Rouses Magazine - The Cajun Issue

2

www.rouses.com/shop

born on the bayou

by Donny Rouse, CEO, 3rd Generation

photo by Romney Caruso

My Cajun roots run deep. My grandmother’s family, the Guillorys, lived in Eunice, the “prairie Cajun” capital of Louisiana. Like the vast majority of Cajuns, my Guillory ancestors came with the wave of Acadian refugees who were exiled from their homes in the French Canadian maritime province of Acadie.

But not all people in Cajun country descend only from Acadian exiles. My Italian great-grandfather J.P. Rouse arrived at Ellis Island, New York, in 1900. J.P. founded City Produce Company in my hometown of Thibodaux, which is in Louisiana’s Cajun bayou country. He helped share the local ingredients that go into our great Cajun food with the rest of the country. He bought onions, bell pepper, celery and fresh green onions — which he called shallots — from local farmers and shipped them by rail to stores and supermarkets as far away as Alaska.

My grandfather, Anthony, continued the tradition of neighbors supporting neighbors when he opened our family’s first grocery store in Houma in 1960. Pa bought Creole tomatoes in Chackbay, which they would clean and pack in the back of that little store, same as the cabbage and shallots and oranges from neighborhood farms. He said buying local was important for the community.

ROUSES

That’s the Cajun way.

While I’m very proud of my Cajun heritage, and it has definitely shaped who I am, I don’t think you have to be from South Louisiana to have the Cajun spirit. It’s about being mindful of where you came from.

It’s about passing down traditions, from generation to generation, so that we keep those traditions alive. We do that all over Acadiana and, indeed, all over the Gulf Coast.

Sharing is the backbone of Cajun culture. We love to introduce people to our fabulous food — our gumbos, étouffées, jambalayas and more. We love sharing our recipes, our cooking traditions and methods, our Cajun joie de vivre. Whether it’s my dad’s recipe for smothered chicken (see page 32), or your mom’s recipe for Alabama banana pudding, it’s in the sharing of these recipes that we truly reflect the Cajun spirit. And in that same spirit, we love sharing the stories and recipes in our magazine with you, our neighbors, customers and friends.

AFTER ALL, THAT’S THE CAJUN WAY.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M

1

table of contents

1 Letter from the Family 4 Contributors 5 Letter from the Editor 6 In Our Stores

CAJUN CULTURE 8 Cajun Alphabet

illustrated by Kacie Galtier

54 Allons Danser

by Michael Tisserand

55 The Cajun Side of Me

by Michael Tisserand

58 James Lee Burke

by Susan Larson

60 By the Book

by Justin Nystrom

62 Cajun Card Games

by David W. Brown

72 Cajun Folklore

by Sarah Baird

cover photo by Romney Caruso

CAJUN & CREOLE HISTORY

CAJUN CHEFS

42 Les Acadiens

22 Blackened Everything

68 Les Creoles

26 Memories of

by Ken Wells

by Lolis Eric Elie

CAJUN FOOD 14 The Gumbo Belt

by Ken Wells

18 Roux-Ga-Roux

by Marcelle Bienvenu

35 Cajun Seasonings

by Kit Whol

36 Maw-Maw Says ...

by David W. Brown

38 12 Essential Cajun Cookbooks

44 Boucherie and

Cajun Charcuterie

by David W. Brown

75 Cajun Glossary

by Sarah Baird

Chef Paul Prudhomme

by Marcelle Bienvenu

48 The Swamp Floor Panty excerpt by Ken Wells

RECIPES 19 Papa’s Court-Boullion 19 Smothered Mirliton 27 Paul Prudhomme’s Blackened Redfish

30 Donald Rouse’s Eunice Sticky Chicken

30 Donald Rouse’s Smothered Chicken 31 Crawfish Étouffée 31 Seven Steaks Étouffée 31 Smothered Green Beans with Potatoes

32 Smothered Okra 32 Macque Choux

The cooking ingredients that make up our Cajun Trinity — bell pepper, onion and celery — are the foundation of so many of our family recipes that generations of Rouses customers have grown to love. Sometimes we add garlic to the Trinity (the Pope), and we almost always liberally sprinkle our Cajun Blessing — fresh green onion (both the white part and darker green tops) and parsley — on top of our Cajun dishes.

—Donny Rouse, CEO, 3rd Generation

2

M AY • J U N E 2019

33 Alex Patout's Shrimp & Crab Stew

33 Rabbit Sauce Piquante 34 Alzina Toup’s Okra Shrimp Gumbo

34 Cajun Two-Step Beans 51 John Folse’s Chicken & Sausage Gumbo

O FF IC S U P ER M AIA L RKET O F TH N EW O R LEE A S A IN TS N S

the best of new orleans, now in your neighborhood.

We’re opening fresh, new stores in Daphne, Alabama, this May, and Gulfport, Mississippi, this June and more locations later this year. If this is your first Rouses Market, we can’t wait for you to taste all we have to offer. We've got the best of Cajun, Creole and classic Gulf Coast.

The fun? That’s lagniappe.

ROUSES

www.rouses.com/futurestores

Contributors SARAH BAIRD

LOLIS ERIC ELIE

Sarah Baird is the author of the books New Orleans Cocktails and Short Stack Edition: Summer Squash. Her work appears regularly in/on Saveur, Eater, GQ, First We Feast, PUNCH and Food & Wine. She was the longtime food editor and restaurant critic for the New Orleans alt-weekly, Gambit Weekly.

Lolis Eric Elie is a New Orleans born, Los Angeles based writer/filmmaker. He recently joined the writing staff of the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle. Before that, he wrote for the OWN series Greenleaf and the HBO series Tremé. A former columnist for The Times-Picayune, he is the author of Smokestack Lightning: Adventures in the Heart of Barbecue Country and editor of Cornbread Nation 2: The Best of Southern Food Writing. A contributing writer to Oxford American, his work has appeared in Gourmet, The Washington Post, The New York Times and Bon Appétit.

MARCELLE BIENVENU Marcelle is a cookbook author, food writer and chef/instructor at the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux. A native of St. Martinville, in the heart of Cajun country, Bienvenu wrote Who’s Your Mama, Are You Catholic and Can You Make a Roux? and Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine with Eula Mae Dora, and other books and cookbooks. She also co-authored five cookbooks with Emeril Lagasse.

ROMNEY CARUSO Romney is a Mandeville resident and has been a professional photographer for over 25 years. He has styled and photographed food for hundreds of local and national publications, and for several cookbooks. His portrait series of chefs and bartenders, titled “Shakers, Knives & Irons,” was recently displayed in New Orleans and Los Angeles.

PATTI STALLARD Patti is a freelance copy editor, proofreader and copywriter with decades of editorial experience in both the marketing and publishing arenas. A native New Orleanian and a culinary devotee, she was part of many creative teams that crafted ADDY awardwinning campaigns for a variety of clients, including tourism, professional sports and higher education.

KIT WOHL Kit Wohl is a lifelong food and wine enthusiast and author of over a dozen cookbooks, including Arnaud’s Restaurant Cookbook and The P&J Oyster Cookbook.

4

M AY • J U N E 2019

When I’m looking for inspiration, I often turn to Octavia Books, a great little indie bookstore nestled in Uptown New Orleans near the Audubon Zoo. The owner, Tom, and booksellers, especially James, are always willing to help and share ideas and recommend new writers. That’s how I found new contributors Justin Nystrom and Ken Wells.

— Marcy Nathan, Creative Director

DAVID W. BROWN

SUSAN LARSON

David is a regular contributor to The Atlantic, The Week and Mental Floss. His work also appears in Vox, The New York Times, Writer’s Digest and Foreign Policy magazine.

He is a regular commentator for television and radio.

Susan Larson is the host of the New Orleans public radio station WWNO’s “The Reading Life.” She was the book editor for The Times-Picayune from 1988 to 2009, and has written two editions of The Booklover’s Guide to New Orleans.

KEN WELLS Ken Wells grew up on the banks of Bayou Black deep in South Louisiana’s Cajun belt. He got his first newspaper job as a 19-year-old college dropout, covering car wrecks and gator sightings for The Courier, a Houma, Louisiana weekly, while still helping out in his family’s snake-collecting business. Wells’ journalism career includes positions as senior writer and features editor for The Wall Street Journal’s Page One. His latest book, Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou, is in stores now.

FRANK RELLE Frank Relle is a photographer born and based in New Orleans, Louisiana. His work is included in the public collections of the Smithsonian Museum of American History, the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Relle’s photographs have been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Geographic, The Southern Review and Oxford American. The Frank Relle Gallery is located at 910 Royal Street in the French Quarter.

MICHAEL TISSERAND Michael Tisserand is a New Orleans-based author whose books include The Kingdom of Zydeco; Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White; and a post-Katrina memoir, Sugarcane Academy, about Tisserand and other parents persuading one of his children’s teachers, Paul Reynaud, to start a school among the sugarcane fields of New Iberia. Tisserand is a founding member of the Laissez Boys Social Aide and Leisure Club, a Mardi Gras parading organization.

CHANNING CANDIES Channing Candies, a photographer based in Schriever, Louisiana, loves to travel, but says there’s nothing like fishing and camping at home in South Louisiana.

JUSTIN A. NYSTROM Justin A. Nystrom is an Associate Professor in the History Department at Loyola University New Orleans. He is the author of Creole Italian: Sicilian Immigrants and the Shaping of New Orleans Food Culture.

letter from the editor

by Marcy Nathan, Creative Director

If you’ve been a regular reader of our magazine (thank you!), you’ll probably notice a new look in this issue. For the past six months, as we were putting out our Holiday, Soup and Pasta issues, the team and I were busying ourselves behind the scenes playing with new designs — even a new name. But like kids who can’t wait for the Cajun Night Before Christmas — ’Twas the night before Christmas an’ all t’ru de Rouse — we ended up already sharing a bit of what our illustrator, Kacie, could do in those magazines. She created a visual Cajun alphabet for this issue (pages 8-9) and drew our first-ever comic. It features the Cajun duo Boudreaux and Thibodeaux (pages 72-74).

This magazine is a passion project for our marketing department, with no issue more dear to us than this Cajun one. Our team includes a Clement, pronounced Clay-mahnt (not Clem-ent) who lives in Chackbay. A Besson, pronounced Bay-sohn (not Besson like lesson) who lives in Labadieville, which sits along the banks of Bayou Lafourche.

She helped edit our Cajun glossary (see page 75). And we’ve got a Barrilleaux from Thibodaux, who helped teach the writer David W. Brown how to play the Cajun card game Pedro (see page 62-65); a LeBlanc from Gonzales, the Jambalaya Capital of the World; and a Hopkins who lived in Mobile, Alabama, but is in Gonzales now (so that counts). Don’t even think about offering either of them a bowl of red jambalaya.

Our new magazine designer, Eliza, grew up in Grand Coteau, which is nestled between Opelousas and Lafayette. When Eliza likes something, she smiles and calls you cher, which is a term of endearment like dawlin’ that is pronounced sha, not Cher, like Sonny and....

Are you surprised she chose the typeface Boucherie for our cover?

ROUSES

Amanda handles our advertising for the magazine. She grew up in Luling. Residents in nearby Des Allemands and Bayou Gauche still make their livings off of the bayou. I pronounce Gauche like gōSH, but Amanda, whose grandmother’s people are LaCroixs from Nova Scotia who settled in White Castle, pronounces it like OH MY GOSH! Patti, our proofreader/copy editor, lived in Luling as a child too, and she backs up Amanda on that GOSH pronunciation, cher.

The most Cajun of our group — at least the one with the thickest Cajun accent — is our marketing director, Tim, who grew up on a sugarcane plantation in Thibodaux. If you’ve ever seen him on our Facebook Lives, you know he almost needs subtitles. I’m from New Orleans, and I sound like I’m straight out of Brooklyn. If you ask Tim, he’d say I’m the one with the accent.

Now if you’ve always wondered how we attract such great writers, the answer is, they live here, or they grew up here, and in this issue, their Cajun roots are showing. Our newest contributor, Ken Wells, spent 24 years at The Wall Street Journal, but he made his bones at the Houma Courier. His new book, Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou, is in stores now. We included an excerpt from his chapter on Chef John Folse in this issue (see pages 48-51).

I have to say it’s been so much fun creating this issue. We’ve been listening to Cajun music, playing Pedro and Bourré, and sharing Boudreaux and Thibodeaux jokes. I’m a bit of a bookworm, so when we opened our store in New Iberia, I insisted we go to Victor’s Cafeteria, which is where Dave Robicheaux, the Cajun detective in James Lee Burke’s mystery books, often dines with his sidekick Clete (see story pages 58-61). Kacie, Eliza, Rob and our artist, McNally — just McNally, like Beyoncé or, well, Cher — and I ate ourselves silly.

Photographer Frank Relle’s epic photo of Lake Fausse Pointe in the Atchafalaya Basin is the focal point of our downtown New Orleans office, and was a daily inspiration for our magazine team. See Frank’s photos on pages 16-19. Visit his gallery at 901 Royal Street, New Orleans or at www.frankrelle.com.

Eating is what we do best around here. Just ask our wonderful food photographer, Romney Caruso. He’s half Italian, half Cajun — his maw-maw was born in Breaux Bridge in 1911, and his great-aunt was once crowned Boudin Queen. Romney’s Italian side shot our recent Pasta issue. His Cajun side shot this one.

And that Cajun tarte à la bouille pie on our back cover? Yeah…it never made it back into the box.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M

5

Laissez les bons temps rouler!

by Ali Rouse Royster, 3rd Generation

Play is so important for our little people — it’s an instrumental building block to children’s successes in science exploration, discovery and creativity. The Bayou Country Children’s Museum in Thibodaux is a fantastic place for hands-on play, and it is possibly the only Children’s Museum that places its entire emphasis on Bayou, Cajun and South Louisiana culture for our kids!

Every exhibit has a bit of local flair to it, from the full-size sugarcane harvester (my 4-year-old’s favorite machine to climb on and “drive”), to the Jean Lafitte pirate treasure dig area — not to even mention trying not to wake the alligator on the Swamp Stomp near the Miss Clotille (my 3-yearold’s favorite shrimp boat). There’s even a 2-story oil platform to climb up, fish from, operate a crane from, and then slide down! My 2-year-old loves the little area called Toddler Town — it’s full of pintsized activities for exploring and bigger, easy-tograb building materials for tiny hands. All three of my kids love the lil’ Rouses Market (it must be in their DNA!), where they can push their cart, shop for groceries and check out. (If they run out of money, there’s a bank set up right next door, complete with an ATM.) They usually find their way to the fully stocked café afterwards to play “restaurant.” When mom or dad needs a break from running around, there are presentations in Safetyville for all ages — toddlers like mine can watch puppet shows put on by local law enforcement about severe weather, what to do if you get lost and other topics that appeal to curious young minds. We love the new addition of the outdoor play area — there’s a real fire truck and a real police car for the kids to explore, and lots of room to run, climb and slide!

All in all, we just love our Bayou Country Children’s Museum! It’s a sensational addition to our Thibodaux community.

6

M AY • J U N E 2019

BOILED GULF SEAFOOD As the Gulf Coast’s grocer, and avid fishers ourselves, we feel a particular commitment to preserve and protect our seafood industry, which plays such an important role in our culture and economy. Most of our seafood comes from local fishermen with whom we have close personal and professional relationships. But our commitment doesn’t end at our coast. We’re mindful of how all of our seafood is caught and farmed. Limited Time Only! Get crawfish boil fried chicken hot in our deli.

HELPING THE GULF COAST GROW In Lower Alabama, Silver corn is worth its weight in gold. We get our Silver King and Silver Queen corn from two centuries-old farms: the Bengtson family’s in Robertsdale, Alabama, and the Sirmon family’s in Baldwin County. Silver King and Silver Queen corn varieties have bright, white kernels and a high sugar content, which gives them an exceptionally sweet flavor. Also from Alabama: Some of the tastiest tomatoes in the world are grown on Sand Mountain, a sandstone plateau in northeastern Alabama that is part of the southern tip of the Appalachian mountain chain. Our Lower Alabama stores get fresh shipments from our Sand Mountain farmers daily. ​

AN OLD-FASHIONED BUTCHER SHOP We have full-service butcher shops specializing in fresh meat, sausages and specialty prepared food items. Our trusted butchers are available to answer your questions about cuts, grades and cooking techniques. Beef and pork are cut by hand.

Choose from steakhouse quality USDA Prime beef and USDA Choice beef. On the more affordable end, we also have USDA Select Beef. Most of our stores also have a dryaged beef locker, in which the beef is aged at least 25 days. Special orders are welcome.​

IN OUR STORES EAT RIGHT WITH ROUSES

CAKES & DESSERTS

Imagine having your own personal dietitian with you when you shop. Rouses registered dietitian, April Sins, has handpicked more than 500 grocery items that have lower sodium, saturated fat, healthier fats, more fiber and less sugar. Just look for the Eat Right logo on the shelf tag or package.

There are as many reasons to order our cakes and cupcakes as there are ways to customize them. If you’d like to place a special order for a cake or dessert, stop by or call your neighborhood Rouses Market. For locations visit www.rouses.com.

FRESH SUSHI

If Rouses Markets is on the label, you know it’s good. We have close relationships with the dairies that bottle our milk, bakeries that make our sandwich bread, and manufacturers who package our products. Every Rouses Markets private label food item has been personally tasted by the Rouse Family and is guaranteed to deliver the best quality at the best price.

You’ve probably seen our professional in-store sushi chefs handcrafting sashimi and sushi rolls. We also have a variety of sampler platters, and sides like edamame and seaweed salad. Special orders and sushi platters are available.

FRESH FLOWER SHOP Our licensed floral directors are as picky about the flowers we sell as our chefs are about the ingredients that go into the foods we make. Visit www.rouses.com to order flowers for delivery within specified areas.

SOUP & SALAD BARS Our make-your-own salad bars feature an everchanging selection of prepared salads and freshcut vegetables and fruits. Our hot soup menu changes daily, though you’ll always find our famous gumbo — it’s a favorite year-round.

GROCERY DELIVERY If you don’t have the time to come to your closest Rouses, Rouses can always come to you! Order online at www.rouses.com for same-day delivery to your home or office.

DIGITAL COUPONS Get offers online at www.rouses.com and redeem directly in your local Rouses store with no need to download yet another mobile app.

ROUSES

PRIVATE LABEL PRODUCTS

CHEESE & CHARCUTERIE Our cheesemonger is an American Cheese Society Certified Cheese Professional, a title that requires passing a master exam covering everything from dairy regions to cheese making, ripening, storage and serving. Get his tips about cheese and how to build the perfect cheese board at www.rouses.com.

WINE, SPIRITS & BEER We offer wines and spirits at every price point and have experts on the floor to answer questions and offer pairing suggestions. Our craft beer selection includes cans, bottles and kegs from all over the Gulf Coast.

PREPARED FOODS You’ll always find something hot and delicious on our line. Depending on your location, you might find barbecue, pizzas, burritos or a Mongolian grill. All of our stores feature grab-and-go meals, including $5 daily deals, fresh sandwiches and salads, and heat-and-eat dinners.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M

7

8

M AY • J U N E 2019

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M

9

introducing

rouses new digital coupons Save on your favorite brands with our new digital coupons.

Get offers online at www.rouses.com and redeem directly in the store with no need to download yet another mobile app. Create your free account today. ​

10 M AY • J U N E 2019

www.rouses.com/coupons

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 11

SAVE $1.00 MANUFACTURERS COUPON EXPIRES 7/31/19

WHEN YOU BUY ONE (1) PACKAGE OF RICHARD’S 16 OZ. BOUDIN (ANY VARIETY) Consumer: Limit one coupon per item purchased. Void if copied, sold, or transferred.

Consumer is responsible for all sales tax. Not eligible for doubling. Retailer: Richard’s Cajun Foods. will reimburse you the face value of the coupon plus 8¢ handling if submitted in compliance with our coupon redemption policy.

Redemption policy available upon request. Send coupon to: Richard’s Cajun Foods 1606, NCH Marketing Services, P.O. Box 880001, El Paso, TX 88588-0001. www.richardscajunfoods.com

12 M AY • J U N E 2019

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 13

14 M AY • J U N E 2019

by Ken Wells; photos by Frank Relle

Growing up on the banks of Bayou Black west of Houma, I got a peek into the old ways of how people lived life and how they made their gumbo. We moved there in 1957 when I was nine years old. My dad, Rex Wells, an outlander from Arkansas, took a job as the payroll clerk for the Southdown sugar mill. His package included a tidy, rent-free planter’s colonial on six fertile acres set right across our clamshell road from the bayou at a place called Mandalay Plantation.

For the first couple of years, we got our water from a cypress cistern.

My five brothers and I learned to swim in the bayou. We kept big gardens and fished and hunted and trapped to supplement our larder.

My mom was born Henrietta Toups in Thibodaux. Bonnie, as she was called, spoke Cajun French, could dance the two-step and cooked a mean Cajun gumbo. By specifying a Cajun gumbo, I mean a gumbo cooked with a roux, although her roux wasn’t always the same. Chicken-and-sausage gumbo meant a dark roux (and no okra). She made her seafood gumbo — always shrimp and often shrimp and crab — with a lighter roux (and always with okra).

My mother had strict gumbo rules. If you didn’t make that roux, it wasn’t gumbo. She would never mix seafood in her chickenand-sausage gumbo, and she never put meat of any kind in her seafood gumbo.

