a warm-brewed Cajun himself—had thrown my way concerning the validity of our trip to New Iberia vanished in the parking lot when he tried Legnon’s boudin. It was one of those sojourns that won’t happen too often, and it was too good to not tell a soul, so my parents had to buy more.
Our last stop, the perhaps aptly-named Best Stop in Scott, La., is a sharp north from New Iberia, just west of Lafayette. One must simply walk through the life-sized Jesus door to sample one of the more famed boudin offerings near Lafayette.
Owner Robert Cormier, who built homes once upon a time, and his cousin Lawrence Menard, a butcher, opened the Best Stop in 1986 as kind of a backup plan when the state’s oil business tanked and the market for new homes went down with it. Starting out, they sometimes made a hundred pounds of boudin a day. For the past twenty-three years, Robert’s daughter Dana Cormier has run the place with her brother, Damon, and they make and sell three to four thousand pounds of boudin daily.
Dana said the meat in the recipe is all Boston butt and pork liver, but the secret to their extremely popular product is great employees. “I have a good group of people who make our boudin,” she said. “They make sure it’s done right. If you have someone who don’t care, who’s just there to collect a paycheck, it doesn’t come out as good.”
Good people are a big part of the success of the Cormier family business. In the early days, Best Stop did no advertising, operating solely on word-of-mouth. “People loved to just come over here and talk to my dad in French; they loved to be around good people, cracking jokes,” said Dana. “They were really good for each other and for the business, and it kept people coming back. They love to see people smiling and happy to be here.”
Boudin is an anytime food—any boudin joint will tell you that—and Best Stop goes the extra mile toward that spirit. “It’s local people usually in here in the mornings, buying a link for breakfast,” said Dana. “We have little cups of cane syrup so they can dip their boudin. It’s really good.”