Christina Leo
Maitland “Spuddy” Faucheux crafted the tables at Spuddy’s himself of salvaged cypress wood. The iconic mural is the centerpiece for the restaurant, smoked meats market, catering business, and cooking class kitchen.
From the outside, the weather-worn facade of Spuddy’s Cajun Foods peers out onto roadside sugarcane like a relic, one of those small-town institutions known only to savvy locals chasing homemade boudin or shelter from the rain over the wide, tawny prairie of Vacherie, Louisiana. But one step inside the small glass door, beside a vintage pinball gumball machine and steeped in the scent of peppers and pecan wood, the restaurant begins to reveal its character, a curated collection of handmade cypress tables, multi-national knickknacks, and scores of photographs displaying the generations of history behind its home on this stretch of the German Coast, the east-of-the-Mississippi region settled largely by Rhineland immigrants dreaming of a rich New World. Overhead, portraits of long-gone plantations hover like ghosts, while LSU memorabilia and black-and-white scenes of Cajun country life take up the lower real estate, the whole room paying homage to the central wall’s mural of swampland and marsh critters: the perfect backdrop for a touristy snapshot.
At the other end of the kitchen, beside the walk-in pantry stocked with the papers of Faucheux’s research on old French recipes and the latest data in food science, sits the sausage-stuffer.
And that’s exactly how Maitland “Spuddy” Faucheux III, the owner of his nominal restaurant, smoked meats market, and catering business, likes it. These days, the old restaurant—which he purchased as Folse Seafood and Meat Market in 1993 as the only sit-down eatery in Vacherie—has been thriving on a concept unique to the lesser-known roads of Acadiana. The Cajun Cooking Experience, a themed class for large and small groups, combines the hands-on preparation of classic Louisiana dishes with a narrative history of the culture that helped create them, all led by Faucheux himself.
On this December afternoon, a pot of peppery stock already simmers on the industrial stovetop alongside a cast-iron pan ready for nursing the gradients of a roux. Clean chrome countertops occupy the room’s center beneath bowls of ingredients for andouille and European-style sausage, as well as peppers, spices, flour, and other accoutrements, each waiting for its star role in the upcoming demonstration. At the other end of the kitchen, beside the walk-in pantry stocked with the papers of Faucheux’s research on old French recipes and the latest data in food science, sits the sausage-stuffer, a pedal-operated machine more humble than hulking. And beside that, in a small, innocuous metal bowl: a cow appendix. Yes, cow appendix. Much whiter, longer, and more gelatinous than any image my imagination could have conjured up, this is the traditional casing for the enormous madlenn, or Creole andouille “ham,” the first of three projects lined up for today’s Cajun Cooking Experience. The “beef middle” intestine casing used for making traditional andouille—the next task before work on the gumbo and jambalaya begins—looks tame by comparison.
Christina Leo
Under Faucheux’s guidance, a simple cow appendix becomes a madlenn, or Creole ham, filled with enough andouille to feed a hungry crowd.
Forsaking the intimidation felt by less experienced hands, Faucheux handles these fixings with the air of expertise, despite the fact that he has no formal training in the arena of food preparation.
“When I first bought the building, I had zero experience in the restaurant industry,” said Faucheux, whose glasses catch the light off the pots, pans, and slinky ladles glinting overhead in the silvery kitchen. “I’m not a chef. I don’t wear a white hat. I never went to school for cooking. But I worked for entrepreneurs my whole life, and there were always people around who were willing to teach what they knew.”
This mindset takes its cue from the same history Faucheux studies and shares during his classes. He is, in the end, just one more successor to the Cajuns of old, making the most of limited tools.
“I threw away a lot of my first attempts at cooking. I burnt a lot. But you learn to experiment, to jump in head-first and be crazy.” —Spuddy Faucheux
“The word andouille can be an insult in French, kind of like calling someone stupid,” he said. “And back in the day, the ingredients people used in their sausage could be stupid, or even dangerous. Is there a mouse running across the dirt floor of your kitchen? Throw it in the mix! There weren’t country stores on every corner back in the 1700s—you couldn’t be picky when food was hard to come by.”
Faucheux credits a previous career in computer programming for development of the organizational skills necessary to running a farm-to-table business that celebrates clean and natural ingredients, but his drive for excellence began even earlier, working as a farmhand (and at gas stations and grocery stores) for the descendants of Italian immigrants in St. Charles Parish.
When Faucheux decided he’d had enough of his career in tech, he began selling paper and janitorial supplies, a gig which gave him access to restaurant kitchens around the region and reignited dreams he’d harbored quietly for years. He began learning how to smoke meat from his building’s former owner, Antoine “Peanut” Folse, and studied the expertise of his friend Ruby Charles, the cook and mother of eight who prepared plate lunches for Faucheux when he first bought the business.