Oh, and no tomatoes. Ever.

And, yes, cher, use filé, but only at the table to jazz up an already cooked gumbo. Do not put filé in your gumbo at the boil (though my mother had heard, to her horror, that some people did).

Oh, wait. Bonnie did sometimes break her no-seafood-in-herchicken-and-sausage-gumbo rule if fresh oysters were available.

She’d ladle them in at the very end, bring her gumbo to a boil, and then turn it off and let the oysters steep. Oh, my. The flavor memory lingers still.

That’s what I love about the Gumbo Belt, which I define more or less as the I-10 corridor from the Texas border east to Mississippi. All the mommas, daddies, and gumbo-cooking aunts and uncles have their ironclad rules — and then break them in the tastiest ways possible.

Back when I was a kid, gumbo had its challenges. Bonnie’s chicken-and-sausage often began with chasing a chicken down in the yard. Well, not always chasing. Our Granny Wells, who grew up in backwoods Arkansas, lived with us. She wasn’t more than 5'2" and the mildest-mannered, sweetest grandma on earth. But she had a clever way of luring chickens to her feet by dispensing tantalizing amounts of some special store-bought chicken feed from the apron she always wore.

Then when the right chicken wandered into the right spot, Granny would snatch it up and pop its neck with a speed and skill that made the Wells boys wonder if a spirit had invaded Granny’s body. If you’ve ever witnessed the death dance of a wrung-neck chicken, you have surely not forgotten it. But, mercifully, it never lasted long.

ROUSES

You still had to scald, pluck and dress the chicken to get it to the gumbo pot. But our chickens were free-range before that term was likely invented, their diets supplemented by generous servings of cracked corn once a day. It was always a plump hen, never a rooster, that my mother cooked. No chicken in my memory has ever tasted better than those.

But do I, today, want to chase down a chicken in the yard?

Absolutely not. I’m hugely grateful for the evolution of the modern supermarket — like the one that publishes this magazine — that makes gumbo prep so much easier but still hews to the traditions and sensibilities that keep the gumbo pot boiling.

When Bonnie got an envie to cook seafood gumbo, we often drove down to the saltwater bayous south of Houma — places with names like Dulac, Pointe-aux-Chenes and Theriot — to get the very freshest seafood directly from the boats. My mother often did the bartering in Cajun French because, back then, French was the dominant language in these bayou communities.

But more often than not, Dad and my brothers trailered our 14-foot johnboat down those dusty, potholed shell roads and, after launching, hooked up a small trawl and started “dragging” some remote crook of the bayou. It wasn’t uncommon to haul in 50 pounds or more of shrimp in a morning or afternoon. If the tides were running right, sometimes we just threw a castnet and filled up a big hamper with the glistening crustaceans that way.

That’s what I love about the Gumbo Belt, which I define more or less as the I-10 corridor from the Texas border east to Mississippi. All the mommas, daddies, and gumbo-cooking aunts and uncles have their ironclad rules — and then break them in the tastiest ways possible.

We caught our crabs using a different method. We’d bring strong twine and a bucket full of chicken necks that we’d saved over the season and stowed in our freezer. We’d cut the twine into, say, 12foot lengths, creating a dozen or more crab lines. Then we’d tie on a chicken neck and toss the bait into the water at some suitable spot along the bayou bank, letting it sink to the bottom, then wait 10 minutes and pull it up slowly. On a good day, there could be two, three or even four crabs clutching the chicken necks. Get a big net under them and they’d go right into the hamper.

My mother actually had a name for these crab lines. She called them “puhlonks” because that’s the sound the bait made when it hit the water.

Using those puhlonks, it was not unusual for us to come back with a bushel, sometimes two, of fat crabs. Those not reserved for the gumbo pot got boiled in Zatarain’s (a concoction I don’t have to explain to people of the Gumbo Belt).

Oysters were seasonal in our family — only in the winter months.

We sometimes bought them from the oyster-pluckers down the bayou.

But it wasn’t uncommon back then for us to harvest a sack or two while we were on a redfishing trip. The conditions had to be right.

Ideally, a cold front had moved through the night before with a coup nord — a cutting north wind — that had blown down the tide and left vast stretches of wild oyster reefs exposed. You didn’t need tongs, just

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 15

stiff gloves, to pry the oysters from their reefs with your hands.

Like most Cajun mommas, Bonnie cooked more than gumbo. She cooked sauce piquants (turtle or rabbit), court-bouillons (always redfish), and étouffées and stews made with either chicken or crawfish. You already know how the chicken got into the pot. For crawfish, there were no farms to speak of back then, and not that many vendors unless you wanted to drive all the way to Morgan City to buy Belle River crawfish — considered the biggest, fattest and tastiest — from a local fisherman.

No worries. Across the bayou from us, on Southdown land, sat a beautiful little stretch of swamp bounded by an old natural levee. We’d hike there, hauling our crawfish nets and the aforementioned chicken necks. I remember on one particular trip, we filled up two burlap feed sacks with crawfish in a single morning.

Our gardens were ambitious. We planted one on the batture, the narrow strip of land between the road and the bayou, and carved another out of a rambling cow pasture behind the farmhouse.

Believe it or not, in 1957, Southdown still kept a mule lot — in part, I believe, because tractors could not easily navigate the narrows of the batture, and because the batture often contained the most fertile ground. So once or twice a year, Dad would pay Southdown’s mule handler to walk his mule the mile down our dusty shell road and form beautiful, straight rows on our batture.

He’d then retire the mule and come back with a tractor to plow the big garden behind the house.

We grew pretty much everything that would grow down here; for our gumbo pot, okra, onions, shallots and bell pepper — celery, no. It’s too hot.

We’d also plant tomatoes, pole beans, radishes, cucumbers, squash, honeydew melon and cantaloupe, which did well, even though the watermelons we often planted did not. (Too hot, again, was our guess.) In the fall, we’d plant two long rows of potatoes.

My mother would help plant the garden but one thing she wouldn’t do is pick okra, as much as she loved to cook with it — not just in her seafood gumbo but in the tasty smothered okra stews she made. Anyone who’s picked okra knows why.

The okra hairs and milky secretions from the okra stems when you cut them away from the stalk can cause serious itching if they touch bare skin. Thus, it was left to the Wells boys — dressed in their “okra-picking uniforms” — to harvest the okra.

The “uniforms”? Long-sleeved shirts, gloves, ball caps and sunglasses to prevent okra juice from squirting into your eyes. Try that in the heart of the hot, sweltering South Louisiana summer when the okra ripens, and you will understand why the Wells boys would rather go to the dentist than pick okra.

My parents quit the bayou in 1968 and moved to a small brick ranch house on the northern

16 M AY • J U N E 2019

outskirts of Houma. There was no room for a big garden there, although Dad still faithfully planted his Creole tomatoes every spring along their backyard fence line.

Bonnie kept the gumbo pot going. By this time I had enrolled at Nicholls State in Thibodaux and would soon move there to avoid the daily commute. Happily, I had gumbo connections in Thibodaux as well. My Maw-Maw Toups lived with my Uncle Pershing Toups and his kindly wife, Ann Adele Naquin. Of course they could cook! Everybody with a Cajun or Creole surname in Thibodaux could cook.

I was working as a part-time reporter for the Houma paper and had little money and, anyway, the cheap lunchtime tuna sandwiches at the Aquinas Center on campus were no substitute for my chief comfort food. So a couple of days a week, I would just happen to show up at the Toups’ house on Spruce Street right around noon. The Toupses kept an open house — no need to call, just come and come hungry.

Oh, my. Reliably, I would walk into a kitchen where red beans or white beans and rice with sausage, chicken stew or gumbo, usually chicken-and-sausage, was on the stove. Sides? Always potato salad, sometime smothered green beans, smothered potatoes or okra.

Here’s how it went: Me: “Hey, y’all, it sure smells good in here.”

Maw-Maw: “You must be hungry, cher. Come get you a bowl.”

Me: “Oh, well, are you sure?”

Maw-Maw: “Mais, cher, look at you. You so skinny. Eat, cher!”

Me: “Okay — if it’s not too much trouble.”

Maw-Maw: “As if you ever been trouble, Kenny. And I know how much you like your gumbo.”

And so I would have a bowl of gumbo (and usually two), and we would talk and catch up, sometimes the Toupses lapsing into Cajun French, which I could understand well enough, though I do not speak it. And I would drive away thinking how lucky I was to have been born in this place.

Half a century later, I drove the length and breadth of the Gumbo Belt, eating gumbo in more than 60 restaurants and dozens of homes

ROUSES

to research my gumbo book. What I found was that from Opelousas to Lafayette to Breaux Bridge to New Iberia to Thibodaux to South Lafourche to Houma to New Orleans, and other stops along the way, the gumbo spirit — joy and pride in food, family and place — is as strong as I remembered it in my Bayou Black days.

More surprising is how our beautiful and tasty comfort food, so long a secret of the Gumbo Belt, has moved onto a national and even international stage in respectful ways that I could’ve never predicted.

I leave you with one example.

In Chicago, where I live now, there are at least seven gumbo-serving restaurants that I’ve discovered. One, called Heaven on Seven, sits in a nondescript office building just off the city’s downtown Magnificent Mile. But when the elevator opens to the seventh floor, you walk into South Louisiana — Mardi Gras beads and “Blue Dog” posters on the walls, Abita Amber on the menu, Cajun music on the sound system and the smell of gumbo wafting through the air.

Heaven on Seven is owned by a Chicago-born…Greek family. The gumbo is made with a roux and, while it might not stand up to the exquisite gumbos cooked in the Motherland, it is very good gumbo — the real deal.

And so when I inquire as to how this came to be, the young woman at the counter tells me that 20 or so years ago, her dad visited South Louisiana and fell in love with the food and the people. He came back to Chicago vowing to open a Cajun restaurant. And in an act that seems crazy, he called the most famous chef he knew to beg him to teach him how to make gumbo.

The chef? Paul Prudhomme.

The best part of the story: Paul Prudhomme — by then a superstar chef — called him back and told him to come on down and he would teach him the Gumbo Way. Is that not a beautiful story?

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 17

by Marcelle Bienvenu photo by Channing Candies

Until I was a young adult, I believed that the only way to make a roux was my mama’s way: Equal parts of oil and flour were combined in a cast-iron pot over a medium-low heat and stirred constantly until the mixture reached the desired color, which sometimes took over half an hour.

When Mama was going to make a roux, she announced to the household that she was not to be disturbed as she went about her task. You could die at her feet, and she wouldn’t even blink an eye. Her method allowed her to enjoy a couple of whiskey sours or Manhattans while she had some peace and quiet.

Chef Paul Prudhomme’s technique for making a roux was to get the oil almost smoking hot, then add the flour and in minutes, voilà! — a roux. I couldn’t believe my eyes. I still can’t bring myself to make a roux like this.

Years ago, I worked with Eula Mae Dore, who was the cook for the McIlhennys at Avery Island, on her cookbook. She professed that all rouxs should have more flour than oil.

18 M AY • J U N E 2019

flour about every 15 minutes for an hour or so, and you will have to stir it more often as the flour gets darker. You can store dry roux in an airtight container for months.

To use the dry roux, I usually mix equal parts of the toasted flour and water, whisking to blend smoothly. Then you can heat it up, add the onions and bell peppers, and continue in your method of cooking your gumbo. My friend tells me he browns the trinity, adds stock or broth, then sprinkles in his dry roux. Experiment to find what works best for you.

A roux can easily be made in a microwave. I haven’t had much success since my microwave only has a timer and an off/on switch, but one of my nieces swears by this process. Put 2/3 cups of flour and 2/3 cups of oil in a 4-cup Pyrex measuring cup. Microwave uncovered on high for 6 to 7 minutes. Remove from the microwave and stir with a spoon, then return to the microwave and heat again on high for about 1 minute, or until it’s the dark brown color you desire.

Be very careful, as the roux will be very hot.

Put the roux in a pot, and you’re ready to go on with your stew or gumbo.

Now on to the topic of the color of roux.

Here is my take: A French-style roux, which is made with butter and oil, is ideal as the base of white sauces that are cream- and milk-based, such as béchamel. A blond roux is used for white sauces that are stockbased, such as veloutés. My mother firmly believed that a peanut-butter-colored roux, rather than a dark brown roux, should be used for a seafood gumbo, since crabmeat “Cher, a little more flour always makes and shrimp are so delicate. A dark brown a slightly thick gumbo or stew, and that’s (chocolate) roux is for chicken and sausage how I like it,” she explained. I admit I do a gumbo and stew, or for meat-based dishes. roux “her way” when I make a shrimp and Several years ago, my culinary students at egg stew. the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University and I took a poll on camChef Paul Prudhomme’s technique pus. We found that the further for making a roux was to get the oil west you go from Lafayette, the almost smoking hot, then add the darker the roux, which might be explained by the hearty, meatflour and in minutes, voilà! — a roux. based Cajun cuisine of SouthI couldn’t believe my eyes. I still can’t west Louisiana versus the more delicately flavored seafoodbring myself to make a roux like this. and fish-based cuisine found down the bayou.

A friend who carefully watches his diet So the best rule of thumb is to make it showed me how to make a dry (no oil) roux however you like it. Let your taste buds years ago. It’s simple enough. Two to three be your guide. And hey, if you like precups of flour is stirred constantly in a castmade roux from a jar, that’s fine too. iron skillet over medium heat until it reaches Another niece of mine who doesn’t cook the color desired. This can also be done in very much always uses jarred roux. She just the oven. Simply spread the flour evenly buries the jar at the bottom of her garbage on the bottom of a large cast-iron skillet or can before her guests arrive!

Dutch oven, and place it in a 400-degree oven. This technique requires you to stir the

PAPA’S COURT-BOUILLON

SMOTHERED MIRLITON

Makes 8 Servings

Makes 4 Servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

²/3 cup all-purpose flour

6 tablespoons butter

²/3 cup vegetable oil

4 tablespoons all-purpose flour

2 medium onions, chopped

2 medium mirlitons, peeled, seeded and chopped

1 medium green bell pepper, seeded and chopped

1/2 cup chopped onions

2 celery ribs, chopped

1/4 cup chopped bell peppers

3 cloves garlic, peeled, left whole

1/4 cup chopped celery

2 (1-pound) cans whole tomatoes, undrained and chopped

1 cup chopped ham

1 can RO-TEL tomatoes (mild version)

2 teaspoons chopped garlic

1 quart warm fish stock or water

2 cups water

1 tablespoon salt

1 teaspoon salt

1 teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

21/2 pounds fish, cleaned and cut into chunks

1 pound medium shrimp, peeled and deveined

1 bunch green onions (green part only), chopped 1/4 cup finely chopped fresh parsley Steamed rice

HOW TO PREPARE

Combine the flour and oil in a large heavy pot or Dutch oven over medium heat. Stirring slowly and constantly, make a roux the color of chocolate. Add the onions, bell peppers, celery and garlic. Cook, stirring, until the vegetables are soft, about 10 minutes.

Add the whole tomatoes and RO-TEL, and stir to blend. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook, stirring occasionally, until the oil forms a thin layer, like paper, over the top of the mixture, about 30 minutes.

Add the fish stock or water, the salt and cayenne, and cook, stirring occasionally, for 1 hour. The mixture should be slightly thick. (If the mixture becomes too thick, add more stock or water.)

Add the fish, cover and cook (do not stir) until the fish flakes easily with a fork, about 10 minutes. Adjust seasoning if necessary with salt and cayenne.

Add the green onions and parsley, and serve immediately in soup bowls with steamed rice.

I had the best of both worlds — Mama (a Broussard) was of Acadian descent, while Papa (Bienvenu) was a Frenchman. Papa was also an avid sportsman who hunted and fished and loved to cook outdoors over an open wood fire.

- Marcelle Bienvenu, Stir the Pot

ROUSES

HOW TO PREPARE

Heat the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat. When the foam subsides, add the flour. Stir constantly to make a roux that is the color of sandpaper.

Add the mirlitons, onions, bell peppers and celery. Sauté for about five minutes, or until the vegetables are wilted. Add the ham and garlic and cook, stirring, for two minutes.

Add the water, salt and cayenne. Reduce the heat to medium, and simmer uncovered for about 10 minutes. Add the shrimp and cook for 10 minutes more.

An ode to

Cajun folklore The roux-ga-roux, or rougarou, rugaroo or rugaru, is a werewolf-type creature with the body of a man and the head of a wolf that prowls the swamps and bayous of Louisiana, as well as the areas around New Orleans. The roux-ga-roux is sometimes called a loup-garou, which means werewolf in French. Learn more Cajun folklore on page 72.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 19

Mission has gone soft. Super soft.

That’s good news for tortilla lovers, since you can now try all your favorite recipes with our new super soft flour tortillas.

Of course, you’ll still get the Mission tortilla taste you love, with 0 grams trans fat per serving.

2 0 M AY • J U N E 2019

SIMPLE INGR EDIEN TS, H O M E M A D E TA S T E™ .

SIMPLE INGR EDIEN TS, H O M E M A D E TA S T E ™ .

NON GMO

Project VERIFIED

nongmoproject.org

www.bonnemaman.us

#bonnemaman_us

FRESH MOZZARELLA Rouses Rio Briatti Mozz_Half.indd 3

ROUSES

4/8/19 1:40 PM

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 21

photo by Michael Palumbo

2 2 M AY • J U N E 2019

Blackened Everything

by Sarah Baird

When a group of hungry guests of the Southern Foodways Alliance gathered for a 2011 dinner honoring Paul Prudhomme at Cochon in New Orleans, the larger-than-life chef and culinary personality began the evening on a humble note: Hello, everybody. My name is Paul Prudhomme and I’m a cook. And I mean that very, very strongly.

And while this genuflection of modesty certainly speaks to Prudhomme’s affable nature and love of the kitchen, what everyone in the room knew well is that the Opelousas-area native was so much more than a cook: He was a man who fundamentally changed the face of what it meant to be a chef in the United States — all while creating a madcap frenzy around Louisiana cuisine.

As an (ahem) younger person, when I first learned about K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen — Prudhomme’s iconic ode to forward-thinking, history-respecting Cajun cuisine in the French Quarter — I automatically assumed the “K” stood for “king” because, well, why not? It made perfect sense given Prudhomme’s oversized stature in both regional lore and national edible history. Soon, though, I learned that the “K” actually represented a queen: K Hinrichs, his late wife and business partner, who was responsible for making the atmosphere and experience at K-Paul’s one that magnetized out-of-town guests and, ultimately, charmed the nation.

This doesn’t mean, though, that Paul himself wasn’t royalty. A proud product of the Cajun prairie who carried the area’s signature lilting accent until his death in 2015, there’s little about his path to acclaim that followed the traditional route at a time when becoming a lauded chef meant climbing the lockstep rungs of a culinary ladder and staying, mostly, out of the public eye.

Instead, Prudhomme carved out a very public-facing path with sheer Cajun tenacity — and therein lay his strength. One of 13 children and the son of a sharecropper, Prudhomme did things his way, meandering through stints in magazine sales, failed hamburger joints and failed marriages to finally bring a style of cooking — first to New Orleans diners, and then, the world — that was completely, deeply, in his blood.

“If that culture wasn’t there, if Mother hadn’t handed me this stuff, and my sisters and my cousins and my uncles and my aunts, if they hadn’t shown me all this by putting it in my mouth and talking about it all the time, I wouldn’t have done any of this. I don’t kid myself. I wasn’t born with it. I may have been born with the drive. But the food was taught to me by the family and the people around. It’s their food as much as it is mine,” Prudhomme recalled as part of an exhaustive oral history conducted by The Times-Picayune’s Brett Anderson in 2005.

And while Prudhomme is, undoubtedly, celebrated as a chef and restaurateur (where would contemporary Louisiana cooking be today, after all, without his blackened redfish?), he also played a critical role in shaping how the public perceives food as not only diners, but as an audience. Prudhomme and K both knew that eating and entertaining are inextricably linked, and through avenues that were novel at the time, heightened Prudhomme’s profile by making the excitement of the dining room at K-Paul’s accessible to the masses. If anyone was an influencer, brand builder and pop culture force of nature long before we had names for these things, it was Chef Paul.

ROUSES

But his massive role as a sculptor of our current food media landscape seems to be glossed over far too often in national discussions.

Julia Child gets almost all the credit for bringing televised cooking into living rooms across the country, but it was Prudhomme who showed that regional cuisines are just as likely to get viewers to tune in. Prudhomme protégé Emeril Lagasse has made a career out of Bam!-ing his way into pop culture consciousness as the quintessential Louisiana chef, but it was Paul who did it first — in an era largely unaided by syndication and social media. And while Prudhomme’s longtime friend Alice Waters is best known for sparking the farm-to-table movement at her California restaurant, Chez Panisse, it would be hard to surpass Chef Paul’s passion for encouraging chefs and home cooks alike to seek out and use the freshest possible ingredients. (After recalling how, as a child, he and his mother would dig up new potatoes fresh from the field to use while cooking, Prudhomme told Nation’s Restaurant News that he “recognized at that point how important it is to have fresh ingredients, and I’ve been battling that battle ever since.”)

A role model for authenticity and staying true to your roots — all while innovating, achieving and, of course, altering dining history — it’s easy to look at the ways Prudhomme succeeded in the kitchen and call him a legend. He was, after all, the first American-born executive chef of Commander’s Palace. But in our ever media-hungry world, it’s more important than ever to begin talking about how Prudhomme was, in part, an architect of something larger, a foundational example of how a chef goes from celebrated to full-blown celebrity.

