Cajun Nights & Cast Iron Dreams

Boots on the grass at the greatest tasting festival in Acadiana

by

Foodways

It was after three on the 25th of October, a Friday afternoon, and I was booking it down I-10 West, headed from Baton Rouge to Lafayette. I would never do such a thing without a good reason. It was the first day of the Blackpot Festival and Cook-Off, held at the Vermilionville Living History and Folk Life Museum.

Maybe you’ve heard of the Blackpot; maybe you haven’t. It’s a celebration of the inherent creativity in Southern home cooking, an incredibly diverse Cajun and folk music festival, and in my opinion, the greatest tasting festival in Acadiana, if not the state. The cook-off inspires camaraderie and creativity among its participants, with no limits on the number of team members, no complicated rules, and an affordable entry fee for teams—who can sign up as late as the day-of to compete. The only rule: entries must be cooked in a cast-iron pot.

The result of all that freedom is, first, a predictable level of chaos; and second, a Cambrian explosion of dishes—most of which are available for festivalgoers to taste—and it’s up to the teams to make sure enough is left for the judges. Some cook-off teams provide bowls and utensils, but they’re not required to. (The merch booth sells signature wooden bowls and spoons for tasting, but many revelers simply bring their own.) Teams aren’t even required to provide samples at all. Though, during my many, many rounds around the 2024 festival, I didn’t meet a team unwilling to share everything they were cooking.

"That’s the spirit of Blackpot: it’s generosity without expectation of reward; a two-day Cajun and folk jam that doesn’t go quiet until the wee hours of the morning; a joyous marathon of music and home cooking set beside the lazy Bayou Vermilion, which must turn to gravy by midnight on Saturday."

And that’s the spirit of Blackpot: it’s generosity without expectation of reward; a two-day Cajun and folk jam that doesn’t go quiet until the wee hours of the morning; a joyous marathon of music and home cooking set beside the lazy Bayou Vermilion, which must turn to gravy by midnight on Saturday.

The festival is nearly two decades old, and I arrived for its eighteenth iteration around five in the evening. During the week prior, I had weighed the pros and cons of setting up my tent in the adjacent ball field for the weekend. Regardless of the season, camping is always a gamble in Louisiana—the unpredictable weather, the heat, and the mood of the biting bugs all threaten to make camping a clammy, itchy experience; one well-fried into my childhood memories. Ultimately, I wanted the full experience of Blackpot, though, and decided the best I could do was get there early enough to grab a premium tent spot.

I scored one next to the fence near the Vermilionville entrance. Despite my unfortunate proximity to a set of portable toilets (or “terlets,” as my camp neighbors said it), my home for the weekend was mostly shaded by a large oak tree—a stroke of luck in an

exposed baseball field. When I arrived, folks were parking in ditches, staking out campsites, and pitching tents—tent villages in some cases, sweating through shirts in the hot afternoon sun, and popping the tops off the first cold ones of the evening. After my claim—and tent—were staked, I cracked open my own and held it against my red face for a while, before wandering into Vermilionville.

As much as the festival centers around Saturday’s big cook-off, make no mistake—Blackpot is also a true, blue music festival, and the live performances are the centerpiece on Friday night. The setting of the Vermilionville Living History and Folk Life Museum is a luxurious one in comparison to many other music festivals in our region, with their multiple rented scaffolding stages set up in giant parking lots or puddle-laden fields. Here, the musicians mostly perform within the permanent exhibits of the museum: the Schoolhouse, the Chapel, the main barn-style event stage, and one temporary stage setup at the front of the parking lot. The property is generously shaded by mature and sprawling oak trees, with all the stages connected by a meandering sidewalk.

On Friday evening, with the sunset casting deep orange rays through the oak branches, I walked this sidewalk until it ended, passing rooms and porches overflowing with the sounds of fiddles and accordions and guitars and spoons clacking together. It felt less like a music festival and more like an evening stroll through a rural musicians’ village, long before electricity or parking lots were invented.

When I walked into the Schoolhouse, though, a chill went down my spine. Inside the recreated one-room Acadian school, the Nashville-based folk duo Golden Shoals were aglow in lamplight, playing their intimate fiddle-and-guitar set. The backdrop was a large chalkboard graffitied a thousand times with the punishment line, “I will not speak French,” hung beneath the metaphorical weight of an oversized, antique American flag.