Christina Leo
“I threw away a lot of my first attempts at cooking,” he said. “I burnt a lot. But you learn to experiment, to jump in head-first and be crazy.”
But craziness isn’t always an inside job. Over the course of several years, Spuddy’s Cajun Foods struggled under the weight of man-made and natural disasters, as when his wife Elaine lost her job as Administrative Assistant for DOE—Faucheux’s “safety net” while embarking on his restaurant dream—in a period of time shared by a tornado that ripped the roof of the kitchen. Then came Hurricane Gustav, and the opening of a bridge that diverted sixty percent of the traffic away from Spuddy’s, and finally, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which spelled disaster for the Gulf and any Louisianan selling seafood for a living.
It wasn’t until Faucheux decided to cut his losses and sell the business that everything changed. On the very same day he waited for the broker to arrive, a woman named Robyn Tanner, whom he had befriended at their parents’ shared nursing home while she was visiting from Switzerland, stood on a small red crate in the kitchen of Spuddy’s, cooking a pot of jambalaya under Faucheux’s direction. After listening to him expound on the history behind the food they were making, she left to tour Evergreen Plantation. While she was there, she took a moment to meditate under an oak tree, then promptly returned to Spuddy’s and warned him not to sell. He should start a cooking class dedicated to the history of Cajun cuisine on the German Coast. The life-changing moment had arrived—an award, almost, for all the years spent learning the hard way.
Christina Leo
Still, years later, Faucheux makes things easy for amateur chefs who might have missed out on a childhood of hurricanes and tomato-picking. Today, the Cajun Cooking Experience has drawn Eric Marcoullier, the chief product officer of Manifest—a Denver-based travel service—who has brought his two teenage sons to experience Cajun culture in and around New Orleans, the city where he spent a year of college at Tulane University as a college student.
“I find that so few places in our country have culture, but Louisiana is an exception,” Marcoullier said as we sat around a table with Faucheux and Elaine for our hard-earned supper, scarfing down what we unanimously agreed to be some of the best gumbo, jambalaya, and potato salad ever created by novice hands. “I grew up in Florida, where everything felt so transient, but in New Orleans, everything takes hold.”
Christina Leo
To Colorado natives, each step in the journey to gumbo and jambalaya might be a first-time experience, but even a long-time Louisianan (like the writer) might learn a thing or two about regional cuisine at Spuddy’s.
Under Faucheux’s instruction and conversation, even the most time-honed dishes of Cajun cooking seem brand-new, each ingredient introduced with its own narrative, its own history, and even a bit of personality before being thrown into the pot. Or, you know, machine-funneled into an appendix. (A little spillage, Spuddy noted, is just fine. Perfection is overrated.)
“The settlers that came from Germany, France, Spain, Canada, even the Canary Islands—they came because they were told they would get rich off the land,” Faucheux said. “They thought they’d hit the jackpot, but instead they found themselves working their butts off, doing what they could with swamps, jungles, and mosquitos. Of course, most of what’s being cooked here in this kitchen today—the rice, the okra—was contributed by African slaves.”
The German Coast, Spuddy reminds the group, was home to the largest slave revolt in U.S. History, a march through St. John the Baptist, St. Charles, and Jefferson Parishes that resulted in the execution of 95 rebels in the year 1811, when the area was still the Territory of Orleans.
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“There’s hardly a building in New Orleans or a sugar cane farm in Louisiana that doesn’t owe itself to slave labor,” said Faucheux. “It’s really disgusting, but it’s part of history, and it’s our job to make sure these stories get told. You’ve got to bring in all the players.”
Like a gumbo made from African rice, German sausage, and French roux, the mix of cultures in Louisiana cuisine is an inimitable flux of flavors, a menu carved from the labors of necessity and the tastes of long-lost homelands. The three-hundred-year-old cypress stumps beneath the floods of the Vacherie lowlands are proof enough that the seeds of the past find purchase in the present, if only someone speaks their stories anew.
“I am having a blast right now,” said Faucheux, the bubbles on the stovetop tapping a beat to the framed “This Kitchen is for Dancing” sign hanging beside the sausage-stuffer, the vintage flour cans, and the little red crate memorialized on a top shelf. “The past may be history, but I feel reborn.”
Try it at home! Get Spuddy's recipe for Andouille, sausage, and chicken gumbo, here.
Spuddy’s Cajun Cooking Experience
2644 LA-20
Vacherie, LA 70090