Love it or hate it, it’s nigh on impossible to flip through television channels, stroll down the grocery store aisle or pick up a local event listing without seeing celebrity chefs everywhere. If you were so inclined, it would be all too easy to be eating a dish cooked with Bobby Flaybranded sauce, using an Alton Brown-branded spatula, in a Ree Drummond (aka The Pioneer Woman) branded crockpot. You could do this while flipping through 24-hour-a-day celebrity food programming on both the Food Network and Cooking Channel, or while getting dressed to head out to a “secret” pop-up dinner from the latest beloved chef du jour.

And while it’s difficult now to imagine a time when food programming didn’t dominate the television landscape and cooks didn’t launch their own lines of ready-to-eat frozen meals on a regular basis, before chefs like Prudhomme, the thought of a “celebrity chef” seemed almost ridiculous.

Paul Prudhomme was a man who fundamentally changed the face of what it meant to be a chef in the United States — all while creating a madcap frenzy around Louisiana cuisine.

Following the runaway success of his first cookbook, Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Louisiana Kitchen, in 1984 (which, by the time his first television show aired in the mid-’90s, had sold over half a million copies), Prudhomme found himself the origin point for, and nexus of, a Cajun food mania across the country. And while most restaurant chefs of the era would’ve simply returned to the kitchen and reveled in the throngs of customers drawn in by such a popular work, Chef Paul took a different tact: He found a way to reach even more people by going on television.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 2 3

you wanted cooking for you, beside you or simply having a seat at your table. If the old political test for likability, “Which candidate would you want to drink a beer with?” was applied to celebrity chefs over the generations, I still believe Prudhomme would be a top choice.

“It’s alive; it’s wonderful gumbo!” Prudhomme marvels at a boiling pot of gumbo in an episode of Always Cooking! “I can just see all the taste in it. Take a bowl of potato salad, pour some rice on it, and take the gumbo to it!”

When the tastes change with every bite and every bite tastes as good as the first, that’s Cajun. ­— Paul Prudhomme

Over the course of his lifetime, Prudhomme starred in five separate cooking shows on PBS, beginning with Fork in the Road in 1995 and ending with Chef Paul Prudhomme’s Always Cooking! in 2007, which can still occasionally be found airing on public television stations across the country. And with over 125 episodes of television under his belt — in addition to direct-to-video instructional tapes like Louisiana Kitchen Vol. 1: Complete Cajun Meal Featuring Blackened Redfish and a recurring syndicated news segment called The Magic of Chef Paul — it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Chef Paul was a bona fide television star, and one who scratched out the blueprint for all celebrity chefs to follow.

While Julia Child (and, before her, James Beard) also pioneered televised cooking

2 4 M AY • J U N E 2019

instruction, Prudhomme gave it flair. Where Julia made cooking that might’ve seemed intimidating — from cheese soufflé to boeuf bourguignon — accessible, everything about Prudhomme was downright affable.

Each facet of his television persona sought to reveal something about his Louisiana heritage, diving into both his personal story and the history of the region with a sense of warmth and tradition that, until then, had rarely been seen in a chef on television. It’s difficult to imagine tracing the legacy of any broadcast chef promoting the cuisine of their region, whether Southeastern or Southern Californian, and not see Prudhomme as the originator of this style of culinary TV. But Prudhomme was not only a representative of regional cooking at its finest and a storyteller extraordinaire: He was a man

Prudhomme’s sensibility not only as a chef, but as a live performer, also made him a favorite guest on talk shows. Perhaps most notably, he was well-liked by Regis Philbin, who hosted him on his daytime program countless times and gave Prudhomme’s recipes a key role in his 1993 book, Cooking with Regis & Kathie Lee: Quick & Easy Recipes from America’s Favorite TV Personalities.

This charm — combined with top-notch cuisine, of course — came to manifest what could be described as the first-ever celebrity chef “brand.” Whether consciously or not, Prudhomme was a master of self-promotion and branding before the term existed as something an individual could (or would even want to) do. There was his signature look, his Cajun identity (“Cajun makes you happy,” he told People magazine in the mid-1980s. “It’s emotional. You can’t eat a plate of Cajun food and not have good thoughts.”) And then, in the early 1990s, the catchphrase “Good cooking, good eating, good loving!” — which became his official television sign-off.

Prudhomme’s status as a deeply recognizable culinary force unto himself also extended to grocery store aisles, with a line drawing of his likeness donning each jar of Magic Seasoning Blends — his line of signature spices, rubs and, eventually, smoked meat — that debuted in 1982. And while restaurant chefs until this point had, by and large, attempted to keep their recipes and processes close to the vest, Prudhomme took a very different approach, bottling and sell-

painting by George Rodrigue

ing his beloved blends of herbs and spices with a kind of flavor-based populism that was theretofore unheard of.

“When we first opened the restaurant, we were using seasonings and I think we had maybe six or seven blends. The customers would come in and say, ‘Man! This is good!

What are you putting on this?’ So we’d actually give them some in foil; take a piece of foil, dump some in and wrap it. They’d come back and want to buy it,” Prudhomme told OffBeat magazine in 2005.

And from the classic blackened redfish seasoning blend, to gumbo filé, to cured specialty meats like tasso, it’s not a stretch to say that the Magic Seasoning Blends brand is now ubiquitous, available in all 50 states and 37 countries around the world.

“The way we work is that the blends are developed — actually next to my house I have a research and development kitchen, and that’s where I work at. We do the blend there, we send it here, they re-blend it and then they send it back to us and we taste it and if it matches, then [we] start blending it,” Prudhomme explained to OffBeat. “Every blend that we do is tasted. It’s looked at, it’s tasted and tested against the last blend.

That’s our system of being consistent. We do about 15 or 20 batches a day. If you like that kind of thing, it’s fun.”

Prudhomme was also one of the first chefs — if not the first —to embrace the culture of

ROUSES

the “pop-up” restaurant as we know it today. In 1983, Prudhomme took K-Paul’s on the road, setting up a residency inside the Old Waldorf nightclub in San Francisco and revolutionizing how chefs think about sharing their cuisine, with a “have knife, will travel” energy.

“It’s the first time anyone’s been nuts enough to try taking a restaurant on the road,” Prudhomme told San Francisco Chronicle reporter Vlae Kershner during the pop-up, which saw the likes of Jimmy Buffett in attendance over the course of its culture-shifting, 32-night West Coast residency.

“The San Francisco version of K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen had lines out the door nightly, with waits of three to six hours. Chronicle restaurant reviewer Patricia Unterman asked Prudhomme, who was holding court at a small table, why he’d allow customers to wait so long. He couldn’t answer at first because of the stream of customers coming up to tell him their waits had been worth it,” writes the San Francisco Chronicle’s Bill Van Niekerken in a 2016 tribute to Prudhomme’s pioneering pop-up spirit. “Thirty years later, the dozens of restaurateurs opening pop-up spots in the city should tip their chef hats to Prudhomme and K-Paul’s.”

But cooking for the masses with Prudhomme in an unfamiliar space had its pitfalls — just ask Chef Frank Brigtsen. “I was the ‘blackened’ guy. So I’m blackening redfish, prime rib, lamb chops, and making barbecue shrimp,” Brigtsen recalls in a 2005 interview about his experiences cooking for Prudhomme at the San Francisco pop-up.

“The place didn’t have a very good exhaust system, so I had to wear goggles. Every 15 minutes I’m dumping the sweat out of my goggles. It was brutal.”

Soon, the East Coast came calling, and Prudhomme set his sights on New York City.

His five-week, Manhattan-based pop-up in 1985 was even more intense and impactful than the San Francisco iteration, with lines often stretching block after block of people

trying to get a seat at a table. By the time Prudhomme opened a permanent New York location in 1989, the branding synergy of television spots, a spice empire and popups had turned Chef Paul into a culinary and cultural zeitgeist.

A snapshot from an April 1989 New York Times article about the harried excitement that fueled the opening of K-Paul’s in New York captures the energy Prudhomme brought to the city. “‘This is the closest I’ve been to the source since I first saw his Cajun Magic powder at the grocery,’ said Mario Rizzo, a retail coordinator who lives in Bayside, Queens. After an hour and 45 minutes, he was close enough to be caught in the blue light of the Paul Prudhomme cooking video that played by the front door. Shards of zydeco music and roadhouse smells followed the departing customers and seemed to fade over the technicolor cooking lessons.

‘I like TV,’ said Lilly Bunn [while waiting in line], ‘but my legs are tired.’”

It’s often noted that Prudhomme did not consider his food to be Cajun, exactly, but instead thought of it as Louisiana food. And no wonder: The man embodied and embraced the whole of the state through and through. Even as his brand grew in stature and global reach, the key components of the Prudhomme empire all remained centered in Louisiana, his permanent home base. His nationally televised shows were all filmed at WYES in New Orleans; his internationally renowned seasoning company continues to be based out of Harahan; and, for pop-ups, it was his local staff who traveled right alongside him to cook across the country. But perhaps most important, Prudhomme was able to take the Cajun flavors and jovial spirit of the cuisine on which he was raised and make it something completely fresh and all his own — a little French Quarter Creole, a little sourced from the Cajun bayou — for a brand, and a way of thinking about Louisiana cooking, that changed everything.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 2 5

An ode to

Cajun tradition

MEMORIES OF CHEF PAUL PRUDHOMME

by Marcelle Bienvenu In 1971, Time Life Books released the book American Cooking: Creole and Acadian, as part of its Foods of the World Series.

By some lucky stroke of fate, I landed the position of local consultant for the publication. I soon realized that few people (me included) knew of the existence of something called “Cajun cuisine.”

Up until then, most people thought of the local fare as “what your mama fixed you.” It was rice and gravy, crawfish étouffée or bisque, smothered okra, smothered pork chops and a plethora of other things “smothered” with onions, bell peppers and celery. (No one at that time called this trio the “Trinity.”)

A few years later, I found myself working at Commander’s Palace in the catering department. You see, Ella Brennan, of the Brennan family that owned Commander’s, and I became fast friends while the Time Life cookbook staff and I were investigating the Creole cuisine of New Orleans.

In 1974, when Paul Prudhomme appeared on the culinary scene in New Orleans preaching the gospel of Acadian (Cajun) cuisine, he quickly caught Ella’s attention. She was fascinated by the creativity of Paul Prudhomme and dubbed him what she called “a foodie.”

When Ella and her family announced that they were going to hire Paul, I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine a restaurant of Commander’s Palace’s caliber having a “Cajun” chef. At the time, you would have been hard-pressed to find a restaurant in the Crescent City offering chicken and andouille gumbo. (Heck, few people — other than those living in Acadiana — had ever even heard of andouille.) I explained to Ella that the chicken in the gumbo was cooked “with bones and skin,” and that I didn’t think the sophisticated diners at Commander’s would like to have to handle whole thighs and breasts in their bowl of gumbo.

“No problem, Marcelle. We’ll take the chicken off the bone before it’s served,” said Ella, who always knew how to solve any problem for her dining guests.

Paul was named executive chef, the first American-born executive chef at the city’s prestigious Creole restaurant Commander’s Palace.

Needless to say, I was anxious to meet a Cajun chef who was born and raised in Opelousas, not far from my hometown of St. Martinville.

We hit it off; I was quite charmed by this country chef. The story about him having little bags of his special seasoning blends is true. In the midst of cooking, he would pull out a wad of his seasoning mix to deftly sprinkle into the pot.

2 6 M AY • J U N E 2019

Long before the chef Paul Prudhomme introduced his brand of Cajun cooking to the rest of the world, and started a trend of blackened everything, Cajuns in South Louisiana’s bayous, swamplands, and coastal marshes were cooking and eating redfish, and other seafood there for the taking.

Cajun cuisine was developed by people that lived off the land, adapting rural French cooking to the ingredients in Acadiana and adopting influences from their native, Spanish, German, Italian and African-Americans neighbors. ​​Learn about traditional Cajun dishes starting on page 32.

I loved his philosophy of using the freshest of the fresh ingredients from local growers, and he easily convinced the Brennan family (and his increasing number of fans) that a potato or any vegetable — okra, tomatoes, corn — grown and picked locally was far more flavorful than those exotic ones that were trucked in from who knew where. He knew this firsthand, because he and his family cooked and ate whatever their home gardens supplied. This belief became an epoch in the ever-evolving cuisine of South Louisiana. When Paul wanted to put quail on the menu, he sought out a farmer in South Mississippi — close to home — to provide the birds for Commander’s.

When Paul left Commander’s to open his restaurant K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, there was no doubt in my mind that his casual establishment was going to be a smash hit. The first time I dined at K-Paul’s, I was in awe of his fried mirliton pirogues, filled with fried shrimp and fried oysters and dressed with a béarnaise sauce flavored with bits of tasso. Wow! He was a magician at combining flavors that tickled your taste buds.

When Ella & her family announced that they were going to hire Paul, I was stunned. I couldn’t imagine a restaurant of Commander’s Palace’s caliber having a “Cajun” chef.

I consider myself lucky to have enjoyed his blackened fish and pork chops. He reinvented turducken and brought tasso (once made with trimmings from a boucherie) to great heights by making his own tasso from a better cut of pork — the shoulder.

I always remember Paul sitting at a table near the kitchen, tasting each and every item on the menu before it went out to his guests. And I know how lucky am I to have worked with him and the Brennans.

photo by Romney Caruso

PAUL PRUDHOMME’S BLACKENED REDFISH

Makes 6 Servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED 1 tablespoon paprika 2½ teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon onion powder 1 teaspoon garlic powder 1 teaspoon cayenne pepper ½ teaspoon thyme leaves ½ teaspoon dried oregano leaves 1½ cups unsalted butter, melted 6 skinless redfish, pompano or tilefish fillets, or other firmfleshed fish, each 8 to 10 ounces and about 1/2 inch thick

HOW TO PREPARE

In a small bowl, combine the paprika, salt, onion powder, garlic powder, cayenne, thyme and oregano. Mix well. Set aside.

ROUSES

Place a large cast-iron skillet over high heat until very hot, about 10 minutes. It will get smoky, so turn on the exhaust fan and turn off the smoke detector.

Meanwhile, pour 2 tablespoons of melted butter in each of 6 small ramekins; set aside and keep warm. Pour the remaining butter into a shallow bowl. Dip each fillet in the butter so that both sides are well coated. Sprinkle the spice mix generously and evenly on both sides of the fish, patting it on by hand.

When the skillet is heated, place the fillets inside without crowding and top each with 1 teaspoon of melted butter. Cook, uncovered, until the underside looks charred, about 2 minutes. Turn the fillets over and again pour 1 teaspoon of butter on top; cook until done, about 2 minutes more. Transfer to warmed plates and repeat with the remaining fish. Serve immediately, with a ramekin of butter on each plate.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 2 7

MANUFACTURER’S COUPON

EXPIRES: 6/30/19

Reproduction, alteration, transfer or sale of this coupon or its contents is prohibited and is a criminal offense.

SAVE $1.00

on any TWO (2) NABISCO Cookies or Crackers (3.5 oz. or larger, any variety)

SNACK, SCAN WIN! AND YOU COULD

2 8 M AY • J U N E 2019

NO PURCHASE NECESSARY. Open to residents of the 50 United States (D.C.) and Puerto Rico, 18 and older. Sponsor, related entities, their families and those living in the same household are ineligible. Ends 11:59 pm ET on 9/5/19. Void where prohibited. Visit www.screentimefavorites.com to play and for details including the free method of entry.

© Mondelēz International group

RETAILER: Mondelēz Global LLC or a subsidiary, will reimburse the face value of this coupon plus handling if submitted in compliance with its Coupon Redemption Policy, previously provided to you and available upon request. Cash value 1/100¢. Coupon can only be distributed by Mondelēz Global LLC or its agent. Mail to: Mondelēz Global, LLC 1538, NCH Marketing Services, P.O. Box 880001, El Paso, TX 88588-0001. Offer expires: 6/30/19.

CONSUMER: One coupon valid for item(s) indicated. Any other use constitutes fraud. VOID IF COPIED, TRANSFERRED, PURCHASED OR SOLD. Valid only in the USA, FPOs and APOs. © Mondelēz International group

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 2 9

Ça C’est Bon!

photos by Romney Caruso

People often confuse sticky chicken with smothered, but Donald Rouse says the two are not the same.

“My mom grew up in Eunice, which is near Mamou and not too far from Opelousas, where Paul Prudhomme was raised. My grandparents made sticky and smothered. For sticky chicken, you typically only use salt and pepper for seasoning, though I sometimes use Rouses Cajun seasoning, and it is cooked in just a bit of grease, lid off. Smothered chicken is made with onions, and the chicken can be dusted with flour, which helps thicken the gravy. It’s cooked with the lid on. You can smother just about any meat; I particularly like smothered pork chops. When we are at the duck camp in South Louisiana – I’ve been taking Donny there since he was a kid — we always use fresh duck.”

DONALD ROUSE’S EUNICE STICKY CHICKEN

Makes 4 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

DONALD ROUSE’S SMOTHERED CHICKEN

Makes 6 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

1 (3- to 4-pound) chicken, cut into 8 pieces Salt and freshly ground black pepper or Rouses Cajun seasoning 1 cup all-purpose flour

1 (3- to 4-pound) chicken, cut into 8 pieces

3 tablespoons vegetable oil

Salt and freshly ground black pepper or Rouses Cajun seasoning

3 cups of the trinity (chopped bell pepper, onions and celery)

Vegetable oil

3 cloves garlic, very finely chopped

HOW TO PREPARE

Season the chicken with salt and pepper (or Rouses Cajun seasoning). Coat a hot skillet with cooking oil and add the chicken. Cook, lid off, until chicken is brown and sticky and liquid has evaporated.

Reduce the heat to low, and simmer, uncovered, stirring often. Check the chicken for tenderness after 1 hour. (When the juices of the chicken run clear when pierced with a knife, and the temperature reads 165 degrees when measured with an instant-read thermometer, the chicken is done.)

When the chicken is tender, taste and add salt and black pepper or Cajun seasoning if necessary. Serve with a vegetable.

3 0 M AY • J U N E 2019

1 bay leaf 1 cup chicken stock Hot cooked white rice, for serving

HOW TO PREPARE

Season the chicken with salt and pepper or Rouses Cajun seasoning.

Dust chicken on all sides with flour.

Heat the oil in a large heavy pot over medium-high heat until shimmering. Add the chicken to the hot oil and brown on all sides.

Add the trinity, garlic and bay leaf. Stir in the stock. Reduce the heat to medium-low. Cook with the lid on, stirring occasionally, until

tender. (When the juices of the chicken run clear when pierced with a knife and the temperature reads 165 degrees when measured with an instant-read thermometer, the chicken is done).

Taste and adjust the seasoning with salt and black pepper or Cajun seasoning. Discard bay leaf. Serve over white rice.

CRAWFISH ÉTOUFFÉE

Makes 4 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

1 stick (8 tablespoons) butter 8 tablespoons all-purpose flour 2 cups chopped onions 1 cup chopped celery 1/2 cup chopped bell peppers 1 pound peeled Louisiana crawfish tails 2 tablespoons hot sauce, plus more for serving 2 bay leaves 1 cup seafood stock

¼ cup all-purpose flour

1 teaspoon salt

1 quart beef stock

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce

Chopped fresh parsley, for serving

¼ cup sliced green onions

Chopped green onions, for garnish

2 teaspoons chopped parsley

Hot cooked white rice, for serving

Salt and black pepper to taste

HOW TO PREPARE

Melt the butter in a large skillet over medium-high heat until foaming. Whisk in the flour one tablespoon at a time. Reduce the heat to medium and continue whisking until the roux turns a deep brown color, about 15 minutes.

Add onions and sauté until translucent, about 2 minutes. Stir in the celery and bell peppers and cook for 2 minutes, until slightly softened.

Add the crawfish, hot sauce and bay leaves. Reduce the heat to medium. Stirring occasionally, cook until the crawfish begin throwing off a little liquid, 10 to 12 minutes.

Add the seafood stock to the crawfish mixture, and season with salt and cayenne. Stir until the mixture thickens, about 4 minutes. Add the parsley and green onions and cook for about 2 minutes.

Remove the bay leaves. Serve with steamed rice and hot sauce at the table.

SEVEN STEAKS ÉTOUFFÉE

Makes 6 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

4 pounds seven steaks or round steaks

Granulated garlic to taste

HOW TO PREPARE

In a 12-inch, cast-iron skillet, heat oil over medium-high heat.

Add steaks and sear until golden brown. Remove meat from pan and keep warm.

Using the same skillet, sauté onions, celery, bell pepper and minced garlic 3-5 minutes or until vegetables are wilted.

Sprinkle the flour over the vegetables and cook for 2 minutes.

Return steaks to skillet, and add beef stock and Worcestershire. Bring mixture to a rolling boil, then reduce to a simmer.

Simmer on the stove until tender, around 1½ hours.

Turn off the heat and add green onions and parsley. Season to taste using salt, pepper and granulated garlic. Serve over boiled rice.

SMOTHERED GREEN BEANS WITH POTATOES

Makes 6 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED ½-pound bacon, chopped

4 tablespoons vegetable oil

1/4 cup all-purpose flour

1 cup diced onions

2 cups chopped onions

1 cup diced celery

1½ teaspoons salt

2 cups diced bell pepper

1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper

¼ cup minced garlic

1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 31

HOW TO PREPARE

Wash the okra under cool water. Cut off the stems and slice each pod crosswise into 1/2-inch rounds.

