By Sara Roahen | Feb/March 09 | Features

Adventures of a Boudin Junkie

An epic search through Cajun country for pork, rice, and sausage perfection

The Queen of Boudin
On the morning I arrived at Herbert's to observe and interview the boudin maker Beverly Giardelli, three men stood around a long steel table picking through a cooked mixture of ribs, shanks, trimmings, liver, kidneys, and heart, separating meat from bones. When they finished, Giardelli knelt on top of another production table to reach the feeding tray of a meat grinder, through which she passed whole peeled raw onions and all the cooked pieces and parts that produce Hebert’s full, round pork-intensive boudin. The grinding complete, she tumbled the meat and onions in an automatic mixer, incorporating three Magnalite pots of cooked medium-grain rice, along with green onion tops and unmeasured handfuls of black pepper, red pepper, and salt. Before stuffing the sausage mixture into casings, Giardelli set a few gallons of the mixture aside for making blood sausage later.

Hebert’s is only the second source of commercial blood boudin I’ve come across in Acadiana (the first was Babineaux Slaughter House in Breaux Bridge), but not for lack of trying. While the idea of it may be morbid, blood boudin is a delight to eat; it has a limitless depth of flavor, and yet it’s somehow also mellow and smooth, a juxtaposition that calls to mind the region’s impenetrably black but easy-to-drink dark roast coffee.

Fresh pig’s blood maintains a beautiful deep rose hue for hours after it’s spilled. Giardelli told me that she almost passed out her first time making sausage with it, but that she loved eating blood boudin as a child while growing up in Abbeville. Today, some of Hebert’s best blood boudin customers are children. As for Giardelli, she’s about had enough. When lunchtime rolled around, she ordered us both foot-long chili dogs from Sonic.

It took her just four hours to produce about four hundred pounds of boudin, with the help of several co-workers who wordlessly stepped in to assist at just the right moments. Meanwhile, a persistent stream of customers passed through the meat market’s doors, some buying links of hot boudin to eat in the parking lot, others dropping in to inquire about the cost of purchasing a whole butchered pig. It was Monday, and I remarked on the impressive flow of business. “This is nothing,” Giardelli said. “Just wait for the colder months—October and November. That’s when people start bringing their animals in from pasture, and then to the slaughterhouse to be processed. Leave them out all winter long and they’ll lose too much weight.”

Wintertime is Hebert’s busiest season, just as it was high season for the old-time boucheries. In the realm of boudin, it sometimes seems that not so much has changed after all. And why would it? Boudin is a historical food, a beloved food, a food that refuses to stale. There’s no end to the oral histories I could conduct for the Boudin Trail—my interview wish list contains a few dozen folks, and every time I pass through Cajun country I add a few more. That supermarket, this convenience store, those butcher shops. More seem to open every day. If in a hundred years the Sam’s Clubs and gas stations have all been replaced by online shopping kiosks and battery-charging bays, I am certain that the boudin will still be here.