Jordan LaHaye
Today, the culinary traditions of Cajun seasoned and smoked meats reaches far beyond the bounds of Acadiana, thanks to the rise of e-commerce and modern day shipping practices (not accurately represented here—all perishable food products distributed by the businesses included in this article are shipped frozen in insulated containers with iced packaging, and are shipped within a strict time frame to ensure all products are delivered freshly and safely).
Imagine it: right now, 1,400 miles away, a man stands at the stove in his New York City apartment, the unmistakable smell of Evangeline Parish smoked sausage wafting through the living room, a gumbo on the way.
Since February, Ville Platte native and thirty-eight-year Manhattanite Joe Soileau has ordered a package of Cajun products from T-Boys Slaughter House in Mamou once every two weeks. “We started with an order of cracklins,” he said. “We haven’t been home in probably five or six years, but when we’d visit, my wife—who is from New York—fell in love with the stuff. I asked my cousin, who still lives in Ville Platte, where to get the best cracklins and boudin, and we ordered a couple of pounds of both. Now, we’ve gotten into tasso, smoked sausage, smoked ponce, and crawfish tails.”
For people like Joe—people like me—who grow up in the center of rural Cajun Country, part of the coming-of-age experience includes realizing that our food doesn’t exist everywhere. In fact, there is almost nowhere beyond the 14,500 square miles that make up the Acadiana region where people eat rice and gravy virtually every single night. And the staples of this (very nutritious) diet—smoked sausage, boudin, ponce, crawfish, roux, Slap Ya Mama, and medium-grain rice—live only in a couple hundred meat markets and gas stations in between Calcasieu, Avoyelles, and Lafourche parishes. Some people claim the range is even tighter. I’ve always been told that the only smoked sausage worth its salt comes from Evangeline Parish.
Even upon moving just seventy miles to Baton Rouge six years ago, I began a regular practice of loading up on the goods at Teet’s Food Store on my visits home to Ville Platte. Check the freezer of any LSU student from Evangeline Parish, any day of the week, and there will be a sausage stash, leaving just barely enough room for a tub of ice cream or some hot pockets.
The fact is, we can’t live without it. There’s a reason why in this part of the world there are so many multi-generational families living together in the same towns. But still, there will always be the ones who leave. And how are they supposed to start their day if not with a link of boudin?
[Read this: Boudin, Uncased—You can't Butcher the Boudin Experience.]
In a remarkable intersection of tradition and technology, over the past decade, a small but growing Cajun meats e-commerce trend has resulted in gravies and étoufées and gumbos being properly browned and seasoned and enjoyed in home kitchens all across the country.
“When we started, it blew my grandpa’s mind that we could send meats anywhere,” said Luke Deville, the third generation owner of Teet’s. “He was stationed in Alaska during World War II. When I told him one time that we were sending out an order to Alaska, he about fell out of his chair.”
Specialty Cajun meat markets like Teet’s and T-Boy’s—usually found at the center of Acadiana’s smallest, most remote communities—represent the heart of surviving Acadian culture: its cuisine. Offering traditional staples you can’t find at Walmart, including meats and bits appropriately smoked, marinated, and—most importantly—local, these places remain the gatekeepers to a tradition entrenched in the spirit of the boucherie—community, preservation, and using everything we’ve got.
Hyper-local as they are, most of these places have remained unchanged for decades—doing what they do best, serving the communities in their immediate vicinity from modest, gas-station-esque shops with a Coke machine by the door, the butcher shop behind the aisles of canned goods, and home-baked breads and cookies Saran-wrapped in piles by the register.
The opportunities brought on by incorporating shipping options and online orders into their business models, though, have brought on not only growth in terms of revenue, but also in terms of range.
Billy’s Boudin & Cracklin started offering shipment orders in 2014 as it began to see a demand for it. “We started slow, trial and error, just to see if it would work,” explained head of shipping department Annette Briscoe. “Within just a few short months, we got calls from every single state.”
After T-Boy’s started shipping their products in 2012, they received orders from as far as Iraq and Italy. Though, like most shops, T-Boys limits its shipments to within the United States to ensure the product is delivered fresh.
"It’s a staple, right? For us. I can’t imagine not having it. If you think back twenty five years ago, though, there was no way for people elsewhere to experience that kind of food unless they showed up.” —Paul Deville
“It was a major change for us,” explained Paul “T-Boy” Berzas. “We’re just some little country boys cutting meat over here, and now we’ve got to work on this computer. But we make the products, and when we’ve got orders we’ve got to prepare for them ahead of time. It’s become like having two businesses in one.”
According to Deville, about seventy-five percent of his orders come from Louisiana expats, people like Soileau who leave and no longer have access to the food they grew up with. The other twenty five percent, he said, are people who wanted to try the products on recommendation or who were curious enough to Google them.
“For me it’s been an amazing ride because I’ve met a lot of people,” he said. “People who have never heard of us before found us online, and now they want to come visit. They’ll travel all the way out here to Ville Platte, Louisiana, to come see us.”
Another round of national customers comes straight from word of mouth: “A lot of our customer base are travelers who have come through the area for one reason or another, tasted our products and want to share it with their friends and family at home, wherever home may be,” said Briscoe. “Then their friends become customers.”
Paul Deville (of no relation to Luke Deville) started getting Cajun meats delivered when he moved to San Antonio for work and wanted to cook a gumbo for two hundred of his coworkers—ordering several pounds of smoked sausage, some hens, and roux from T Boys. “I realized, shoot, I don’t need to wait for someone to travel from Louisiana out this way to bring me my meat. I’ll just start doing this over the Internet.”
Since then, he’s taken advantage of the service to share his culture with friends in Texas. “I’ll cook a ponce and have people over for dinner,” he said. “They’re amazed at what they’re eating and how good it tastes. It’s a staple, right? For us. I can’t imagine not having it. If you think back twenty five years ago, though, there was no way for people elsewhere to experience that kind of food unless they showed up.”
tboysboudin.com
teetsfoodstore.com
billysboudincracklin.com