In a heavy saucepan or Magnalite cookware, heat the oil over medium-high heat and sauté the okra, onion, celery, bell pepper, and garlic until the okra is no longer stringy, about 30 minutes.

Add the tomatoes, bay leaves and seasonings.

Reduce the heat to medium and simmer for an hour.

Serve immediately.

MACQUE CHOUX

Makes 8 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

8 ears of fresh corn, shucked

2 cups chicken stock 1½ pounds fresh or frozen unthawed green beans, trimmed 1 large russet potato, peeled and cut into 1-inch cubes (about 3/4 pound)

HOW TO PREPARE

Fry the bacon in a large saucepan over medium-high heat until slightly crisp, 6 to 8 minutes. Remove the bacon with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels. Set aside.

Add the flour to the fat in the pan and stir constantly for 5 to 8 minutes, making a medium-brown roux the color of peanut butter.

Add the onions and cook, stirring often, for about 5 minutes, or until softened. Add the salt, cayenne, black pepper and water. Stir until the mixture is smooth and thick.

Add the beans and cubed potato. Reduce the heat to medium. Cover and cook for about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, until pototoes are tender enough to be pierced easily with a fork.

Uncover and cook for about 3 minutes.

SMOTHERED OKRA

Makes 10 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED /3 cup vegetable oil

1

2 pounds fresh or frozen unthawed okra

3 tablespoons canola oil 1 large onion, cut into 1/2-inch dice 1 large red bell pepper, cut into 1/2-inch dice 1 tablespoon minced garlic 1 cup heavy cream 1/2 cup green onions, thinly sliced 2 tablespoons parsley, chopped Salt and freshly ground black pepper

HOW TO PREPARE

Shuck the corn. Remove the kernels and set them aside. (To cut down on cleanup and keep things contained, try shucking inside a plastic or paper bag.)

Cut the corn cobs in half, place them in a pot, and barely cover with cold water.

Bring the water to a boil, then reduce to a simmer to make a corn stock; let simmer about 1 hour. Strain and discard solids.

In a separate pot, heat the oil over medium-high heat and sauté the corn, onion, bell pepper and garlic.

Add the corn stock, half of the green onion, half of the parsley and the heavy cream, and reduce to a simmer.

Simmer until the liquid has reduced and slightly thickened.

Season with salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Serve garnished with the remaining green onions and parsley.

2 cups chopped onions 1 cup chopped celery ½ cup chopped bell pepper 1 tablespoon garlic, chopped 3 cups chopped, peeled and seeded fresh tomatoes 5 bay leaves 1 tablespoon plus 2 teaspoons salt 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper 1 teaspoon dried thyme

3 2 M AY • J U N E 2019

Alex Patout’s family roots run deep in New Iberia. His family first settled in the area in 1828. Patout opened his first restaurant in the very late ’70s — his signature dish there was fresh redfish in a lemon butter sauce with lump crabmeat. By the early ’80s, he was drawing national attention, thanks in part to another chef famous for redfish, Paul Prudhomme, who sent national food writers to eat at Patout’s. “In one week we had Ruth Reichl, restaurant critic for The New York Times, Patricia Unterman of the San Francisco Chronicle and the critic from The Washington Post. Chef Paul really put me on the map,” Patout says. In 1984, Patout was named one of the Ten Top New Chefs in the country by Food & Wine magazine (the same year as Emeril Lagasse).

ALEX PATOUT’S SHRIMP AND CRAB STEW Makes at least 10 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

5 cups medium-colored roux 3 10-ounce cans whole peeled tomatoes or 4 cups fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped*

Bring the stock to a boil over medium heat, then add enough roux to make a thick sauce, a little at a time, stirring frequently (the sauce should drop from a spoon in thick beads).

Add the salt, peppers and Tabasco sauce. Let simmer for an hour or more, stirring occasionally. Add the quartered crabs and cook for another 45 minutes, then add the shrimp and cook for 10 minutes.

Add the green onions and parsley and simmer 5 minutes more.

Serve in bowls. Don’t forget the French bread!

5 medium onions, chopped 3 medium bell peppers, chopped 3 celery ribs, chopped 5 pounds medium raw shrimp in their shells, heads on (or 3 pounds, heads off) 1 dozen live blue or other medium crabs 1 tablespoon salt 11/2 teaspoons ground black pepper 1 teaspoon ground white pepper 2 teaspoons ground red pepper 4 to 6 dashes Tabasco sauce 1 cup chopped green onions 1 cup chopped parsley *For this recipe I like to use RO-TEL tomatoes because of the peppers that they have mixed in. Drain the tomatoes and

Gumbo and stew are both slow-cooked food made with stock, seasoning and roux, and of course they are both served with rice. But they use different amounts of stock. Stew comes out much swampier than gumbo. It’s heavier and has a lot more volume. I use tomatoes in my shrimp and crab stew, which is heresy to some Cajuns. ­— Alex Patout put them in a bowl. Break them up with your fingers.

HOW TO PREPARE

Heat the roux over medium-high heat. Add the tomatoes and cook until the mixture is mahogany colored, stirring often. Add the onions, bell peppers and celery to the roux. Remove from heat, and let sit until the vegetables are soft and the roux is cool enough to touch, stirring occasionally (this will take a good half hour).

While the roux is cooling, remove the heads from the shrimp and peel them. Remove the claws from the crabs. Put the crab claws and the shrimp heads and peels in a 10-quart stockpot; add 6 quarts water. Bring to a boil and then simmer, uncovered, over mediumhigh heat for 45 minutes. Strain the stock, return to the pot, and set aside.

Heat a large kettle of water to boiling, add the crabs, return to the boil, and cook exactly 1 minute. Drain and let cool. Clean the crabs and cut them in half lengthwise, then again horizontally (with your knife parallel to the crab back) to expose the meat.

ROUSES

RABBIT SAUCE PIQUANTE

Makes 6 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

2 rabbits (about 4 pounds), cut into serving pieces* 2 tablespoons Rouses Cajun seasoning

3/4 cup vegetable oil, divided 1/4 cup all-purpose flour 2 cups chopped yellow onions 2 cups chopped green bell peppers 1 cup chopped celery 2 teaspoons chopped garlic 1 (16-ounce) can whole tomatoes, crushed in their juice 1 (10-ounce) can RO-TEL tomatoes, undrained 3 tablespoons tomato paste 2 bay leaves 1 large lemon, juiced 3 to 4 cups chicken broth or water, as needed Fresh parsley leaves, thinly chopped, for garnish Green onions, thinly sliced for garnish ½ lemon, thinly sliced for garnish Hot steamed rice for serving *If you are using chicken, substitute 2 (2½-pound) fryers, each cut into 8 pieces.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 3 3

HOW TO PREPARE

Season the rabbit pieces with Cajun seasoning. Heat a half-cup of the oil in a large, heavy, aluminum Dutch oven or pot over mediumhigh heat. When the oil is hot, brown the rabbit, in batches, about 6 minutes on each side. Transfer to a platter and set aside. Drain the oil from the pot and clean it well.

Return the pot to the stove and, over medium heat, add the remaining quarter-cup of oil and the flour. Stirring slowly and constantly, make a dark brown roux. Add the onions, bell peppers and celery, and cook, stirring often, until the vegetables are totally wilted and golden, about 10 minutes.

Add the garlic and cook for 1 minute. Stir in the tomatoes and their juice, the RO-TEL, tomato paste, bay leaves, lemon juice, and 3 cups of the broth or water.

Bring to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium-low and simmer, uncovered, until the oil rises to the surface and a paper-thin skin forms, about 30 minutes. Stir occasionally.

Return the rabbit to the pot and adjust seasoning to taste. Continue to cook over medium-low until the meat is tender, about 2 hours. If the mixture becomes too thick, add the remaining cup of broth or water during the cooking time. Remove the bay leaves and add the green onions, parsley and thin slices of lemon.

Serve over steamed rice.

HOW TO PREPARE

In a medium saucepan, heat the stock and keep warm.

In a large pot over medium heat, add the oil and onions and sauté, stirring frequently, until the onions are soft and golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Add a little hot stock if needed to avoid burning and to keep the onions soft.

Add the salted pork and ham, and cook for 10 minutes. Add the garlic, celery, bell pepper and 1 cup stock, and simmer for 15 to 20 minutes. Add the mild and hot smoked sausages, and simmer for 10 minutes. Add the remaining stock and the Slow Cooker Smothered Okra, and cook until thickened slightly, 15 minutes.

Stir in the shrimp, parsley and green onions, and add salt and red pepper to taste.

Cook another 5 to 8 minutes, then turn off the heat and stir in the crab.

SLOW COOKER SMOTHERED OKRA FOR GUMBO WHAT YOU WILL NEED

Four 12-ounce bags frozen cut okra

1/4 cup corn oil

HOW TO PREPARE

Combine the okra and oil in a slow cooker and stir well.

Cover and cook on high until tender, 3 to 4 hours. Stores well in ziplock bags in the freezer.

Alzina Toups has been cooking some of the best Cajun food on Bayou Lafourche for more than 40 years. Her Galliano, Louisiana restaurant — Alzina’s Kitchen — is located in a former welding shop, steps from Bayou Lafourche. Reservations are harder to come by than real Cajun food in Oklahoma — she entertains only one party at a time. Meals are served family-style.

ALZINA TOUPS’ OKRA SHRIMP GUMBO

Recipe from the Food Network, courtesy of Alzina Toups

Makes 6 to 8 servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

7 cups chicken or shrimp stock 3 tablespoons corn oil

1 onion, finely diced 8 ounces salted pork meat, diced 8 ounces ham, diced 3 garlic cloves, minced 1 rib celery, finely diced 1 green bell pepper, finely diced 8 ounces mild smoked sausage, diced 8 ounces hot smoked sausage, diced 3 cups Slow Cooker Smothered Okra (recipe follows) 11/2 pounds small shrimp (51/60), peeled 1/4 cup snipped fresh parsley 1/4 cup thinly sliced green onions Salt and red pepper flakes to taste 8 ounces crab claw meat 3 4 M AY • J U N E 2019

CAJUN TWO-STEP BEANS

Some of the best Cajun food is made by home cooks.

Steve Galtier, our former HR director, talked us through how to make delicious smothered lima beans in just two steps: cooking, then boiling.

Step 1: Cook 1/2 pound salt meat in a large saucepan until just pinkish. Add 1 cup chopped onions and 1 clove chopped garlic. Add 1 pound frozen lima beans, and cover with 6 cups of chicken stock.

Step 2: Heat over medium heat until just boiling. Reduce heat; cover and simmer 21/2 hours or until beans are tender.

Season with salt and pepper to taste.

by Kit Wohl My husband Billy delights in keeping what is called a PAR level. PAR stands for Periodic Automatic Replenishment, or the minimum amount of pantry inventory needed to meet standard uses, with backup in case of unexpected demand.

Nothing is worse than discovering that a critical recipe ingredient is missing. Billy insists that once something is opened, a duplicate must be placed in the pantry or refrigerator.

Around here that means a goodly quantity of Cajun seasonings, fresh and ready for use. Authentic Cajun cooking blends fresh garden onions, garlic, celery, parsley and bell peppers — combined with fresh and dried hot peppers — to create flavors found only in Cajun country. Here’s my Cajun Seasonings PAR Checklist:

BAY LEAF The woodsy, earthy flavor of the dried leaf enhances many stews, gumbos, and vegetable or meat dishes, plus soups and sauces. Bay leaf is a must-have in a Cajun pantry.

CAYENNE PEPPER The misuse of cayenne pepper has created heartburn for creators of real, honest-to-goodness Cajun cooking. It’s a staple that, when appropriately used, adds a gentle yet well-rounded heat to many dishes. Add it sparingly, tasting as you go. Cayenne can be aggressive and its heat can vary over time, which is why so many have struggled unsuccessfully to duplicate Cajun recipes in kitchens elsewhere.

CANE SYRUP Think of it as Cajun molasses made from sugar cane. It is used with great pleasure as both an ingredient and a garnish for savory or sweet recipes.

CRAB BOIL Crab boil is a spicy blend of seasonings, including mustard seed, coriander seed, cayenne pepper, bay leaves, dill seed and allspice. It is a necessity for boiling shrimp, crabs, crawfish and other seafood. Everyone has a favorite brand, dry or liquid.

CORIANDER SEEDS These seeds have a warm, pleasantly nutty flavor and are easily crushed for use in sausages and brines. Coriander seeds have a natural thickening ability so they are often used in sauces.

FILÉ POWDER Acadian settlers were introduced to filé powder made from the dried leaves of the sassafras tree by the native people in Southeast Louisiana. It is traditionally used as a thickening agent for gumbo and typically served alongside the bowl to be added as desired by the individual. In addition to its thickening properties, filé powder adds a slightly smoky note or a hint of root beer-like flavor to food.

ROUSES

OREGANO, DRIED A member of the mint family, oregano is a distinctively robust herb used in many Cajun recipes such as poultry and stews.

PAPRIKA Paprika is made from ground sweet red pepper pods and comes in both mild and hot varieties. Use it to season meat, seafood and vegetables.

PEPPERCORNS Little, BB-shot-size peppercorns are available in a variety of colors from black and white to pink, red and green. Cajun cooks know that each color has a different flavor, from mild to robust. Some have an upfront taste, some more of an aftertaste; it’s all about balance. Use more than one kind of pepper for a full and complex flavor profile.

ROSEMARY, FRESH AND DRIED Many cooks and gardeners grow rosemary; however, I always keep dried rosemary around too. It’s an indispensable herb when the fresh rosemary is out of season or has all been used. With an aroma of lemon and pine, rosemary is versatile and used in an assortment of familiar dishes.

SUMMER SAVORY Savory comes in two broad seasonal varieties, summer and winter.

It is a mildly pungent herb similar to thyme. Often used in sausages, it’s also popular in poultry dishes, meat stews and beans. Savory should be used with a light hand, especially when it’s the dried version of summer savory. Fresh savory lasts about two weeks when properly refrigerated and has a more delicate flavor than the powerful dried savory.

THYME, DRIED AND FRESH Thyme seasons meat, poultry and vegetables. It’s a must-have, universal herb in our kitchen. Keep dried thyme on hand for when fresh thyme is out of season. Both the fresh and dried varieties combine beautifully with citrus flavors such as lemon and lime.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 3 5

maw-maw says Here is what you need to know about rice: when making a Cajun or Southern dish, use what your grandmother recommended.

Really. What, after all, is a recipe if not a telegram from the past — a little card written with care, able to invoke gustatory sensations across time and space. You look at a faded photograph and, yeah, you see the old-timey truck, maybe some once-young couple standing in front of a field or maybe a tree or a house, and you might feel pangs of nostalgia or marvel at what life was once like.

But prepare that recipe as written, and you are experiencing the precise emotions experienced by Grandma. You’re not imagining what life was like — in some small but profoundly real way, you are living it. So use the rice the recipe recommends.

On the other hand…why be a slave to a bunch of ghosts? There are hundreds of varieties of rice and, when employed properly, they can elevate your dish from delicious to divine. First, the basics: Classic Cajun dishes generally call for medium grain white rice. It can go in just about anything, though it is particularly suited to something like étouffée, with its oftentimes rich and thick sauce. If you are preparing a gumbo, on the other hand, you might consider a stickier grain of rice. Gumbo is a thinner broth. Short grain rice releases more starch as it’s cooked, and that starch is what makes it sticky.

3 6 M AY • J U N E 2019

by David W. Brown photo by Romney Caruso

When preparing a jambalaya, cooks often go for a long grain rice.

Now, I am sure half of the entrants in the Gonzales Jambalaya Festival’s cooking contest disagree with this, but hold your fire, friends: When you are making a pot of jambalaya the size of a bathtub, do what works for you. Because when it comes to jambalaya, there is no wrong rice! Only a wrong color. (Red. Red is the wrong color.)

Beyond Cajun cooking, different types of rice yield different dishes.

Jasmine rice is frequently used in Middle Eastern dishes because that rice exudes a floral scent that elevates shawarmas, grilled meats and kibbes. You might also consider jasmine rice when making a pilaf or any dish where the rice stands alone. Obviously, you wouldn’t bother using jasmine for its fragrance with a gumbo or étouffée; that delicate floral aroma would be smothered.

Wild rice is great with wild game — duck, rabbit or venison, for instance — because it has a stronger flavor profile and can stand up to proteins that possess a stronger, gamier flavor. (That’s why, when you see a duck dish at a restaurant, it’s frequently served with a wild rice pilaf.

HOW TO COOK RICE Each type of rice should be cooked differently. Because you are most likely to be cooking white rice, here is how to do that.

First, measure out your rice and water. “A lot of people like a 2:1 ratio of water to rice, but I like mine a little drier than that,” says Marc Ardoin, the corporate chef of Rouses Markets. (He prefers 1¾:1.)

Set your rice aside, and add your water to a small saucepan. Bring the water to a boil, then salt it. “Always salt the water after it comes to a boil,” says Ardoin. “If you put the salt in first, it will take longer to reach a boil.”

Add your rice to the boiling water, and shake the pot slightly to spread it out. When the water returns to a boil, lower the fire to a simmer and put a lid on the pot at an angle.

Once you see that a majority of the water has evaporated and cooked into the rice, close the lid the rest of the way. When all the water has been absorbed, turn the fire off and let it sit for about 10 minutes with the lid on. “Don’t touch it, don’t stir it — don’t do anything to it,” says Ardoin. Just let it sit there.

When the timer goes off, use a fork to fluff the rice, and serve.

From a nutrition standpoint, portion control is important with rice,” says April Sins, the retail dietitian for Rouses Markets. Even if you use brown rice, she says, you still need to watch your portion sizes, although there are benefits to brown rice not present in its bleached cousins — most notably, the increased presence of fiber.

If you are looking for rice alternatives in your dishes, she recommends quinoa or cauliflower rice — both of which are gluten-free and come in convenient, microwave-ready bags. Sins says that she is not anti-white-rice.

“I’m a Cajun girl through and through. I’m from Houma!

As a dietitian, I’m not going to tell somebody they can’t have white rice. Just be mindful of your portions.”

If you are making substitutions, know that gumbo tastes completely different when served with cauliflower rice. (Brown rice is a better option.)

Cauliflower works well as an alternative when making stir-fried rice, however. Ultimately, it comes down to why you chose a rice alternative. Chances are that you didn’t grab that cauliflower rice by accident. If you are serious about using a healthy alternative to rice, you already know that it won’t taste exactly the same. If you are okay with that, you’ll have a happy dining experience.

may 24-26, 2019

Jambalaya Festival ROUSES

Rouses is a proud sponsor of the Jambalaya Festival and World Champion Jambalaya Cooking contest, May 24­-May 26, 2019 in Gonzales, Louisiana, the “Jambalaya Capital of the World.”

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 37

3 8 M AY • J U N E 2019

Photo by Romney Caruso

1. CHEF PAUL PRUDHOMME’S LOUISIANA KITCHEN Chef Paul Prudhomme all but singlehandedly kicked off an international craze for Cajun food, introducing Cajun cuisine to the Creole restaurants of New Orleans before opening his own, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen, in the city’s French Quarter. The prolific chef published many cookbooks, but if we have to pick only one, it’s this 1984 cookbook. The book includes the most famous of Prudhomme’s recipes, Blackened Redfish.

2. WHO’S YOUR MAMA, ARE YOU CATHOLIC, AND CAN YOU MAKE A ROUX? Cookbook author and food writer — and regular contributor to our own Rouses magazine — Marcelle Bienvenu, a native of St. Martinville, shares personal stories and her time-honored recipes for the classic dishes of Cajun country. The book was so popular when it came out in 2006, Bienvenu wrote a sequel. Among her many books and cookbooks, Bienvenu coauthored Stir the Pot, which explores how Cajun cuisine was born.

3. THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF CAJUN & CREOLE CUISINE No one is more responsible for preserving Cajun food traditions than John Folse. Officially named “Louisiana’s Culinary Ambassador to the World” by the Louisiana legislature, Folse grew up in a family of great cooks on the German Coast of the Mississippi River in St. James Parish. This, his seventh cookbook, pays homage to Louisiana’s culture and cuisine. It features step-by-step directions for more than 700 recipes, plus the history and folklore behind them.

4. THE JUSTIN WILSON #2 COOKBOOK: COOKIN’ CAJUN Before there was Emeril and the Food Network, there was Justin Wilson on PBS. Justin, pronounced JOOS-tain, was a Cajun storyteller and chef whose distinctive accent delighted viewers of his nationally televised cooking series, Cookin’ Cajun. A native of Amite, Louisiana, Wilson spun folksy Cajun stories while he cooked, usually punctuated by his famous catchphrase: “Ah gha-rawntee!'” He wrote five cookbooks.

ROUSES

5. LOUISIANA COOKERY Originally published in 1954, Mary Land’s Louisiana Cookery is a comprehensive guide to the cooking history of Louisiana.

Land got her start writing fishing and game recipes for the Louisiana Conservation Review, and the cookbook makes clear her love of the great outdoors. It features more than 1,500 recipes.

6. LOUISIANA LAGNIAPPE Many an Opelousas cook has a recipe box stuffed with yellowed newspaper clippings from Mercedes Vidrine, who regularly contributed to the Opelousas Daily World. Here you can find all four copies of her Quelque Chose cookbook series under one title — Louisiana Lagniappe — including the entire contents of the award-winning cookbook Quelque Chose de Doux avec une Demi-Tasse. The compilation cookbook was originally published in 1973 with a preface by Owen Brennan, famed New Orleans restaurateur.