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Afterward, I caught the tail end of a Cajun jam with the Holiday Playgirls on the porch of the Chapel, joining the crowd of people spectating and dancing on the lawn. Back up the winding path were the multi-Grammy-nominated Pine Leaf Boys, fronted by Grammy-winner Wilson Savoy, playing on the main stage. Back toward the baseball field, an informal Cajun jam had set up shop just fifty feet from my tent, and the hobby musicians were creating music every bit as enchanting as any professional band I had seen inside the actual festival. As the night wore on and, I assume, the jammers got drunker, someone started singing in fluent Cajun French.

The singing brought back a distant memory of drifting awake at my parents’ house one summer morning to music and singing coming from the living room. One of my dad’s best friends was the late Cajun fiddler and guitarist, Dennis Boudreaux, who dropped by every couple of years to play music for and with my dad, and once stashed his instruments in my parents’ attic for safekeeping during a transitional time in his life. Boudreaux wrote and recorded music with bands like La Touche and Savoir Faire avec Paul Daigle, and he passed away too young, while playing music on stage at a New Year’s Eve event in 2008.

Weeks later, I would be flipping through photos I’d taken of the jam session near my tent, and I’d realize the fiddler in the group was Dennis’s son, Jacques Boudreaux, clearly keeping something sacred alive. And I would wonder if his fiddle had ever spent a summer in my parents’ attic.

The Blackpot Cook-Off

I woke up at six in the morning, as you do when the sun's baking your tent. I didn’t know exactly when the cook-off was going to start, but I didn’t have to; by half-past nine, the ball field smelled like any Louisiana mawmaw's house.

When I poked my head out, the Vermilionville parking lot was already overrun with canopies and propane tanks, plus a veritable traffic jam—and of course, folks were already cooking. Cook-off winners are selected in five categories: gumbo, jambalaya, gravy, cracklin’s (or gratons), and dessert. There are no mandatory ingredients for any category, and the gravy category is intentionally vague, allowing imaginations to flourish.

Believe me when I say you’d be a fool to eat anything before you get to Blackpot on Saturday. If you get their early enough, a walk around the parking lot on cook-off morning will likely earn you some breakfast. On my first lap, scrambled eggs and bacon sizzled alongside pork chops and Boston butts; pancakes and breakfast sausages fried on griddles; and beers a-plenty opened for business, well before noon. The first thing I tasted was team Vidrine Dream’s blueberry lemon sweet rolls, which were cooked in cast iron, per the Only Rule, giving the bottoms an incredible brown crispiness. I wandered past one group that was frying big slabs of something, and I asked if the slabs were going into a gravy. “Nah, these are gar steaks,” he said. “This is just for snacks.”

Many of the teams present were repeats from prior years—and some were even former champs. Team Everystuff showed off their former wins with a tall wooden shelf displaying multiple previous trophies—the lids of the cast iron pots traditionally awarded to Blackpot champs. Team Coonassty, who wore matching jumpsuits embroidered with their team’s logo, were selling stickers of it. One team decided to use the Blackpot festival as a family reunion venue, and I saw a handful of teams representing restaurants and catering companies.

"The air sizzled with sweat and heat. Festival-goers young and old swung each other around like delirious children, everyone simultaneously light of heart and heavy of gravy." 

Every Blackpot-goer knows, or quickly learns, to watch for the lines forming outside of booths; that’s how you know when the gumbos, gravies, and other goodies are coming off the heat. As the afternoon wore on, slowly but surely, the lines began to appear. I ate my heart out: smoked meatball gravy with sweet peas from Mermentau Outlaws, Team Everystuff’s gravy and gumbo, pork backbone stew from team Put The Dogs Outside, duck and sausage gumbo from A-Town Podnuhs, pork vindaloo (for the gravy category) from Savory Sisters, and gumbo z’herbes from Dame(s) de Font. One festival-goer put it best: “I’m not gonna have to eat again until Monday.”

In my experience, the longer the line, the more interesting, tasty, or fried the sample.  Case in point: the longest line I waited in was the beignet line. The cooks in team Put The Dogs Outside could only serve the crowds as fast as each batch of dough took to fry in the big cast iron pot. The sweat I sacrificed waiting in that line was more than worth it—the beignets were served over a divine sweet potato custard.

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There wasn’t a dry shirt at Vermilionville by two in the afternoon, but something about sweating a gallon in ten minutes enforces the present moment, anyway—and if you do stray too far from the moment here at Blackpot, an oak tree root will soon be underfoot to trip you back into the now.

Soon enough, the festival organizers began their rounds on a golf cart, loading sealed and numbered bowls containing cook-off entries into the official Blackpot submission vessel: a cardboard Amazon box on the back rack. One of the organizers on the golf cart waved me over and asked if I wanted to go to the judging room. I almost spit out my beer.

