La Boucherie de Quartier

Recalling the ways of the collective, here in Louisiana

by

As soon as it was light enough to see on a recent November morning, I pulled into a pasture near Arnaudville, where my friend Yvonne Olivier lives in a nineteenth century home flanked by cypress barns. A group of friends and neighbors were already chatting, having coffee, positioning their over-sized cast iron pots onto propane burners.

Yvonne and I were hosting a boucherie de quartier—the neighborhood slaughtering of a pig. The first time we did this, in 2019, I slaughtered two pigs that I raised myself. After I shot each one with a .22, it took under an hour for the group of us to capture the blood for later use, remove the hair and internal organs, and carve up the animals. This year, we took the less-traditional-but-still-effective route of purchasing an already-butchered pig from a friend. I doled out the specific cuts of meat to the group, who had positioned themselves in a circle of five cooking stations.

As the day wore on and guests continued to arrive, folks walked back and forth visiting with their neighbors while we cooks stewed and grilled and fried.

Our assigned dishes were a collection of those traditionally made at boucheries. The heart, kidneys, and parts of the liver were mixed with tenderloin in a stew called fraisseurs. The backbone was slow-cooked until the marrow melted out. Cuts of skin, fat, and meat were fried to make gratons. There was boudin, a mixture of rice, liver, meat, and seasonings stuffed in casing. We also had jambalaya, fried pork chops, pork stew, smoked ribs, and bacon.

At other boucheries, you might also find hog’s head cheese—cooking the pig’s head and mixing it with onions, bell peppers, and spices into a gelatinous mass, often served on crackers. In addition to regular boudin, folks often make blood boudin, as well as sausage—the intestines are removed, cleaned, and then packed. Ponce, a sort of sausage that has been stuffed in the pig’s stomach, is also common.

[Read about the origins of the Cochon de Lait Festival in Mansura, Louisiana, here.]

As the day wore on and guests continued to arrive, folks walked back and forth visiting with their neighbors while we cooks stewed and grilled and fried. Musicians sat in the middle of our circle and with their accordions, fiddles, triangles, and guitars, they played traditional Louisiana songs. When a dish was ready, a call went out and everyone lined up to taste.

The Multicultural Origins of the Boucherie

Pig preservation techniques originated thousands of years ago in Europe. According to Bruce Aidell in Complete Book of Pork, “The annual community pig slaughter became a tradition in many communities and was a cause for celebration. There were Schlachtfests in Germany, boucheries in France, matanzas in Spain, and the festa del porco in Italy. One large, well-fed pig could keep a large family, or sometimes a small village, well-fed throughout the winter.” Due to Louisiana’s Francophone origins, the name of our practice remains in French. Yet, there is actually no direct line from France’s particular methods of meat preservation to Louisiana’s tradition. Our boucherie certainly includes French elements, such as blood sausage, and hog’s head cheese. But the tradition has also been touched by the hands of many groups of Indigenous peoples, West Africans like the Bambara and Wolof peoples, Creoles of the Spanish Caribbean, and Germans.

Chase Cormier, a PhD candidate at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who is finishing his dissertation, “The Boucherie: Nourishing Francophone Culture in Louisiana,” told me Native Louisianans like the Choctaw used smoke to preserve sausage and tasso, while they cooked bear skin in its own fat, similarly to the way pork cracklin’s are made at a boucherie. Techniques like braising and slow cooking can be traced back to various West African culinary traditions, introduced with rice agriculture to Louisiana by enslaved people brought to the region in the eighteenth century. Germans who settled along the Mississippi River in the 1720s contributed andouille made in a smokehouse, or la boucanière. And the traditions of Spanish Caribbean Louisianans brought in hot peppers. “All of these different groups valued sustainability at a time when that was incredibly important,” said Cormier. “The boucherie is a mix of these different cultural elements.”

The Colonial Boucherie

Louisiana boucheries before the Civil War and in the colonial period continued the ancient, communal aspect of the tradition. This is why, in Louisiana French, the tradition garnered the names boucherie de bloque, boucherie de quartier or boucherie de société—all referring to the communal aspect of the event. But, at that time, the event lacked the festive flair of boucheries today. “These boucheries were strictly about survival,” Cormier said of early Louisiana boucheries. “People were sharing and maximizing what they could get out of an animal.”

Winter was the ideal time to slaughter a pig that had spent the summer and fall fattening up. Cormier said winter also aided in storage; people would stash food on the north side of the house, made cooler by winter winds and increased shade during that time of year, or in cisterns or wells. Only dishes that would spoil fast were eaten that day—a stew, for example. Everything else was smoked, heavily salted, or stored in the pig’s fat in jars. Even with these preservation methods, in Louisiana’s mild climate the meat would only last a few weeks. A slaughtered hog, which often yielded hundreds of pounds of meat and fat that no one family could consume, was shared among neighbors so it wouldn’t go to waste. After the meat ran out, a neighbor dispatched their pig.