7. COMMUNITY COOKBOOKS Those spiral-bound community cookbooks produced by Junior Leagues and civic groups are deeply treasured recipe collections. Talk About Good!, compiled by the Junior League of Lafayette, is now in its 30th printing, with over 775,000 copies in global circulation. And the most popular of them all, River Road Recipes out of Baton Rouge, has sold a whopping 1.3 million copies since 1959.

Also check out Pirate’s Pantry: Treasured Recipes of Southwest Louisiana from the Junior League of Lake Charles; Tell Me More: A Cookbook Spiced with Cajun Tradition and Food Memories from the Junior League of Lafayette; and Cajun Men Cook from civic group the Beaver

Club in Lafayette.

8. REAL CAJUN: RUSTIC HOME COOKING FROM DONALD LINK’S LOUISIANA James Beard Award-winning chef Donald Link’s first cookbook from 2009 offers a glimpse into the kind of Cajun cooking he grew up with in Lake Charles, Louisiana and how it — and his family — influenced his cooking. The influence of French culture on Cajun cuisine is well documented, but German immigrants like Link’s great-great-

grandfather, who immigrated to Rayne with 40 other families from Geilenkirchen, Germany, in 1881, and settled in Roberts Cove, also influenced Cajuns with their knowledge of rice farming, crawfish farming and sausage-making techniques.

9. CHASING THE GATOR: ISAAC TOUPS AND THE NEW CAJUN COOKING Chef Issac Toups grew up in Rayne, Louisiana, and this cookbook is a colorful tribute to the traditions of Cajun cooking and the Cajun way of life. The Top Chef celebrity favorite (and namesake of restaurants Toups’ Meatery and Toups South in New Orleans) shares time-honored family traditions, like hunting and fishing in the Atchafalaya Basin, plus how to make boudin.

10. THE SAVOY KITCHEN: A FAMILY HISTORY OF CAJUN FOOD

Sarah Savoy, the “Princess of Cajun,” is the daughter of master accordionist and worldrenowned craftsman Marc Savoy and singer-musician Ann Savoy, and Sarah’s a great Cajun musician in her own right. Here she pulls together recipes collected from three generations of her family.

11. CAJUN CUISINE: AUTHENTIC CAJUN RECIPES FROM LOUISIANA’S BAYOU COUNTRY

W. Thomas Angers’ 1985 collection of over 200 traditional Cajun recipes, including 11 different versions of gumbo, is a great introduction to Acadiana cuisine for the novice cook.

12. ACADIANA TABLE: GEORGE GRAHAM’S STORIES OF LOUISIANA COOKING AND CAJUN/CREOLE CULTURE South Louisiana food blogger and photographer (and award-winning ad man) George Graham shares 125 regional recipes and observations on Acadiana must-visits, like Fred’s Lounge in Mamou. His cookbook was published in 2016. His popular blog, Acadiana Table, was launched in 2013.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 3 9

4 0 M AY • J U N E 2019

BONUS 10% OFF STAYS MAR 1 – MAY 15, 2019 WITH CODE: SPICY10 800.932.6759 . FoodiesLoveTheBeach.com

ROUSES

Restrictions apply.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 41

les

acadiens

by Ken Wells

The Cajun journey to the land that would become America began in violence, dislocation and tragedy, and yet their eventual triumphant assimilation in Louisiana — a place they have stamped forever as their own — is among the greatest refugee success stories of recent centuries.

The Cajun odyssey started in France in the early 1600s, when the French monarchy went looking for hearty pioneers to settle its eastern Canadian maritime territories — the provinces known today as Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island but which were then called “Acadie.” The French settlers, principally from the PoitouCharentes and Vendée regions of west-central France, referred to themselves as les Acadiens. The British would use the term Acadians; later in Francophone Louisiana it became “Cadiens” and eventually was anglicized by the Americans to Cajuns.

After 150 mostly peaceful years in Acadie, the Acadians were swept up in the nine-year territorial battle between the British and French known as the French and Indian War. Though taking no sides in the conflict, the Roman Catholic Acadians drew the suspicion of the British because of their reluctance to take a loyalty oath to the English and their Protestant king.

The Acadians also sat on some of the richest farmland in all of Canada — land that the British decided ought to be in the hands of the British settlers they hoped to coax there. (The British prevailed in the war.) So in 1755, the British began confiscating and burning Acadian farmsteads and sending Acadians into exile to other colonies aboard cargo ships, where they languished under often deplorable conditions. Many families were separated and almost half of the 12,000 Acadian deportees died. This act is known as “Le Grand Dérangement.”

Clusters of survivors began arriving between 1763 and 1776 in the Louisiana territories, recently ceded to Spain by France, but which

4 2 M AY • J U N E 2019

supported a robust and sympathetic French-speaking culture. They were greatly aided by the Spanish, who ran the Louisiana colony for nearly four decades after gaining it from the French in the treaty that ended the French and Indian War. The Spanish — eager to shore up the manpower of the Louisiana colony as a foil against British incursions — would help to boatlift the Acadians from some of their waystops in the Caribbean and points in North America. And in 1767, the Spanish warmly welcomed several hundred bedraggled Acadian refugees who arrived by chartered ship in New Orleans after being stranded in Maryland and Pennsylvania for years.

The Cajuns initially felt at home in Louisiana, even under Spanish rule, for New Orleans and most of South Louisiana never stopped being anything other than a French-centric colony during the Spanish period. The Cajuns had farmed and fished in Acadie and found their new home a paradise on that front. They would settle the remote bayous, swamps and prairies of South Louisiana and live in relative isolation, their culture, music and antique French intact.

The Cajun experience after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 began to change as les Americaines undertook a concerted effort to make Louisiana an English-speaking territory and English the official language. The drive to assimilate the Cajuns — and stamp out their language — gained particular momentum in the acculturation pressures that naturally followed World War I and escalated after World War II. Louisiana’s English-speaking population began to grow rapidly, and conveniences like roads and radios, as well as secularizing amenities like public schools, began to peel away the Cajun isolation.

Cajun kids were banned from speaking French on the school grounds, and Cajun adults found themselves often being ridiculed for their “bad” French, thickly accented English (if they spoke Eng-

lish at all), lack of formal schooling and adherence to a kind of earthy Catholicism. The Cajuns’ religion didn’t go down well with the predominantly Protestant interlopers who came in increasing numbers from places like Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma to work the oil and gas fields that were popping up all over South Louisiana.

Things began to change for the Cajuns in the mid-1960s when Cajun music broke out from the swamplands onto a national stage and, along with the amped-up, Creolized interpretation of the Cajun repertoire known as zydeco, began to create a sensation at home and all over the world. This began to fuel not just an interest in the music, but the culture that created it and the food that nourished it. Gumbo, the one-pot soup made with a roux that had come to be most associated with Cajun culture, began to find its way into restaurants and homes all over America and the world.

By the 1980s, Cajun had become hip — everybody wanted some part of Cajun culture, even large numbers of the Bible Belt rednecks working the Louisiana oil patch who had derided the Cajuns earlier. Louisiana elected a Cajun, Edwin Edwards, as governor multiple times. Cajun superstar chefs like Paul Prudhomme and John Folse began taking Cajun cuisine to places like New York, Los Angeles, Beijing and Tokyo, to rave reviews. In 1968, the Cajuns and other Louisiana French speakers got another nod toward their culture when the state legislature formed the Council for the Development of French in Louisiana, CODOFIL for short, to be the chief torchbearer in efforts to revive the very French that les Americaines had earlier tried to stamp out.

Known then as either Cajun French (spoken by white French speakers) or Creole French (spoken predominantly by black French speakers), the preferred term today is Louisiana French. And far from being “bad French,” it is simply an antique form of classic country French — basically an amalgam of Colonial French with roots principally in 17th-century northern and western France and the Canadian Maritime provinces from whence the Cajuns came, with borrowings from Spanish, Native American and English forms.

ROUSES

By some estimates, about 250,000 people still speak Louisiana French, most of them residing in the 22 contiguous South Louisiana parishes that form the heart of Francophone Louisiana.

One interesting and little noted ethnic footnote to the Cajun story: Many Cajuns descended from French Celts, and if you’ve ever listened closely to Irish Celtic fiddle playing and the Cajun fiddle repertoire, it’s hard not to notice the similarities in style and melodies.

It’s also incomplete to write about Cajuns without writing about “cajuns” — with a little c. My mother’s family are Toupses from Thibodaux and, for most of my mother’s life, she thought of herself as an actual Acadian.

After all, the Toupses spoke Cajun French, danced the Cajun two-step and cooked Cajun gumbo with a Cajun roux.

It turns out, however, that the Toupses descended from Swiss-German pioneers — who likely spoke both German and French — who migrated to France in the early 1700s and then in 1721 took a long sea voyage that landed them in the Louisiana colony, a full half-century before most of the Cajuns arrived.

They were among the dozens of Germansurnamed, Swiss-German families who settled near the present-day city of Hahnville and are known as “German Coasters.”

But their other legacy is that intermarriage among Swiss-German and Cajuns was so common that essentially the cultures merged.

One happy coda: That’s how sauerkraut and wieners became smothered cabbage and andouille — a leap forward, we can all agree, for sauerkraut.

Evangeline:

a tale of acadie

The heartbreaking story of Le Grand Dérangement – the forced expulsion by the British of the Acadians from Canada – was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the epic poem Evangeline.

Evangeline and her fiancé Gabriel are tragically torn apart on their wedding day. She spends her entire life looking for him. Eventually the lovers are reunited, but Gabriel is on his deathbed and dies in her arms; Evangeline dies soon after.

There are other versions of the legend of Evangeline. The best known is a novelette, Acadian Reminiscences: The True Story of Evangeline, by Felix Voorhies. Published in 1907, 60 years after Longfellow’s poem, the story stars Emmeline Labiche and Louis Arceneaux, the “real” Evangeline and Gabriel. In this version, the displaced couple are finally reunited, this time beneath an oak tree on the banks of Bayou Teche in St. Martinville (Voorhies’ hometown).

Gabriel is married; a distraught Emmeline loses her sanity and dies.

—Marcy Nathan, Creative Director Oak Tree Plate handcrafted by Tanya Nehrbass Schulze

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 4 3

Pictured: Rouses Pepper Jack Pork Boudin; Pickled Onions; Tabasco Spicy Brown Mustard, Avery Island, LA; Rouses Smoked Green Onion Sausage; Chef Paul Prudhomme Seasoned & Smoked Tasso; Cajun Chef Pickled Okra, St. Martinville, LA; Rouses French Bread; The Farmer’s Daughter Citrus and Spice Hot Pepper Jelly, Lafayette, LA; Rouses Andouille Sausage; Rouses Hogs Head Cheese 4 4 M AY • J U N E 2019

Boucherie s Cajun Charcuterie It was a great big get-together. It was a social gathering.

It was processing the meat, dividing it up, cooking it and packing stuff. It was a celebration, and everybody would come out to eat. The meat wasn’t meant to last a long time — people had stuff to take home, but at the same time, it was really about the moment. A party on the cane field where they worked so hard, and eating, drinking and having a good time.

—Tim Acosta, Director of Marketing & Advertising at Rouses Markets

photo by Romney Caruso ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 4 5

Boucherie s Cajun Charcuterie

by David W. Brown, photos by Romney Caruso

ROUSES BOUDIN: MADE IN LOUISIANA IN THE HEART OF BOUDIN COUNTRY They held it on the Sugar Cane Plantation. It was Areil Plantation to be exact, in St. Charles community in Lafourche parish. Tim Acosta’s dad was a sugarcane farmer in Thibodaux, and every year just after grinding season, he and the workers would bring out the sawhorses, plywood and these big, black iron pots. They would bring the pigs, and they would build a big fire, and the boucherie would begin.

“It was a great big get-together,” says Tim, the director of marketing and advertising for Rouses Markets. “It was a social gathering. It was processing the meat, dividing it up, cooking it and packing stuff. It was a celebration, and everybody would come out to eat. The meat wasn’t meant to last a long time — people had stuff to take home, but at the same time, it was really about the moment. A party on the cane field where they worked so hard, and eating, drinking and having a good time.”

Grinding season and boucheries are staples of Louisiana culture.

The former refers to the harvesting of sugarcane and its transport to local refineries to be ground into sugar. The latter — which is French for “butchery” — is a Cajun tradition stretching back centuries. As the name implies, some animals (and pigs in particular) are about to have a very bad day. But a boucherie is more than a pig roast; it’s a communal event, a sort of Cajun Thanksgiving.

During Tim’s childhood, one event led to the other — in part, because of the time of year. “They always did it on cold days, because it gave everyone more time to work with the meat. It was less likely to spoil if the temperature was in the 30s.”

The men would take the sawhorses, line them up and lay plywood across them. The pigs would be cut up — every part would be used — and on those improvised tables, the meat would be separated. “The pig fat would be thrown in the pot and, all day, they would make everything you could think of. They would grind up meat and make sausage, and they would make cracklins — even hogs head cheese,” Tim recalls.

KNOW YOUR CAJUN MEATS & MEALS You don’t need to hold a boucherie to enjoy sausage, boudin and other Cajun meats. That’s what Rouses Markets are for! If you didn’t grow up immersed in Louisiana culture or never ventured too far into the meat aisle, it can be a little intimidating. Two Cajun meats in particular that you might have run across are sausage and boudin.

They say nobody wants to know how sausage is made, but nobody is the boss of me, dear reader. I’m here to give you the unvarnished truth: It is made in clean, bloodless and beautifully shrink-wrapped packages in Rouses refrigerators.

Apparently things happen before that, though and, without going into the gory details (which involve grinders and…parts), here is what you need to know. If you have an assortment of meats and rice, you have a lot of options when preparing Cajun cuisine. One possibility is dirty rice, which is generally prepared with rice (as the name suggests), as well as pork and chicken livers. Dirty rice is not the same as rice dressing, however. The latter is usually made with pork or ground beef and seasonings.

The difference between sausage and boudin comes down to the fillings. Sausage has, primarily, a meat-based filling with season4 6 M AY • J U N E 2019

ings and the occasional vegetables for flavor. But boudin is all about the rice and pork filler. In a very real way, boudin has nearly as much in common with rice dressing as it does with sausage.

The dressing mix inside of boudin is much, much finer, however, than you would find in rice dressing.

Chances are, you don’t have the ingredients, hardware (or stomach) at home for making your own boudin. Rouses Markets can pick up the slack for you there. (Rouses also carries rice dressing and dirty rice in their delis. Look, you can still take credit for preparing them all from scratch. Who’s going to know?) Rouses boudin is made from a family recipe that goes back to the store’s founder, Anthony Rouse, which means its flavor has stood the test of time. Rouses boudin is made in Louisiana in the heart of boudin country. All you have to do is cook it!

Boudin can be prepared a number of ways. It can be smoked. It can be boiled. It can be steamed. But it is particularly good when grilled, and is perfect for filling in those spots on the grill between the steak, chicken or pork. To get it just right, you don’t want your pit to be too hot — try to have it somewhere around 350 degrees.

Grill each side of the boudin for two to five minutes. The skin will get a nice, popping crispiness, and the flavor and moisture will burst from each bite.

ELEVATING A CLASSIC Cajun meats have been around for centuries, but like everything else, they’re beginning to evolve. You can’t walk into a bakery and find a vanilla cupcake — rather, you find endless trays of such flavors as churro con cajeta or maple bacon. (If you do find a vanilla cupcake, it’s “Madagascar vanilla bean” or some such flavor.) Forget ordering a hamburger that has bread, meat and maybe lettuce. Burgers today are topped with truffle aioli or cranberry brie. When I was a kid, hot dogs were topped with mustard.

The fancy ones had chili. Today they’re topped with things like Kalamata olives, tzatziki and feta.

So of course sausage and boudin would experience the same chef-driven changes that see the grilled cheese built nowadays with fontina cheese on cocktail pumpernickel bread. Welcome to the world of Bougie boudin, where a cheap meat that once fueled Cajun life in Louisiana is experiencing a renaissance of its own.

And yes, that elevated Southern staple can be found at Rouses.

“We are starting to develop new types of boudin,” says Marc Ardoin, the corporate chef of Rouses Markets. “These new spins on the Cajun classic started in the last couple of years. It’s gaining more popularity — it’s ‘on trend,’ as we say. We at Rouses have our own, and we carry some from vendors who are doing it as well.” It takes a long time for a new variety to appear on store shelves. Everything is tasted across multiple batches, with some tweaking of seasoning or ingredient. Is the sausage casing too thick or too thin? Is the seasoning balanced? It doesn’t go out until it’s perfect.

Among the most notable variants of boudin today is pepper jack boudin which has, in addition to the normal filling, the addition of its namesake cheese. It’s a perfect “starter” boudin — a savory, accessible flavor that crosses culinary cultures. Other such variations include egg roll boudin and cauliflower boudin.

Rouses Markets love local foods and cater to local tastes. Pepper jack boudin is a good example of that. According to Tim Acosta, when they first found it in Southwest Louisiana, they began carrying it in those markets. “It was popular there, and when we tried it, we realized it was so good, we said we’ve got to bring this everywhere.” His recommendation is unambiguous: “Go get a Rouses pepper jack boudin, and that’s the only boudin you’ll ever eat.”

A GLOSSARY OF

CAJUN MEATS

ANDOUILLE An import that originated in France, andouille — pronounced ahn-doo-wee — is a dense, highly seasoned, heavily smoked sausage combining pork chunks or pieces — or coarsely ground pork (usually from the shoulder), garlic, onion and pepper. Despite its French ancestry and name, andouille actually owes its spicy flavor and peppery heat to the sausage traditions of another South Louisiana immigrant group — the Germans.

BOUDIN Rice, pork, spices and usually liver stuffed into a natural pork sausage casing.

FRESH SAUSAGE Pure ground pork or poultry is mixed with seasonings, onions, and usually a bit of fresh green onion tops. Rouses butchers make several kinds, including a fresh Italian sausage spiced up with peppers and anise seed or fennel, and a fresh green onion sausage flavored with green onion tops and Cajun seasonings.

SALT MEAT AND PICKLE PORK

Salt meat comes from the belly of the pig, while pickled pork comes from the front leg or picnic (lower part of the shoulder). But both meats are salt cured, meaning they’re preserved with a mixture of salt, sugar and nitrates.

SMOKED SAUSAGE Ground beef, pork or chicken are mixed with Rouses seasonings and green onions, then stuffed in a casing and smoked. Smoked sausage, with its distinctive smoky flavor and smell, is a must for several Cajun dishes.

TASSO Tasso is not actually a ham, because it’s made from the front shoulder (instead of the rear leg) of a pig. Brined for preservation and smoked until flavors are highly concentrated, tasso is used to flavor jambalaya, as well as just about any slowcooked stew or vegetable dish.

HOGS HEAD CHEESE Is hogs head cheese really cheese? No. It’s sausage-like, kind of gelatinous and similar to a classic countrified French terrine. Tender meat from a long-boiled pig’s head (hence the name) is ground and cooled into a jellied loaf and served cold. It is usually eaten on crackers or bread.

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 47

The Swamp Floor Pantry

by Ken Wells Excerpt from Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou. On sale now.

“Here comes the sausage,” says Chef John Folse. Chef has a penchant for understatement. A 15-foot-high stainless steel robotic arm has just lifted and poured, into what Folse modestly calls a “kettle,” the first batch of what will be 400 pounds of lightly smoked sausage.

Yes, pounds.

The sliced meat avalanches down the kettle’s silvery sides, sliding into a light film of melted butter that prevents it from sticking. An ingenious system of mechanical paddles and blades keeps it moving.

A second, third, and fourth bin shortly follow. Soon, the cavernous spaces of Folse’s sprawling USDA-sanctioned factory fill with the delicious aroma of browning sausage.

If you spend much time with Folse, an upbeat, energetic, loquacious man, you can’t help but understand that he’s running a mission as much as a company. For him, the breakout of gumbo and South Louisiana cuisine onto a national and world stage is, pure and simple, a credit to the place and culture that produced it.

Paramount in this is the preservation of what the chef frames as “the glory of the black-iron pot” and the ingenuity and authenticity of the generations of home cooks who have kept the traditions alive. Everything that comes out of his factory is measured against this standard.

“You don’t want to put the culture or the cuisine into a museum,” he says. “You want it to evolve but not in a way that is unrecognizable.

We have been very proud and protective of our culture and the traditions that were handed down in full form in families for generations.

That authenticity is what we need to make sure doesn’t get lost.”

That sentiment was the chief motivation in the founding of the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in 1995. Folse recalls hatching the idea a year or two earlier over bowls of gumbo at his Donaldsonville restaurant, Lafitte’s Landing, with then Nicholls president Donald Ayo. (Ayo retired in 2002 after two decades at the Nicholls helm.) The overarching goal wasn’t just to teach students to master the art of Cajun and Creole cooking, but to steep them in its lore and traditions while also encouraging them to do independent research into the region’s deep and old foodways.

The institute, where Folse still teaches and serves as board chairman, has grown from a handful of students to an enrollment of three hundred. It recently moved into a state-of-the-art, 33,000-squarefoot building with teaching kitchens and a restaurant. Students can earn a four-year bachelor’s degree in culinary arts at a cost of about $30,000. Two-year private cooking academies often cost twice that much.