The Judging

I’m not sure why I was expecting a quiet reprieve from the boisterous festival outside, but the judging room—a private space for large parties in the back of the museum’s restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman—seemed louder than the festival. There were roughly thirty judges, split into groups and each assigned to a cook-off category, and these people were having a great time. The gravy category had the most entries by far, while the cracklin’s (gratons) table was pretty thin, with four or five entries, each stashed in its own grease-spotted brown bag bearing only a number. Each judge gives each entry three numeric grades: for presentation, taste, and an overall score, with a line to leave notes. Some of the judges had been in this room before; others were new. And one, sitting at the cracklin' table, wasn’t a judge at all.

Amidst all the noise, this imposter judge had slipped in unnoticed. She was exposed when the other judges saw her scoring sheet, where she had written things like “Meh,” and “Yes, baby!” instead of numbers, and she was promptly booted out. (If anyone’s wondering, it’s clear she preferred team three’s take on cracklin's, and I did get a photo of her.)

Despite the imposter, the judging rolled forward, sans the phony scoring sheet, with the cracklin’s table finishing first. The desserts table seemed to have the happiest disposition, no doubt due to all the dopamine, while the jambalaya judges struck me as the sternest of all the judging groups. The gumbo table had a difficult time scoring—the entries were all slam-dunks; ask me how I know—but the gravy table truly had their work cut out for them. The nineteen gravy entries included enough knockout Sunday-at-ya-Mamere’s-house gravies and sauce piquants to feed an army of petit-enfants; but they also had to score the more creative entries, such as birria tacos (yes, really) and vindaloo, alongside all that tradition. All the other judging tables were long finished by the time the gravy category was settled—and by then, we had been in that room for well over an hour, if not two. Cook-off organizer Adam Hebert was still hunched over the scoring sheets with a calculator when I left the room with the gravy judges, all of us rounder than when we entered.

The Party

Blackpot is held on the last weekend of October, so of course there’s a costume contest to close down Saturday night. When I had passed someone dressed as a literal interpretation of “I’m all ears” earlier that afternoon, I had not yet been aware of that; but as the day wore on, more and more costumed revelers came out of the woodwork (or their tents, or the terlets), and by sunset, the main stage barn was full of hipsters, over-tired kids, and elder two-steppers dressed as various creatures and food items.

With costumed audience at the ready, The Daiquiri Queens took over and put everyone’s waning stamina to the test. The air sizzled with sweat and heat. Festival-goers young and old swung each other around like delirious children, everyone simultaneously light of heart and heavy of gravy.

Long after many of the cooks had either gone to bed or blown past the sensible period of a marathon drinking day, the cook-off winners were announced at around 9 pm. Team Everystuff took home another first-place pot lid for their chicken and sausage gumbo; Coonassty and their matching janitorial jumpsuits swept the jambalaya category; Lache Pas Boucherie won the coveted gravy category with their duck sauce piquant (notably, the Savory Sisters’ vindaloo took second); Lache Pas Le Cochon took home first place for cracklins, and Good Lard Almighty’s cinnamon rolls won best dessert. Team King Cobra was crowned with a golden paper chef’s hat for the Peoples’ Choice award.

After the winners shuffled offstage with their prizes, The Revelers—some of whom are founders of Blackpot—took the wheel. Sometime between the Daiquiri Queens’ set, the announcement of the cookoff winners, and The Revelers’ performance, is when I suspect Bayou Vermilion turned into sauce piquant.

Back in my tent, whatever was left of me melted onto my sleeping pad. My muscles and joints ached, some different kinds of joints burned somewhere outside my tent, and I once again drifted off to sleep with the help of the perpetual Cajun jam session. By the time I was packed up and headed back east on Sunday morning, the fiddle playing in my head was more intense than a simple earworm—rather, it felt like that cool whole-body feeling you get after being in the ocean all day, where the waves tug on your equilibrium long after you’ve washed the sand out of your butt.

Blackpot is not for the faint of heart (seriously, don’t go if you have heart issues), but it is for the hungry of mouth and soul. It’s three to five days of food simmered into a single Saturday, and even as it nears the twenty-year mark, it’s still far from a tourist attraction. On cook-off Saturday, I ran into a friend who I know to be a vegetarian, and when I wondered what she was able to eat at Blackpot, she said, “This is the only day of the year I eat meat.”

If you’re going to pick one day a year to eat meat, save it for Blackpot.

blackpotfestival.com