Another crucial aspect of boucheries at this time was using tallow to make candles and soap—ensuring the community had adequate lighting and a way to stay clean, which promoted good health.

Sharecropping-Era Boucheries

With the rise of certain modern conveniences, like storage areas stocked with blocks of ice and eventually refrigerators, boucheries from the 1890s to the 1950s allowed for less solemnity around the tradition, which began to function more as a festive event—though it remained grounded in the spirit of sustenance. Cormier called this style “sharecropping-era boucheries”.

In a recent conversation with my grandmother, Betty Olivier, who grew up in Pécanière in the ‘30s and ‘40s, she explained, “Tout le monde alentour venait pour la boucherie. Quand eux-autres partaient, ils avaient leur viande, leur boudin, leurs gratons. Ça c’était pour eux-autres. C’était séparé. Là une autre semaine, quelqu’un d’autre faisait une boucherie.” [Everyone from around here came for the boucherie. When they left, they had their meat, their boudin, their cracklin’s. That was for them and it was separated. Then another week, someone else had a boucherie.]

She told me that the women often made the boudin while the men cooked gravies, smoked meat, and made hog’s head cheese. While food was being preserved, it was also consumed throughout the day, enjoyed along with the camaraderie and an element of celebration provided by the community’s musicians.

[Read how hog's head cheese is made at Wayne Jacob's Smokehouse in LaPlace, Louisiana, here.]

At this point in its history, the Louisiana boucherie was firmly established as a gracious collaboration that warranted selflessness, trust, and coordination within communities—embodying Wendell Berry’s vision described in the 1968 essay “The Loss of the Future”: “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.” When Berry wrote that essay, those virtues had been fading from the Louisiana landscape due to Americanization, industrialization, and the modernity of an increasingly globalized world.

The Boucherie Today

Yvonne and I didn’t host our boucherie out of necessity, of course, but as a gesture towards sustaining the cultural traditions of our home. This perspective embodies the contemporary boucherie—a designated day for people to come together, share food, play music, and intentionally celebrate their culture.

While food was being preserved, it was also consumed throughout the day, enjoyed along with the camaraderie and an element of celebration provided by the community’s musicians.

In The Cajuns: Americanization of a People, Shane K. Bernard considers the modern continuation of these traditions in terms of sociologist Herbert J. Gans’s concept of “symbolic ethnicity”—which “permits minorities to feel ethnic by participating in traditional holidays and festivals, by consuming traditional cuisine, and by listening to traditional music, among other activities—none of which require the burden of practicing folkways on a daily basis.” Instead of an integrated way of life, Gans observed, “Ethnicity has become a leisure-time pursuit.”

No longer a necessary venture for community survival, boucheries provide a space for symbolic practices of tradition for twenty-first century Louisianans, allowing someone to express their Cajunness or Creoleness for one day with the option to return to more mainstream values the next. The event acts as a tool to help Louisianans hold on to a unique identity that has been central to their cultural fabric.

This makes the boucherie an imperfect act of cultural preservation. Though the tradition keeps intact some cultural values—such as the ritual of slaughtering a pig, the consumption of regional dishes, playing and dancing to Cajun or Zydeco music—contemporary boucheries have also taken on their own, new meanings.

Take Jeffrey Burge and the Pa Ta Sa Cooking Krewe, for example. Burge, from Eunice, and a group of around thirty friends host boucheries for festivals, cook-offs, and other events. With the help of sponsors, they purchase a pig, slaughter it, and then sell various dishes to festival-goers. In turn, Burge and his group donate the proceeds to a charity or other worthy causes. This year, Burge and his group will lead Eunice’s Old Time Boucherie at Lakeview Park & Beach on Lundi Gras. Other groups have popped up with similar missions. Toby Rodriguez, from Grand Coteau, traveled around the state and country to host pay-for-entry boucheries as a means of educating people about Louisiana traditions. Other examples are Vermilionville’s La Boucherie Merci, John Folse’s Fête des Bouchers, and St. Martinville’s La Grande Boucherie des Cajuns.

In this way, the modern boucherie can sometimes seem more a performance than a continuation of our ancestors’ traditions, more re-enactment than active participation in a culture. Regardless, these events hold value for their ability to bring people together in the spirit of the old tradition.

By inviting Yvonne’s and my neighbors and family to our boucherie, I thought that for at least a day we might take one step closer to invoking Berry’s depiction of community. The optimist in me believed that a few visitors would walk away with a newfound appreciation for the collective, a lost way of living in this country’s capitalist, independent-minded society—a memory we can’t stop clinging to.