Folse was clearly inspired by his roots. He was born in 1946 in the Mississippi River farming town of Vacherie and grew up nearby, absorbing the cadence of speech, pace of life, and cooking traditions of St. James Parish. Back then, Cajun French speakers were the majority.

Vacherie was settled by Folse’s Swiss-German pioneer forebears in the 1720s. The Germans readily accepted into their communities and lives the Cajuns who came four decades later. Intermarriage between the Germans and Cajun women was so common that sometime in the mid-1800s most of the Germans had given up their native tongue to speak Cajun French.

4 8 M AY • J U N E 2019

Folse (the original German surname may have been Voltz, Volz, or Folz) is a gleeful encyclopedia of the culinary serendipity of this mixing, the Germans bringing charcuterie and the smoked sausage into the food; the Cajuns bringing the roux, country French cooking influences, and knowledge of seafood soups. “The Germans loved to cook with pork and root vegetables,” he says, “but the Cajuns had their own ideas about this.” In the exchange of ideas, “that’s how sauerkraut became smothered cabbage with andouille sausage” (in Folse’s mind and mine, a great leap forward for cabbage).

Folse was one of eight kids. His mother, Therese Zeringue, died when he was seven years old. His father, Royley, was a fur trapper, moss picker, and logger who never remarried. After his mother’s death, Folse’s paternal grandparents moved in to help out. His maternal grandparents, the Zeringues, were a constant presence. Cajun French was the everyday language. Food, with gumbo at the center, was enormously important to his family and their tightly knit circle of Cajun and Cajunized-German friends.

“You began with the roux,” recalls Folse. “Every mother taught her daughter how to cook roux at home, and the sons learned how to make a roux at the hunting camp.” His mentor was his maternal uncle, Paul Zeringue, who would round up the boys in the family from the time they could manage a kitchen knife and say, “C’mon, we’re gonna make a gumbo.” That was his favorite dish.

In Uncle Paul’s world, “if you were old enough to chop an onion, you chopped the onions,” says Folse. “Maybe you later got to do the green onions. Maybe next year you prepared the rabbit. The point is that every year you got a better station and you woke up one day realizing that, having watched and listened and helped, you not only could make a good roux, you were a pretty good chef.”

If you spend much time with Folse, an upbeat, energetic, loquacious man, you can’t help but understand that he’s running a mission as much as a company. For him, the breakout of gumbo and South Louisiana cuisine onto a national and world stage is, pure and simple, a credit to the place and culture that produced it.

Back then, it was a matter of great pride to both parents and kids when these lessons had been both taught and absorbed. “Children were praised by the qualities of their fricassees and courtbouillons and gumbos,” recalls Folse. In the heavily Catholic community, “It was nice to have the priest praise your Latin, but the ultimate affirmation was when Uncle Paul put his arm around you and said, ‘What a good gumbo.’”

Folse feels Uncle Paul’s calling. “The greatest challenge today,” he says, “is walking into my culinary classes and making my students disciples of the traditional — to make them aware we’re stepping back three hundred years.”

Though he knew cooking was his “life’s DNA” he started out in hotel operations, not thinking he could actually earn a living as a chef.

But a German chef, on Folse’s training rotation in a hotel kitchen, saw his expansive home-hewed technique and the tasty concoctions he could whip up, and urged him to rethink his career. The rest is history.

Folse and his wife, Laulie Bouchereau, started their first restaurant in Baton Rouge in 1974 and opened Lafitte’s Landing four years later.

His production company and plant, officially known as Chef John Folse & Company, opened in 1991 and in 2008 moved into its current facility.

And this operation is but part of a sprawling Folse food and media empire that includes a catering operation out of Folse’s White Oak Plantation in Baton Rouge and a cookbook publishing and baking operation in Gonzales. His The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine is in its fourteenth printing. And with star chef Rick Tramonto, Folse in 2012 opened a high-end New Orleans French Quarter restaurant called R’evolution. On the menu is his “Death by Gumbo” — roasted quail, andouille, and oysters finished off with a dash of filé and served over rice — that sells for $18.00 a bowl. Folse says that dish comes right out of the Cajun hunting camp gumbo tradition of his Uncle Paul.

Folse employs about 160 people in the factory here and 400 company-wide. “Everything here today,” he says, gesturing around his plant, “came out of that restaurant business.”

Beyond hard work and an ability to cook, Folse also had to gin up some old-fashioned Cajun ingenuity to get where he is today.

There were no existing kettles to cook 2.5ton batches of gumbo when he first conceived of the idea. He had to invent them.

For years, however, he was dissatisfied with his gumbo because he couldn’t produce ample amounts of the dark brown roux he came to see as essential. He needed roux by the ton to make roux-rich gumbo by the ton but, like the cooking kettles before, nothing on that scale existed. So back to the drawing board he went.

“Here, you have to see this,” he says as he leads me into his roux room. Inside are two of Folse’s pride and joys, imposing black castiron, drum-shaped containers each capable of making 1,000 pounds of roux at a time.

He gestures toward them like a proud father.

“We use 500 pounds oil and 500 pounds of flour for each batch,” he says. That’s the fiftyfifty mixture used by my own mother and a vast majority of other gumbo cooks.

The design challenges were daunting. He had to figure out not only how thick the cooker walls had to be to hold the superhot roux but what size of drive and transmission apparatus you would need to push the paddles to keep a half-ton roux stirring so it doesn’t scorch. “How would you heat it to maintain temperature? How do you push a roux that big? Everybody said it was impossible.”

He ended up flying off to Germany after finding a company that could build the roux-cookers to his specifications. Roux suddenly became a business in itself. The factory these days produces dark, medium, and light oil-and-flour roux along with duck fat and butter roux that mostly get sold to other food companies.

ROUSES

photo courtesy of John Folse

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 4 9

photo courtesy of Nicholls State University

Following Folse around his gumbo factory is a bit like following Willie Wonka in his chocolate factory. Everything is of grand scale and Folse sees magic being done everywhere. The smooth-functioning technology clearly delights him. He’s effusive in praise of his team, to whom he is simply known as Chef.

Otherwise everyone is on a first-name basis. As we watch the 5,000-pound batch of gumbo come together, Folse could be someone seeing it for the first time instead of the thousandth.

“Look at the color,” he says as the kettle absorbs and stirs in the dark roux slurry that’s just been poured it. “It’s looking like gumbo now. That’s beautiful. Wherever they eat this, they will be eating real gumbo.”

“We’re dumping in the chicken now,” a plant worker tells the boss.

That means the gumbo’s getting close. They’ll add a little more water, the secret sauce, and then bring the batch up to 190 degrees F and hold for fifteen minutes. Then, a little more salt and the gumbo will be ready for pumping.

We head back to Folse’s conference room to continue the discussion and where he wants me to sample some factory gumbo. We talk as we go. He’s a man of a thousand ideas and his latest one is the creation of a Bayou Studies Program within the Nicholls State Culinary Institute. It would be the “repository for all things bayou, instead of having everything go to LSU or Tulane.” Folse says he’s already 5 0 M AY • J U N E 2019

got a $1 million pledge to that end. (The program, in fact, is already up and running.)

We also talk about a curiosity of mine, the disappearing Cajun accent. His eyes light up. “True, something’s being lost.” He tells of a star student of his whose parents and sister are both shrimpers, speak Cajun French and English with thick Cajun accents. But the daughter has gone off to study both abroad and in New York. “She sounds like she’s from New York City — she could’ve come off Broadway,” says Folse. “It’s not that that’s bad. But it’s what’s happening.”

Folse, in fact, has among the more unusual Cajun accents I’ve encountered. It seems to me to be somewhere between Brooklyn and the bayou. I ask him about it. He laughs. When a student at Nicholls he took a speech course; the prof called in a linguist to try to decode the accent. The verdict: Cajun with a mysterious mix of Bostonian brogue.

Chef remains mystified. “That’s impossible,” he says, laughing.

Folse has ordered up cups of the recently cooked megabatches of gumbo, but first wants me to sample his crawfish bisque. It comes, and I dig in.

I’m sorry, but nothing coming out of a factory kitchen should taste that good.

Next, the gumbos arrive. I take a bite of each and tell Folse what I’m required to tell everybody when I try their gumbo: “Well, it’s not as good as my momma’s.”

But I honestly think that in a blind tasting with gumbos cooked in home kitchens, it would hold its own.

CHICKEN & SAUSAGE GUMBO Recipe courtesy of John Folse & Co.

Makes 8-10 Servings

WHAT YOU WILL NEED

1 (5-pound) stewing chicken, preferably a hen 1 pound smoked sausage 1 cup oil 1½ cups flour 2 cups diced onions 2 cups diced celery 1 cup diced bell peppers ¼ cup minced garlic 3 quarts chicken stock 24 button mushrooms

Restaraunt R'Evolution

2 cups sliced green onions 1 bay leaf 1 sprig of fresh thyme 1 tablespoon fresh basil, chopped Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste Louisiana hot sauce to taste ½ cup chopped parsley Steamed white rice

HOW TO PREPARE

Boil chicken 1-2 hours before beginning gumbo. Reserve stock.

Bone chicken, discarding bones and reserving meat and stock for use in gumbo.

Using a sharp boning knife, cut chicken into 8-10 serving pieces.

Remove as much fat as possible. Cut smoked sausage into ½­-inch slices and set aside.

In a 2­-gallon stockpot, heat oil over medium-­high heat. Whisk in flour, stirring constantly until a golden brown roux is achieved. Stir in onions, celery, bell peppers and garlic. Sauté 3-5 minutes or until vegetables are wilted.

Blend chicken and sausage into vegetable mixture, and sauté approximately 15 minutes. Add chicken stock, one ladleful at a time, stirring constantly. Bring to a rolling boil, then reduce to a simmer and cook approximately 1 hour. Skim any fat or oil that rises to the surface.

Stir in mushrooms, green onions, bay leaf, thyme and basil. Season with salt, pepper and hot sauce.

Cook an additional 1-2 hours, if necessary, until chicken is tender and falling apart. Stir in parsley and adjust seasonings. Serve over steamed white rice. photo Caruso R O Uby S ERomney S

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 51

CHEERS to 100 YEARS! In honor of Community Coffee’s centennial year, we want to celebrate communities that inspire us. Let’s raise a cup to the incredible communities of Community® coffee drinkers who are helping to usher in our next 100 years.

•

•

•

•

CommunityCoffee.com/100years

Crafting authentic hickory-smoked sausage since 1976

5 2 M AY • J U N E 2019

READY IN

7.5 MINUTES

EXCELLENT SOURCE OF

PROTEIN

4 DELICIOUS

PASTA MEALS

© BOB EVANS FARMS, LLC 2019

Find Bob Evans Family Classics in the Refrigerated Section.

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 5 3

ALLONS DANSER!

by Michael Tisserand

The first thing to know about Cajun, zydeco and swamp pop music is that they are all distinct music styles to emerge from South Louisiana. But the second thing to know is that they are all so deeply intertwined with each other that it’s not possible to draw sharp lines between them.

Cajun music is the style that emerged from the traditions of the Acadians who arrived in Louisiana as 18th-century refugees from Acadia in Canada. Zydeco derives from the music of black Creoles from West Africa and the Caribbean. And swamp pop is a modern hybrid of both sounds combined with rock and roll, rhythm and blues, country and the blues. All styles show influences from other immigrant groups as well as native peoples in Louisiana.

Cajun music features an accordion and fiddle as lead instruments; zydeco has an accordion and frottoir — a corrugated metal washboard — and occasionally horns.

Both include guitar, bass and drums as a rhythm section. And you should know: Cajun, zydeco and swamp pop are all designed for dancing first, and listening second.

How hard can it be to draw lines between the music styles? Consider two of the leading bands in Cajun and zydeco music: Steve Riley & the Mamou Playboys and Geno Delafose & French Rockin’ Boogie. Riley is a Cajun who fronts a Cajun band; Delafose is a Creole who fronts a zydeco band. Yet the Mamou Playboys will easily move from a Cajun waltz or two-step into a burning zydeco number. Meanwhile, Delafose will skillfully lead his band into playing a lovely Cajun waltz. And both musicians love to play swamp pop.

In fact, the musical kinship between Riley and Delafose mirrors the closeness of the two musicians: Riley and Delafose were high school students together in the prairie town of Eunice, Louisiana.

Historically, this musical kinship goes even deeper. Even during some of the most overtly racist times in history, musicians in Louisiana found a way to integrate their sounds, even if they might not be able to integrate their 5 4 M AY • J U N E 2019

dances. Some of the earliest and most influential recordings in Cajun and zydeco music are the records made in the 1920s and 1930s by Cajun fiddler Dennis McGee and black Creole accordionist Amédé Ardoin.

Their music continues to be a seedbed for all tradition-based music in South Louisiana.

zydeco for much of the late 20th century.

Several musicians who played in his band went on to successful careers of their own, including Buckwheat Zydeco and Clifton’s son, C.J. Chenier. Also heavily influenced

by Chenier is Nathan and the Zydeco Cha Chas.

You should know: Cajun, zydeco and swamp pop are all designed for dancing first, and listening second.

As swamp pop’s sounds took over much of Louisiana’s musical landscape in the 1950s and 1960s, it seemed for a time that some traditional Cajun stylings might die out. But local pride was reignited after fiddler Dewey Balfa and other Cajun musicians received national acclaim at events such as the Newport Folk Festival. Young musicians like fiddler Michael Doucet and Zachary Richard took note, bringing a revivalist sensibility to their inherited sounds. Doucet brought both musical knowledge and artistic adventurousness to bands such as the electrified Coteau and the more acoustic-oriented BeauSoleil (which also benefits from his brother David Doucet’s guitar flatpicking prowess). Richard, meanwhile, has penned everything from Cajun party tunes to soulful singer-songwriter anthems on topics ranging from lost love to ecological tragedies. These musicians have in turn helped to inspire younger bands on the scene, including Feufollet, the Lost Bayou Ramblers, the Pine Leaf Boys and Balfa Toujours, which is fronted by Dewey Balfa’s daughter, Christine Balfa.

Zydeco music owes much of its energy to its “king,” Clifton Chenier, whose mighty personality and keen musicianship drove

Clifton Chenier performed on a piano-key accordion that allowed him to play a bluesdrenched version of zydeco; the other primary influence on the sound, Boozoo Chavis, played a smaller and punchier diatonic accordion. Zydeco players influenced by Chavis include Beau Jocque, Keith Frank, Rosie Ledet and even Amédé Ardoin’s descendants, Sean Ardoin and Chris Ardoin. Other popular zydeco bandleaders include the genre-defying Terrance Simien and Chubby Carrier, son of Clifton Chenier’s contemporary, Roy Carrier, as well as younger, hiphop & R&B-infused Texans such as J. Paul Jr. Seek out their recordings — or, better yet, find a weekend dance and make your way to the center floor.

by Michael Tisserand The drive to Dockside Studio in Maurice, Louisiana stretches past large homes and small trailers, a single-pump gas station with a sign for boudin egg rolls, and a family cemetery. It’s a cool Sunday evening, and as an orange sun dips behind green-blue wisps of clouds, a sonorous voice carries through Dockside’s open side door and onto the nearby Vermilion River.

Rainin’ in my heart Since we be-e-en apart …

The soulful voice takes its time, lingering on the vowels. The voice’s source can be found inside Dockside. There, surrounded by keyboard and guitar players and a sax, bass and drums, stands a glass-walled sound booth in which two people stand, swaying in time to the song.

One is Yvette Landry, former middle-school teacher turned Grammy-nominated professional musician and leader of her own band, The Jukes. She has organized tonight’s recording session. The other is tonight’s singer, Warren Storm. He’s 82, with jet-black hair and a jet-black mustache. Heavy silver rings decorate his fingers and an alligator tooth dangles from his neck. He looks like a rock legend — which, in fact, is what he is.

I know I was wrong Baby, ple-e-ease come back home The song, “Rainin’ in My Heart,” has been recorded by everyone from Neil Young to Tom Jones, but it was co-written and first sung by Louisiana blues musician Slim Harpo, whose version scored on the rhythm and blues and pop charts in 1961. It’s one of those swampy classics that tonight’s band — Roddie Romero on guitar, Eric Adcock on piano, Chris French on bass, Gary Usie on drums, and saxophone player Derek Huston — never tires of playing.

In addition to “Rainin’ in My Heart,” the band’s session tonight included three other new versions of classics Storm has reinvented over the years — new takes of the Fats Domino hit “Let the Four Winds Blow,” Merle Haggard’s “My House of Memories” and the 1920s hillbilly tune “The Prisoner’s Song,” which was Storm’s biggest career hit. Storm’s swinging version for Excello Records soared to the top of the charts in 1958, earning him both a spot on Wink Martindale’s Memphis-based television dance show and an invitation to a party at Elvis Presley’s Graceland.

Even at the end of a long recording session — plus an afternoon gig he’d performed before arriving at Dockside — Storm’s voice shows no sign of wear, his energy level closer to that of an energetic teenager than an octogenarian legend. He shouts “Yeah!” and “I love that, me!” at Romero’s guitar solos. He holds a cane but mainly uses it like a prop, in turns pretending it is a microphone, a conductor’s baton, and a flute.

“Hey Warren, I wish I had a dime for every time you sang this song the last 60 years!” Adcock yells from the piano.

“Yeah, baby!” Storm shouts back.

ROUSES

Photo by Terri Fensel

The session finally wraps up. Landry dances around the studio.

There’s some small talk about the dangers of driving your boat in the Vermilion River at night. Then the musicians start peppering Storm for tales of the records he’s made, panning for nuggets about historic sessions. Almost as an aside, Storm mentions that he’d played drums on Slim Harpo’s original version of “Rainin’ in My Heart,” at J.D. Miller’s studio in Crowley, Louisiana.

As the band takes that in, Storm laughs quietly. “Yeah, baby,” he says again.

As Yvette Landry tells it, the inspiration to record with Warren Storm started one Thursday night at her regular gig with steel guitar player Richard Comeaux at Buck & Johnny’s in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Comeaux had invited 92-year-old steel guitar player Milton Gilbeau to the restaurant, and Gilbeau brought his friend Storm.

“I’m setting up and I look out the window and see this jet black hair and mustache walking to me, and I grab Richard and I’m freaking out,” remembers Landry.

As she sang that night, Landry eyed the table where Gilbeau and Storm were sitting. “They’re like 13-year-old boys and they’re cutting up,” she says. She hesitated about singing one song: “I Need Somebody Bad.” Penned by Mississippi-born songwriter Ben Peters, it became a country hit for Jack Greene in 1973 — but in Louisiana, the barroom weeper is primarily known as a Warren Storm song.

Yes Lord, I need somebody bad tonight ‘Cause I — I just lost somebody good Landry recalls asking Comeaux, “Is this even appropriate? This is Warren’s song.”

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 5 5

Comeaux replied simply, “Do it.”

After the performance, Storm walked up to Landry. “He said, ‘I’ve never heard a woman sing that song before,’” Landry says. “And he kind of winked at me and he said, ‘You did it good.’” The next day, Landry brought Storm a copy of her most recent CD and invited him to lunch, and a friendship was born.

When asked what she admires about Storm, Landry points to the way he can make any song his own, whether it’s blues, rock or country. “There are no boundaries for Warren. He can do it all.”

It’s an equally apt description of the remarkable career of Landry, who admits about South Louisiana music, “I love it all. I want to play it all. I want to express it all.” She grew up in a Cajun household in Breaux Bridge in the 1960s, at a time when the French language in South Louisiana was in danger of dying out. “My parents and all my relatives’ first language was French. When my parents went to school, they’d been punished for speaking French. So the only time they spoke it at home was when they didn’t want us kids to hear what they were saying.”

Landry’s dad, a middle-school science teacher and school administrator, had brought home a portable record player. But instead of Cajun recordings, the albums the Landry family spun were by the likes of Storm, Rod Bernard and Tommy McLain — some of the top names in a South Louisiana-born music style that eventually was dubbed “swamp pop.” A potent blend of homegrown Cajun and Creole music with rock and rhythm and blues stylings, swamp pop was most succinctly described by saxophonist Harry Simoneaux as “half Domino and half fais do-do,” underscoring New Orleans pianist Fats Domino’s great influence on the sound.

As a child, Landry did hear Cajun music on the radio. And she still remembers the day she heard an older man playing accordion at a neighborhood boucherie, after which she informed her mother that someday she’d play accordion, too. But the soundtrack to her teen years was swamp pop.

“We would go to Pat’s Showboat,” she remembers. “It was a funky little bar with a kitchen in the back and a small wooden dance floor.

And I used to go there when I was 16, and we’d dance to Warren, to T.K. Hulin and to Cookie and the Cupcakes.”

Landry never imagined then that, one day, she’d perform the dance tunes she heard at Pat’s Showboat. Then she started playing bass with local bands the Lafayette Rhythm Devils and Bonsoir, Catin. “When I started playing music was when I connected with the Cajun side of me,” she now says.

Her commitment to music deepened with her father’s cancer diagnosis. She began writing songs to sing for him; when he died in 2009, she honored his wish that she record her own compositions.

Her 2010 debut album, Should Have Known, was awarded OffBeat magazine’s “Best Country/Folk Album” that year.

