Listen to an audio clip of Bubba Frey talking about old-time boucheries.

Back out in the parking lot at Legnon’s Boucherie, a meat market in New Iberia, I set a brown paper sack on the trunk of my Toyota and begin to unpack its contents: a bottle of root beer; a bag of cracklins; and a hot link of boudin blanc, which at Legnon’s is always dense with roughly ground pork, shored up with long-grain rice, enriched with pork liver, and peppered to impress. The white-hot heat of a Louisiana afternoon in August penetrates from all angles like a microwave oven, but I take my time. It’s a two-hour drive back to New Orleans, and sustenance is in order. Even before I free the sausage from its white paper wrapping, I hear a low voice call out, “You got you some boudin, baby?” I turn to see a man lounging in the driver’s seat of a white minivan parked beside me. As if offering a lesson in boudin enjoyment, the man leans hard into his reclined seat, tips back his head, and using his fingers and his front teeth empties the innards of a boudin link into his mouth. “This place is the best,” he says, chewing with obvious satisfaction.

Boudin, a super-seasoned soft pork and rice sausage, is fast food, not given to pomp. Fuel stations are a primary source for it in southwest Louisiana; between ringing up Marlboro hard packs and scratch-off lottery tickets, cashiers use kitchen tongs to lift the warm links from Nesco ovens or slow cookers, snip them into manageable pieces with scissors, wrap them in paper, charge you just slightly more than a pack of gum costs, and send you on your way.

In Acadiana, the region of prairies and bayous where the Acadians (today called Cajuns) settled after 1755, having been expelled from Nova Scotia, you find boudin at supermarket deli counters and at the area’s manifold festivals. A place like Legnon’s, where the meat case glows with the rubies and roses of seven steaks and freshly ground chicken patties, is about as high-end as boudin shopping gets.

The absence of pretension in its packaging might prompt you to unwrap your boudin as I did, atop the closed trunk of your car (or, even more regionally appropriate, on the tailgate of your pickup truck). Go ahead! If you manage to make it to a seated position, as my new friend in the parking lot did, it’s within the cultural norm to squeeze the sausage into your mouth as you drive. You may eat the casings, most of which are pure pork products, but pressing the peppery filling onto saltines, or into hollowed-out bell peppers for baking, is equally acceptable. Boudin can be cocktail party food, wedding food, and Super Bowl buffet food, but if its presentation ever gets stuffier than a napkin and a toothpick, something’s fishy.


Bonding with Boudin
I first started eating boudin some seven years ago, once I’d lived in New Orleans long enough to need a breather from urban living and began exploring outside the city’s limits. I experienced my first link ever at Poche’s Market in Breaux Bridge, a town I’ve since come to regard as a boudin hotbed because of its several irresistible destinations: Poche’s for livery links; Charlie T’s for milder, green-onion-spiked specimens; the restaurant Café des Amis for boudin-stuffed omelets; Babineaux Slaughter House for increasingly difficult-to-find boudin rouge (blood boudin); and Bayou Boudin & Cracklin’ for innovative white bean and tasso boudin, as well as fantastically seasoned cracklins.

Some newcomers to boudin country require periods of palate adjustment. The liver component is too exotic, or the soft texture is off-putting, or the deliberate seasonings are challenging (for seasoning-phobes, Floyd Poché, the market’s proprietor, suggests trying a balanced Cajun seven-course meal: one pound of boudin plus a six-pack). Perhaps thanks to my late grandfather’s liverwurst-and-raw-onion sandwich habit, or perhaps because eating in New Orleans had prepared my palate for boudin’s riches, my affection for the sausage was immediate. Acadiana is rural and removed enough—from New Orleans, as well as the rest of the country—that even its largest town, Lafayette, has an old-fashioned charm; the liver in Poche’s boudin seemed to be an edible expression of that. Ditto the boudin’s simple wrapping, its made-today freshness, and its take-it-or-leave-it seasoning. I took to it without condition.

My easy bonding with the sausage was fortunate, as a few years later I got a job gathering interviews for the Southern Foodways Alliance’s Southern Boudin Trail oral history project. This work, which is ongoing, has changed my life in at least two ways. First, I never leave the city without an ice chest in the car anymore. Second, I Google gout symptoms more often than I ever imagined would be necessary for a former vegetarian who hasn’t yet turned forty.

To date, we’ve accumulated roughly thirty interviews for the Boudin Trail, a preservation project archived at the University of Mississippi in Oxford that also exists on the Web as a resource for scholars, tourists, and the plain interested. Most of our subjects are boudin makers, but I’ve also chatted with rice growers, folklorists, historians, and one meat inspector. So many voices. Some of them still speak the Cajun-French dialect that began to disappear from dinner tables in Acadiana two generations ago—many subjects have told me that their parents were punished with slaps and spanks for speaking French in school. I’m short on female voices—boudin making is a man’s world—though nearly every boudin maker credits his momma or MawMaw (grandmother) as a culinary inspiration.

Besides the boudin, there’s one constant, one thread that connects all of the interviews: place. Boudin is so of Acadiana that it’s nearly impossible to find it two hours away in New Orleans, or in Shreveport, or in Monroe. Which means, lucky me, that a boudin documentarian must go to it.