Her partnership with bandleader Roddie Romero, meanwhile, grew from their shared love of swamp pop. One night, the pair duetted during a gig on the swamp pop classic “I’m Leaving It All Up to You” — a Billboard number-one hit for Dale & Grace in 1963 — and found their vocals were perfect matches. Their recording of it became a regional hit, leading to the release of Louisiana Lovin’ last year, a tribute to classic and lesser-known works heard through the years in Louisiana dancehalls and corner bars. (Coincidentally, Warren Storm played drums on that 1963 Dale & Grace hit — but then again, it quickly becomes apparent that Storm played on just about every swamp pop classic.)

Along the way, Landry has also found time to author two children’s books — The Ghost Tree and Madame Grand Doigt — for

5 6 M AY • J U N E 2019

the University of Louisiana at Lafayette Press (UL Press). In fact, as her friendship with Warren Storm deepened, the first project they discussed was a book, not a recording.

“After we went out to lunch, when I dropped off Warren, I walked in and it’s like walking into a museum,” Landry remembers. “The walls are just filled with awards, and he goes into the closet and pulls out this big ol’ Tupperware bin and starts pulling out pictures of Elvis and Willie Nelson. He begins to tell me his story of when he was 21 and had a number one hit. I come home and I’m all excited and talking to my husband and he says, ‘I think I have a new project for you.’ I called UL Press the next day.”

That was last June. Since then, they’ve been meeting every week for interviews, as Storm traces his career from being Warren Schexnider, son of a Cajun musician, to journeying to New Orleans with music legend Bobby Charles to hear rhythm and blues, to his swamp pop stardom. Landry hopes the book will be out in the fall.

She isn’t yet sure when their recording will be released.

Once they decided to go into the studio to record some of Storm’s classics, they decided they should replicate the method by which they were originally cut: straight to tape, no digital, no overdubs.

“This music deserves to be recorded that way,” Landry says. “It has to have that gravelly sound that is real. When you record digitally you can tweak anything.”

When she says “tweak,” she nearly spits out the word, as if it might leave a bad taste in her mouth.

As for Storm’s response to the recording session?

“It came out beautiful,” he says in a recent telephone interview.

“Being able to play all this music and love it, that’s what keeps me going. And since I’ve been recording for 60 years, I’ve never had so much fun than I had on that day.”

By Thursday evening, Yvette Landry and The Jukes are working a different gig, at Magdalen Square in Abbeville. A live oak canopy shades the square, and catkins form a golden shag rug around the statue of Père Antoine Désiré Mégret, the priest who in 1843 purchased this land to start a church.

The center of Abbeville has the feel of a small European town, with a central square bordered by St. Mary Magdalen Church on one end and the circa 1937 Frank’s Theatre, which is being restored by funds including those raised tonight at Yvette Landry’s dance, on the other.

Landry is here with her mom and her brother; later she’ll coax him to the stage, where he’ll sing a letter-perfect version of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.” Roddie Romero, Eric Adcock and Derek

Photo by Gene Tomko

Huston stand by the stage. “I’m still kind of decompressing from the studio,” Romero admits. “Warren kept us on our toes. It’s all about listening and playing, and communicating with each other with our eyes.”

Romero faces the setting sun, arms wrapped around his guitar. He was just 14 when his parents first brought him to play with Warren Storm. “It’s up to us and to the people behind us to keep this music sounding like it should,” he says.

Rows of folding chairs form a semicircle around the stage. They’re occupied by an older crowd, sporting mostly cowboy boots or sensible sneakers. Some huddle under LSU blankets. There are little conversations here and there, and occasional bursts of laughter. Children are taking advantage of their grandparents’ inattention to down bags of potato chips. But mostly it’s quiet. Looking over the crowd, it’s difficult to imagine that a rock and roll show is about to start.

Then Landry walks up to the microphone. “You might know these songs,” she says, and starts singing.

Betty told Dupree I want a diamond ring …

An older man and woman, both chewing gum to the beat, walk arm in arm to the front of the stage. They instantly and effortlessly fall into a groove. More couples join them, and soon the dance floor is filled.

“You all remember Bobby Charles?” Landry says to the crowd, and suddenly the crowd is back in high school, learning the ways of the world to a swamp pop beat. The band launches into “Take it Easy Greasy,” Charles’ follow-up to his hit “See You Later, Alligator.”

It goes on like this all night.

“You all remember Cookie and the Cupcakes?” Landry says.

ROUSES

“That’s it! That’s it!” a man shouts.

“You all remember Dale & Grace?”

Darkness settles over Abbeville, but the songs don’t stop. Landry steps to the microphone again. “I got a new best friend, his name is Warren Storm,” she says.

There is another roar. Landry launches into “I Need Somebody Bad,” the song of lost love and found lust. Hands touch arms and dancers guide each other to the floor, again and again. They’ll stay like this, just as long as the music keeps playing.

Swamp Pop’N & Pop-A-Top’N One of my favorite deejays, Swamp Pop and French music show host Bobby Richard, grew up in the swamp town of Pierre Part (Swamp People star Troy Landry lives there).

Music is in his blood. Don Rich is his first cousin, and his dad and uncles played music as the Richard Brothers. Richard was inducted in the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 1995 for his work in preserving and popularizing Louisiana music.

Tune in to the Swamp Pop Show Saturdays, 5am and 1pm and the French Music Show Sundays 11am-1pm or stream it online at www.gumbo949.com.

—Donny Rouse, CEO, 3rd Generation W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 57

James lee burke: Under surveillance

When it comes to cooking, like most Louisiana men, Dave does his share. This is a culture where men take pride in their kitchen skills.

He takes care with food, especially when it’s to share. There’s always a little something extra — breakfast isn’t just Grape-Nuts, it’s Grape-Nuts with warm milk and blackberries. Coffee comes with warm milk; iced tea is always garnished with fresh mint leaves. In recent novels, he’s as apt to make a tomato and avocado sandwich for his daughter Alafair as he is to get out the cast-iron skillet. He knows the life of the body, its needs and desires. And he occasionally succumbs to the desire for sweetness. Dessert is usually a bowl of ice cream and strawberries. A celebration can be as simple as a spearmint snowball. In one novel, he brings home a chocolate cake for dessert and cuts “a thick wet slice.” Can’t you taste it? That’s vintage Burke.

The rituals centered around food provide comfort and stability in Dave’s crime-ridden world. After a tough day, he says, “I wanted to go home and eat a hot supper with my family and perhaps walk down Main Street with them in the twilight and have a dessert on the terrace behind Clementine’s restaurant. I wanted to have a normal life again.”

His rough-and-tumble sidekick Clete Purcel is a great cook too, though readers worry about his cholesterol levels. He likes to start his day with “coffee and massive nutrients.” One “healthy” breakfast includes “four biscuits, scrambled eggs sprinkled with grated cheese, green onions, and bacon bits, a pork chop smothered in milk gravy, orange juice, a bowl of stewed tomatoes, and multiple cups of coffee.”

When Clete is in residence at the New Iberia motor court, he brings the party with him, sets up his grill out front, and has a pork roast or a chicken cooking that he shares with anyone who stops by. There’s always plenty of cold beer in the cooler too — maybe a little too much.

In his post-Katrina masterpiece, The Tin Roof Blowdown, Clete — when he can’t get his usual room — takes refuge with Robicheaux and his wife and daughter. Not wanting to cause anyone extra effort, he insists on bringing dinner. Here’s what that looks like:

by Susan Larson

When we open a book, we enter a world. Part of the delight of reading is that sweet and complete surrender to a place we know or desire to know, and James Lee Burke is South Louisiana’s master seducer. In 22 Dave Robicheaux novels, Burke has guided loyal readers into his colorful, often violent version of Cajun country. In this author’s good literary company, we can squint at the sunlight on the bayou water, sway to imagined Cajun dance music, smell the sweet olive on a summer night. And oh, can we taste the food — spicy and soul-satisfying.

Burke always reminds us of the richness of the Louisiana landscape, how it nourishes us even as we see it wash away. Life on the bayou has a particular sweetness in Dave’s bait shop days, a refuge from his work in law enforcement. The day begins with feeding the animals, maybe opening up a can of tuna for pet raccoons Mon Tee Coon and Tripod or that tough tomcat survivor Snuggs. Then Dave or his longtime friend Batist fire up the grill to make chicken and sausage with sauce piquante for hungry fishers coming back for lunch. When we hear the ping of a pecan dropping onto the tin roof, we know we’re home, just as we know that on a hot summer day, we can savor the sweetness of a watermelon picked fresh from the patch out back.

Then at the end of the day, there’s the satisfaction of cooking up the sac-a-lait and bream caught in the bayou for a family supper. And when the late-night heebie-jeebies strike, Dave pours a glass of milk to drink in the dark on the dock.

5 8 M AY • J U N E 2019

And motor over he did, at 6:00 p.m. sharp, with a bucket of Popeyes fried chicken and buttermilk biscuits and a big carton of fried oysters and dirty rice. He also brought a separate bag of paper plates, plastic forks and knives, paper napkins, and a six-pack of Dr Pepper. He went about setting the table while Molly and Alafair tried to hide their smiles.

“Clete, we have plates and silverware,” I said.

“No need to dirty things up,” he said.

Molly shook her head behind his back to stop me from admonishing him. Alafair wasn’t as diplomatic. “You have any salad in there, Clete?” she said.

“You bet,” he replied, and proudly lifted a quart of potato salad from the sack.

You can always tell the villains in a Burke novel by their food choices. The unforgettable Chester Wimple, aka Smiley in The New Iberia Blues,“ ate Ding Dongs for breakfast and Eskimo Pies and Buster Bars around the clock.” He even converses with a potential victim while eating a carton of ice cream. The dreadful Ronald Bledsoe is interrogated in the sheriff’s office while he eats four custard-filled doughnuts “as you would a hamburger, feeding the whole doughnut into his mouth, the yellow cream glistening on top of his nails.”

In addition to being a chronicle of violence in American culture, this series is a long, cautionary tale about a life battling alcohol, an

In this author’s good literary company, we can squint at the sunlight on the bayou water, sway to imagined Cajun dance music, smell the sweet olive on a summer night. And oh, can we taste the food — spicy and soul-satisfying. especially difficult struggle in the context of a place that celebrates and enables drinking. Dave’s beverage of choice is Dr. Pepper with cherries and slices of lime, but when he goes off the rails and orders a shot and a beer chaser, we know that trouble will ensue.

“Why’d you drink, Dave?” Alafair asks him.

“The same reason as everyone who goes out.

I wanted to,” he answers. It’s a sign of his scrupulous honesty as a writer that Burke occasionally sets scenes during AA meetings; Dave’s struggle is real.

We tend to forget that Burke was born in Houston, and his series about the Holland family pays tribute to Texas history in all its violent and larger-than-life glory. You might think that he’d be an expert on chicken-fried steak and chili too. Barbecue does tend to appear in his books now and then.

When Burke says a place serves “barbecue

ROUSES

chicken that could break your heart,” you know he’s tasted that chicken. Just the way a song can break your heart, bringing back memory, he knows that food has the same power.

The path of Burke’s life has taken him to Montana’s Big Sky country, where he works with rescue horses when he’s not writing. The new setting seems somehow right for the creator of Dave Robicheaux, but Louisiana is always in Burke’s heart and on his mind.

“As you know,” he said, “Louisiana food is prepared in the Elysian Fields and is probably the best seafood in the world. It also is probably responsible for the fact that Louisiana has the highest rate of cardiovascular disease in the country. That said, you gotta do something for kicks [the line comes from Rebel Without a Cause]. My favorite South Louisiana dishes are dirty rice, deep-fried

crawfish, breaded pork chops, Popeyes fried chicken, étouffée, pecan pie, oyster and chicken gumbo, fried eggplant, any kind of gumbo, fried sac-a-lait, catfish po'boys, oyster po’boys, oysters on the half shell, and either red or white boudin.”

But then, there’s this: “Here’s the problem, however,” he said. “I’m a vegetarian today and no longer feel I can justify the killing of animals, even fish, simply to make a meal, although sometimes I do eat fish. I don’t mean that others are wrong in doing so.”

Live and let live. Reverence for life. Do no harm, or at least as little as possible.

Vintage James Lee Burke. Vintage Dave Robicheaux too.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 5 9

BY THE BOOK

photo by Romney Caruso

by Justin Nystrom

It’s just now lunchtime at Victor’s Cafeteria. A sunny glow filters down through skylights into the inviting dining room where hungry customers, filled with anticipation from the aromas of smothered pork chops and fried shrimp, queue up along one paneled wall under a sign that reads, “Dave Robicheaux Eats Here.”

It is unclear whether Dave — or his jolly and mercurial sidekick Clete Purcel — is in the building, but it matters not. In my imagination both are present and very much alive for the legion of fans, who come from all over the world to this family restaurant on New Iberia’s Main Street — just for a chance to walk in the footsteps of the colorful characters created by the town’s favorite son, James Lee Burke.

Known as “The Robicheaux Series” in the world of popular fiction, Burke’s crime novels first appeared in 1987 with The Neon Rain, which debuted the troubled, quixotic figure of former New Orleans police detective Dave Robicheaux, as he brings the region’s bad guys to justice while facing the daily struggle of his own alcoholism and traumatic past. At the end of the second book in the series, Heaven’s Prisoners (1988), Burke relocates his fictional hero to his hometown of New Iberia, where Dave begins work for the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department. In 1990 the third Robicheaux novel, Black Cherry Blues, won an Edgar Award, mystery writing’s highest honor and an undeniable sign that Burke had “made it.”

New Iberia has benefited from James Lee Burke’s writing. Of course, tourists have

6 0 M AY • J U N E 2019

always been drawn to antebellum mansions like The Shadows along scenic Bayou Teche. And foodies in search of boudin or shrimp Creole, armed with Macon Fry and Julie Posner’s fabulous 1992 Cajun Country Guide, have come for the town’s culinary treasures. But the Robicheaux series, which has been “translated into almost every language in the world,” has exposed the town to a far bigger audience, culminating in 2016 in what is now called the Books Along the Teche Literary Festival, a celebration of the region’s culture that unfolds the first week in April each year.

Visitors to New Iberia seldom leave disappointed, entranced either by the picture postcard beauty of the town that Burke describes in such loving detail or by the food that they eat during their stay. Victor’s is the most obvious first stop for the Robicheaux faithful. It’s difficult to go wrong with its à la carte offerings of Creole and Cajun comfort food served in an airy space built a century ago, when it housed a jewelry store. Diners with bigger appetites might, like Clete Purcel in 2003’s Last Car to Elysian Fields, pile their plate high “with dirty rice and gravy, kidney beans, and two deep-fried pork chops.”

Likewise, hungry fans make the pilgrimage to the nearby Bon Creole, an unassuming, blocky building whose humble decor lends an authentic vibe to some of the best renditions of regional specialties.

And after enjoying these food landmarks, Burke’s fans owe it to themselves to dig deeper into the role food plays in his novels, in expressing the very culture and history that they came to New Iberia to find in the first place. His critics and fellow writ-

ers agree that what makes Burke’s body of work stand above and beyond most other crime fiction is his lyrical depiction of South Louisiana, one that is by turns love letter and sorrowful lament. It’s no accident that food is a subtle yet important ingredient in Burke’s expression of the folk customs that make the region distinctive. For visitors, understanding the relationship culture has with food and setting offers an opportunity for a more fundamental appreciation of what it means to love, celebrate and even mourn Louisiana in the way that Dave Robicheaux does.

The bait shop and boat rental business that Dave runs with Batist, an ageless AfroCreole man who had once known Dave’s father, becomes a frequent setting to express a relationship with the outdoors — and food.

Dave describes, in 1992’s A Stained White Radiance, starting the fire for the grilled chicken and sausages he sells to fishermen, and how he “then fixed coffee and hot milk and bowls of Grape-Nuts for the three of us, and we ate breakfast on one of the telephone-spool tables under an umbrella out on the dock.” Dave might eat a mass-produced convenience food for breakfast but, as he does so often in the series, he eschews the Keurig or even the microwave in favor of the local ritual of heating a pan of milk on the stove for café au lait.

And a simple “fried-egg-and-ham sandwich on French bread” carried out of Victor’s in a styrofoam container to be eaten at a “giant crab-boil pavilion” in a small city park on the opposite side of Bayou Teche transports the reader into the lush beauty of a Louisiana winter where “the camellias along the bayou were in bloom and looked

like red paper flowers inside the grayness of the day.”

Both bad guys and good guys are constantly grilling food in the Robicheaux series, sending “smoke from meat fires” into the atmosphere. The sporting pastimes of fishing, crabbing and boiling shrimp act as a sort of regional universal language of eating for Burke. A thermos of coffee resting on the seat on an early morning drive in the “dampness of predawn” resonates with anyone who has headed out to a fish camp or duck blind, just as unwrapping po’boy sandwiches for lunch also rings true — at least in South Louisiana, it does. These are the routine acts of moving, doing and eating that simultaneously unfold during daily life in Acadiana.

As any fan knows, history is central to Dave Robicheaux’s understanding of the world, defining the present and playing a critical plot element in just about all of the novels. It is unsurprising that food helps Burke to transport his readers to a time in Louisiana that some say is either vanishing or has vanished completely already.

Cush-cush (or coush coush) is a breakfast dish once common in old-time Cajun homes.

A few keystrokes online will reveal numerous recipes for it, but they all start with a mixture of cornmeal, milk, salt and, oftentimes, baking powder. It’s then fried and stirred in a cast-iron skillet with oil until it resembles a

ROUSES

crumbly cereal. John Folse — among many others — suggests topping it with milk or cane syrup (traditional touches). Folk tradition suggests the name comes from the North African semolina-based couscous, an idea reinforced by similarities of look and texture.

“It’s hard to imagine that a dish so simply prepared could taste so good,” notes Folse.

In Crusader’s Cross in 2018, an older Dave wistfully reflects on how he and his half-brother Jimmie waited before breakfast for his mother, who “would return from the barn smelling of manure and horse sweat, a pail of frothy milk in one hand and an armful of brown eggs” and who would wash her hands and arms in the sink before filling “our bowls with cush-cush.” We see the healthy and even curative aura of such humble fare in Black Cherry Blues when a character takes in a motherless child: “She raised Tee Beau as her own, fed him cush-cush with a spoon to make him strong…” Later in the same novel, Dave and his young adopted daughter Alafair are in Montana, where he prepares her cush-cush for breakfast. The scene conveys what Louisianians living elsewhere keenly understand — that no matter how far we stray, food is a ritual that helps us cling to a piece of home.

No Robicheaux pilgrimage is complete without visiting the site of Provost’s Pool Room, today the home of an upscale restaurant called Clementine on Main. In Last Car

to Elysian Fields Dave’s character reminisces about going there as a boy with his father on Saturday afternoons, in an “era when the plank floors were strewn with football betting cards and green sawdust and the owner served free robin gumbo out of big pots that he set on an oilcloth-covered pool table.”

According to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, robins, like most other songbirds, became protected species by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918. Yet custom is often more powerful than the law, a thread woven into James Lee Burke’s depictions of the past.

It’s no accident that the gambling and the robin gumbo, both equally illegal, appear in the same sentence!

Nostalgic reflections on cush-cush and robin gumbo aid Burke in his creation of what cultural critic Richard Slotkin has termed “mythic space,” or a place in our historical imagination that is larger than life and full of the emotions and meaning that define who we are as a people. The term suits perfectly the Atchafalaya Basin that Burke constructs within the mind of Dave Robicheaux: a mythical Acadiana before mainstream American culture took over, a place defined by food, its semi-aquatic landscape, and the proud people who inhabited it.

“I wanted to drive deep into the Atchafalaya Swamp,” laments Dave in 2002’s Jolie Blon’s Bounce, “past the confines of reason, into the past, into a world of lost dialects, gator hunters, busthead whiskey, moss harvesters, Jax beer, trotline runners, moonshiners, muskrat trappers, cockfights, bloodred boudin, a jigger of Jim Beam lowered into a frosted schooner of draft, outlaw shrimpers, dirty rice black from the pot, hogmeat cooked in rum, Pearl and Regal and Grand Prize and Lone Star iced down in washtubs, crawfish boiled with cob corn and artichokes, all of it on the tree-flooded, alluvial rim of the world, where the tides and the course of the sun were the only measures of time.” In this single rambling sentence, Burke paints a picture of a Cajun subculture mostly vanished today. Yet we might try to re-create this mythic space on our own front porch by placing beer on ice, boiling crawfish in the yard, and cooking a pot of dirty rice, all in an effort to reconnect with who we once were or, perhaps, wish that we had the chance to be.

James Lee Burke turned 82 recently, and Dave Robicheaux is growing older too, it seems. In January 2019, the prolific Mr. Burke published The New Iberia Blues, the 22nd novel in the Dave Robicheaux series that has run, astonishingly, for over 30 years.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 61

Cajun

Card Games

by David W. Brown, photos by Channing Candies Ali Rouse Royster, a third-generation owner of Rouses Markets, pulls out a printed notebook with ROUSES OFFICIAL PEDRO SCORE PAD printed across the top. There are two columns, each with a heading for team names, and grids for tallying scores.

“When you start the score sheet, the only proper way to have team names is to write ‘Winners’ for the name of your team, and ‘Losers’ for the other,” she says. “Those are the only acceptable names.”

“I don’t know why they didn’t just print that on the sheet,” says Chris Acosta, a category manager of Rouses and another third-generation team member.

“Because your dad prefers to write it in!” says Rob Barrilleaux, a designer and the company’s print manager, referring to his boss, Chris’s dad, Tim Acosta. Rob is Uncle Rob. His brother-in-law is Tommy Rouse.

If there is one constancy for the Rouse family during gatherings, holidays and vacations, it is the presence of good food made from old family recipes. But if there are two things a guest can pretty much count on, it’s a deck of cards and an inevitable game of Pedro. “If you wake up at the camp and there’s whitecaps in the ditch, you’re not going fishing. This is what you are going to be doing,” Rob says.

If you have never played it before, it is a staple card game in the Houma-Thibodaux area, and is pronounced PEE-dro. It is a followsuit, trump card game. It is a little like Spades in that you play with a partner, but cannot communicate your hand of cards or how you intend to play them.

When you start the score sheet, the only proper way to have team names is to write ‘Winners’ for the name of your team, and ‘Losers’ for the other. Those are the only acceptable names.

—Ali Rouse Royster, 3rd Generation I recently spent a day with members of the Rouse family when they had time to play their card game of choice. I watched them sit across from one another, handling cards like Vegas magicians, calculating hands and scores and the motivations of partners and rivals, and blasting through entire rounds with the speed of a cashier on a 10key. I witnessed the finest taunts and trash-talk this side of professional wrestling, all hurled about like javelins. And to quote the Book of Job, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

Members of the Rouse family endeavored earnestly to explain the rules of Pedro to me, and I took copious notes and recorded audio and played hands with them and brought back score sheets and had them explain things repeatedly, as though I were a small child — but reader, the game remains a mystery to me. Maybe you just had to be born in Terrebonne or Lafourche parish. Maybe it is part of a secret ceremony or cultural initiation that you experience when you buy land there, or a superpower acquired after drinking the water of Bayou Lafourche.

“Look, we taught this game to people in Texas,” jokes Rob. “Surely you can learn this.”

6 2 M AY • J U N E 2019

All I can say for sure is that if you are an outsider, you basically have to be a psychic accountant to understand this game. The rules as described here are reported here to the best of my abilities. Just typing them out caused my computer to run slow, because not even its multicore microprocessors could handle Pedro in principles and practice. The point is, I’m counting on my editor to make sure I get the rules correct. We play Spades in Gonzales.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

“If you find somebody in Houma or Thibodaux who doesn’t know how to play Pedro,” says Rob, “they are the exception.” (He was one of many who tried to explain the rules to me.) The two towns have a sort of Hatfields-and-McCoys antithesis toward one another with respect to Pedro rules, as was repeatedly explained. The Houma way, according to the Thibodaux players, is bedlam, chaos — a grim, lingering look into the mouth of madness. Talking with players from Houma, the feeling is apparently mutual.

“My wife is from Houma,” says Lee Veillon, the human resources director of Rouses Markets, “and I got transplanted from Thibodaux, so I’ve had to adapt to the rules depending on whom I’m playing with.

We have to decide in advance which way we’re going to play. It’s a big deal. If you talk to anybody on my wife’s side of the family, we’re all wrong.”

“Well, it’s because they have a slightly different set of rules,” says Tim Acosta, the Rouses director of marketing and advertising.

Pedro is a four-player game with partners sitting across from one another. Each player is dealt nine cards, three at a time. (The dealer rotates each round.) Only five cards in the game have any value: aces, jacks, 10s, and twos are each worth one point; fives are worth five points. Based on the cards dealt, players bid the number of points their team hopes to earn.

Rouse Cousins, Left to Right: Nick Acosta, Ali Rouse Royster, Blake Richard, Chris Acosta

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 6 3

“Talking across the table is forbidden,” says Rob. “You’re not allowed to tap yourself on the heart or touch the diamond on your ring.”

Regarding bidding: if a team shoots the moon, they could bid for a theoretical maximum score of 14. (Only the fives of the same color are worth five; the active suit is the high pedro, and the other, the low pedro.)

A team must bid, at a minimum, a score of seven. With me so far? Are you sure? If you intend to play at home, you really ought to google the rules.

After the cards are dealt, the player to the left of the dealer can either bid or pass. This goes all the way around the table — bid or pass — and you can only bid higher than the current highest bid. If everyone passes, the dealer is forced to bid seven. Once play begins, teams must, at a minimum, win the number of tricks they have bid, lest terrible consequences befall them. The player who bids the highest chooses the trump suit. In other words, if he or she chooses clubs, only the ace, jack, 10, two, and both black fives are worth points.

• J U N E 2019 6 4 M AYAli Rouse Royster and Lee Veillon

Next, players (other than the dealer) discard from their hands any non-trumpsuit cards, and are dealt enough cards to bring their hand up to six. For example, if you discard seven of the nine cards you are holding, you would be dealt four cards.

9-7+4=6. (Look, it’s even more confusing when a Rouse is explaining it to you because, again, they are all Jedi Masters at this game, and I think it’s hard for them to conceive of somebody not playing pro-level Pedro.) The dealer, meanwhile, gets to look through the entire remaining deck and builds his or her hand entirely from the trump suit. This might mean holding more than six cards. It’s good to be the dealer!

“There’s a lot of psychological warfare in this game,” Ali warns me.

PLAYING THE HAND YOU’RE DEALT The highest bidder goes first. He or she can play whatever suit is desired. Each subsequent player must either play that suit or the trump suit. (THIS IS WHERE HOUMA

DIVERGES FROM THIBODAUX. The people in Houma play a “cutthroat” variation where you do not need to play the active suit.) If you aren’t holding the active suit, you can play any suit you would like. The highest trump wins the trick, or the highest card of the active suit. The winner of the trick leads off the next round.

That’s my understanding, anyway. “If diamonds were declared at the start, but the high bidder starts by playing a heart, everyone has to play a heart?” I ask.

“If you have one. Except the five of hearts, because technically for that round, it’s a diamond,” says Ali, and I begin to question the career choices I have made that led me to this card table.

Just to be clear about something: the pedro card — the five of the trump suit — does not automatically win on its own. It is the most valuable card, but a six could easily beat it; your partner would have to protect that card (by playing a high card). Whichever team wins the trick, wins the pedro — and thus its five precious points.

“If you play an ace, you want your partner to play a pedro,” says Cindy Rouse Acosta.

Once all of the cards are played, the point cards in each of the tricks are counted up.

If a team bids eight, but only scores seven, their score for that round is negative eight.

Meanwhile, the opposing team, who did not bid, simply adds up their points and adds the total to the score sheet. The next player clockwise becomes the dealer, the cards are shuffled, and the deal begins again. The game ends when a team reaches 52 points.

Everyone at the table has been playing the game for as long as they can remember.

“I learned to play when I was about 10 years old,” says Chris. He learned from his grandfather, who held weekly games. “Imagine like 12 grandfather-age men eating hardcore South Louisiana meals every Sunday night,” he says. “They would play cards and eventually we would get in [the game].”

Because Pedro is a four-person game, the losing teams would rotate out, and a new duo would be dealt in.

“My dad always knew what everybody had,” Cindy says of her father, Anthony Rouse, founder of Rouses Markets.

“Or he just made everybody think that,” jokes Chris, who is her son. “We all played it as a family. Papa Rouse, when he wasn’t playing, he would still stand over the table and watch everybody and mumble under his breath sometimes, ‘Ahh, don’t play that hand’ or ‘Who dealt this?’ just trying to gauge the table.”

There is something so quintessential about family game nights. A certain kind of bond can only be formed over cards or board games. People you know and love and live with and work with are suddenly put in a mild and amusing form of jeopardy, and you get to see how they respond.

A BLESSED RESPITE WITH BOURRÉ After a raucous round of Pedro, players swapped out and they decided to play Bourré (pronounced: BOO-ray), also a trump or trick-taking game. “I knew how to play this before I knew how to play Pedro,” says Tim. If Pedro is the 1040 long form of card games, Bourré is the 1040EZ. More so than Pedro, Bourré is a betting game and, before each round, players ante up.

“When I was a kid, I used to play Bourré a lot with my grandmother,” says Lee. “And she would play for money — I’m not talking about a lot. We played with pennies. She always made sure your money went in the pot. But when it came time for her to put in her money, she would mysteriously have these mental lapses of old age! You had to watch her!”

“It’s the grandmothers that are the craftiest,” says Ali. “She was the sweetest, soft-spoken like Ali’s grandmother. Amazing how she never seemed to remember to put money in the pot.”

Ali says, “My grandmother had a little jar of change she kept, and when we would come and play, that would be our antes so we could ‘play for money.’ I don’t think we ever took it home.”

In Bourré, five cards are dealt to each player, and the dealer turns his or her fifth card face up. That will be the trump suit.

Clockwise from the dealer, each player declares if he or she is in or out. Those who remain discard however many cards they choose, and an equal number of cards are dealt back to them by the dealer. By the end of this, everyone’s hands should be back to five cards.

The winner of each trick, starting with that initial face-up card by the dealer, begins the next trick. Any suit may be played, and players must “follow suit.” If you lack the active suit, you may play a trump card. The highest card of the trump suit — or absent a trump, of the suit that led that play — wins the trick.

You must win the trick (i.e., play a card higher than that which is currently winning) if your

ROUSES

hand allows it. If you lack an active suit or a trump suit, you can “throw off” with any card you like.

The player with the most tricks each round wins the pot. (If there is a tie, no one wins the pot.) If you have won no tricks at all, you have gone bourré. Your ante for the next round is the entire value of the pot just won.

(In other words, if there were $10 in the previous pot, your ante for the next is $10.) The player to the left of the previous dealer is now in charge; he or she shuffles the deck, and the process begins again. There are nuances to the game beyond the scope of this simple explanation. After all, haven’t you read enough rules by now? That’s what Google is for.

As I left that day, I was struck by the memories shared over the course of an afternoon. It is a near certainty that I got some of the rules of the game wrong here, but it doesn’t really matter because that’s not really what I learned. There is something so quintessential about family game nights. A certain kind of bond can only be

formed over cards or board games. People you know and love and live with and work with are suddenly put in a mild and amusing form of jeopardy, and you get to see how they respond. Inevitably, you learn something of their craftiness, or of the joys we bottle up or sometimes never otherwise get to experience or share: a small victory, a rally from behind. Even in defeat, there is joviality and relief. You might already know what it looks like when a family member experiences a significant loss in life. So here is what it looks like when the loss need have no consequence. Take my pennies. I’ll get more! The games go on. And across decades, it all melts into a single fond memory, uninterrupted, pure and shared across generations.

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 6 5

6 6 M AY • J U N E 2019

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 67

The Creole is among the most revered of tomatoes. Most of the ones we have in our stores now come from Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, just downriver from New Orleans.

Our farmer partners like Matt Ranatza and Ben & Ben Becnel grow entire fields of these knobby, “ugly” tomatoes just for you. The rich river soil and weather conditions — what winemakers refer to as the terroir of a region — south of Lake Pontchartrain contribute to the Creole tomatoes’ unique, super-sweet flavor.

les

creol e s

by Lolis Eric Elie

Who called whom “Creole” first?

Folks in South Louisiana tend to take ownership of the word “Creole.” We tend to assume that all things Creole, including the word itself, were born of this soil and the people who tilled it. We are not entirely wrong to take such a proprietary view. No other place in the continental United States can rightly claim to have done so much to define and refine the term and the culture for which it stands.

But what happens when we travel south, and I don’t just mean south to the wetlands of Plaquemines and Terrebonne parishes. I mean south to Cuba and Haiti and Colombia — even to that most “American” part of Latin America, Puerto Rico. Travelers to these places will often encounter menu items 6 8 M AY • J U N E 2019

described as “Creole.” These meats and seafood tend to be stewed in rich tomato sauces. Which is to say, they sound very much like that emblematic Louisiana dish shrimp Creole. While shrimp swim in waters around the world, only the American hemisphere can claim to have birthed the tomato. So it’s fitting that the tomato figures so prominently in cooking here. But the word “Creole” is far larger and richer than mere tomato-based sauces. A closer look into its history and usage reveals that Louisiana Creoles have far-flung cultural cousins.

The simplistic definition of Creole is that it is a mixing of old world and new, a mix of people’s cultures from Europe and/or Africa in the Americas. The one consistent feature of all definitions of Creole is that the term

and the culture developed, not in Europe, but in the places Europeans conquered and settled. While we tend to think of Creoles as creatures only of this hemisphere, there are people as far away as the Seychelles Islands who are very much Creole and boast a similar mix to the Creoles of the Americas.

But the question of “Which people mixed with which others?” is a fraught one. Are Creole people white, black or, as some AfroCreoles argued more than a century ago, an entirely new and separate race?

The book Creole Cooking (Step-By-Step Cookbooks), published in 1990, contends that, “To be considered a Creole in the strictest sense, you would have to have descended from a French or Spanish family who came to the area before 1803.”

Similarly, Virginia Cooper wrote in her 1941 book, The Creole Kitchen Cook Book: Famous New Orleans Recipes, that “‘Creole’ is a name applied to the descendants of the French and the Spaniards who explored Louisiana and settled in the state.”

Lafcadio Hearn, the 19th-century writer who did much to create the popular notion of New Orleans and its culture, extended the ethnicity of Creoles to many other European immigrants. In their book, French Cooking in the New World: Louisiana Creole and French Canadian Cuisine, Frances D. and Peter J. Robotti quote Lafcadio Hearn, who defined a Creole as “a white descendant of an original Louisiana settler, who may be either French, or Spanish, or German, or English, or even American.”

ROUSES

It’s strange to read that Hearn thought that a Louisiana settler could be American. Wasn’t Louisiana already settled by the time the Americans arrived?

Each of these authors is very careful to state that Creoles are purely descended from Europeans. “Many of the leading citizens of Louisiana are proud they are Creoles, but they would be surprised to know that there has been in existence and still lingers the belief that the word Creole is associated with ‘mixed-bloods,’ or mulattoes, as they are more generally called,” Cooper wrote.

“It only remains to observe that the Creoles of New Orleans and of Louisiana (whatever right any save Spaniards may originally have had to the name), are all those native-born who can trace back their

ancestry to European immigrants to or European colonists of the State, whether those were English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, or Sicilian,” Hearn wrote in the essay entitled Los Criollos.

“But the term is generally understood here as applying to French residents, especially those belonging to old French families, and few others care to claim the name,” Hearn wrote.

But on the website 64parishes.org, the historian Shane K. Bernard writes that, in its earliest usage, the word Creole, or its Spanish equivalent, was used specifically to refer to people of African ancestry.

“The word Creole derives from the Latin creare, meaning ‘to beget’ or ‘to create,’ W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 6 9

Bernard writes. “It appears to have been used first by the Portuguese in the form crioulo, which denoted a slave born in the New World (as opposed to one born in Africa). By the 1600s, crioulo came to denote a native New World colonist, regardless of racial or ethnic heritage — black, white, or mixed race. In Louisiana, the term — which evolved into criollo in Spanish and créole in French — adhered to this convention, even though it most commonly referred to persons born into slavery in the New World.”

of the tomato name. But as our produce, our livestock, our architecture and our cooking are extensions of our self-image, what we say about these things reflects what we think of ourselves.

In the context of Louisiana, the term Creole is often contrasted with the term Cajun, much to the confusion of folks from outside the state. While Creoles can trace their lineage to a wide range of places, Cajuns are specially descended from those people who migrated from Canada to Southwest

Whatever other differences divide us; people along the Gulf coast tend to agree that our food is the best indigenous cuisine to be had in the United States.

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, the son of a Spanish conquistador and an Inca mother, did not look to Latin etymology to describe the origin of Creoles. In 1602 he wrote that “it’s a name that the Negroes invented…it means Negroes ‘born in the Indies,’ they invented it to distinguish those…born in Guinea [Africa] from those born in America, because they consider themselves more honorable and of better status than their children because they are from the fatherland...” he wrote.

It wasn’t long before the term Creole started to be applied not merely to human beings born in the Americas, but also to plants and animals thought to have their origins or finest expressions here. In South America, for example, the term Criollo has been given to horses bred in Argentina, Peru, Venezuela and other Spanish-speaking countries. In Portuguese-speaking Brazil, the horses are called Crioulo. These horses are said to be hardier and have more stamina than their European parents. In that way, what is said about these horses reflects what self-defined Creole human beings often say about themselves — that they are not only different but perhaps slightly better than the peoples from whom they descended.

If you walk down the produce aisle of a Louisiana supermarket in the summer, you are apt to see Creole tomatoes and even Creole okra. The term is not meant to suggest that these are special varieties of vegetables, separate and distinct from breeds grown north of I-10. The term is meant to boast that vegetables grown in the soil of Creole Louisiana have a distinct and — dare I say? — superior flavor. In this era, when supermarket shelves are filled with heirloom tomatoes of every size, shape, color and flavor, it is quaint to hear local folks speak of Creole tomatoes as if no other fruit is worthy

7 0 M AY • J U N E 2019

Louisiana after 1763, when the Treaty of Paris expelled French colonists from Canada. While Cajuns are a specific and distinct subset of Louisiana residents, they also have much in common with their Creole fellow citizens. For evidence of this, you need look no further than the emblematic dishes of both cuisines. Gumbo, jambalaya and étouffée differ in preparation from one part of the state to the other. But whether you consider yourself Cajun or Creole, you tend to take pride in your ability to execute those crucial dishes.

As is often the case in discussions of Louisiana culture, the French get even more credit than they deserve for their influence. Even though Louisiana was a Spanish colony for much of its colonial history, and even though the Spanish administration was more successful than the French, it is the French who get the lion’s share of the praise. The Creole language spoken in South Louisiana is often assumed to be French with variations. But linguists are increasingly analyzing other influences on the language. “[T]he Creole language continues to be used in Louisiana, and in recent decades it has received more attention from the state’s institutions and scholars,” Shane Bernard wrote. “These scholars generally regard Creole not as a dialect of French but rather as an ‘autonomous language’ because of ‘major differences in grammatical structure.’”

Where did those other influences come from if not from France?

Roughly a decade after the Louisiana Purchase, a large influx of Creoles came to Louisiana, fleeing the revolution in Haiti. To varying degrees, these people spoke both French and Creole. Creole, like other lingua franca around the world, developed as a means of communicating between people whose native languages are different. In ad-

dition to French, Louisiana residents in the early decades of the French colony spoke a variety of Native American languages as well as languages from many regions of West Africa including present-day Benin, Nigeria, Senegal, Congo, Cameroon and Angola. Elements of those languages go a long way toward explaining why Louisiana Creole developed into an “autonomous language” rather than a mere variation on conversational French.

It is difficult to separate the term “Creole” from the politics of race and culture. You could probably create a chart demonstrating that definitions of the term fall along the same liberal-conservative fault lines as our electoral politics. But as is often the case in a place so richly blessed with great food, what is on our plate could well save us, if only we’d let it.

Whatever other differences divide us, people along the Gulf Coast tend to agree that our food is the best indigenous cuisine to be had in the United States. In defending the honor of our native dishes, we tend to focus less on the distinctions between how your mother and my mother make their respective versions of roux. Rather, we stand together in our conviction that the United States could be made an infinitely better country if Creole seasoning was sprinkled more liberally in the pots of the nation. A chicken in every pot? Yes! But don’t forget get to add the Holy Trinity of Creole aromatics — onion, bell pepper and celery.

We would be wise therefore to focus more on what unites people of Creole descent than what divides us. Roux can be more than an agent to thicken, season and darken sauces. It can also be a tie that binds.

the official seal of approval.

Look for one of these Certified logos in stores, farmer’s markets and restaurants to support Louisiana businesses and families, while keeping your dollars at home and helping the local economy.

Buy certified louisiana products today! certifiedlouisiana.org

ROUSES

LOUISIANA DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE & FORESTRY MIKE STRAIN DVM, COMMISSIONER

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 71

CAJUN FOLKLORE If there’s anyone who knows Cajun folklore, it’s Barry Jean Ancelet.

Born in Church Point and raised in Lafayette, Ancelet is one of the few people (outside of famed ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax) devoted to the preservation of oral traditions — whether storytelling, song or poem — and the revelatory, nuanced, entertaining and complicated truths they reveal about people and places. Thankfully for Acadiana, there are also few people so deeply committed to place and devoted to promoting and supporting the region he calls home.

“I grew up in a family of storytellers but, of course, a lot of people around here did. It’s the kind of thing you probably wouldn’t think of. You’d just think, ‘Everybody tells stories,’” explains Ancelet. “But as I took French classes, first in high school and then at university, I started realizing that [the stories] other cultures eventually expressed in literature were oral instead in our culture, because people mostly didn’t read or write French in the 20th century. They were actively prevented from learning to read and write French in schools in an effort to eradicate the language. A lot of people persisted in speaking it, and communicating that way, but they didn’t leave anything on paper, in print.”

These new understandings led Ancelet to craft his life’s work around taking these stories that had been passed down orally for so long — through family trees and social gatherings and the grocery store line — and preserving them in all their colorful glory for posterity.

“I was unwilling to concede that we didn't have any stories. We had lots of stories; I knew that; I’ve heard them. The only way to get to them was through the oral medium.

That meant getting a tape recorder to capture [the stories] and going around to real people and recording them, so that’s what I did for several decades.”

And while, at first, that meant almost exclusively field recordings, over the course of a masterfully diverse, decades-long career, Ancelet has now recorded and told the stories and folklore of Cajun country in just about every way imaginable. He’s told them on the radio — most notably on his weekly program, Rendez-vous des Cajuns, which ran for 24 years. He’s told them through museum exhibits; as a professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette; as an author and poet; as the co-founder of the Festivals Acadiens et Créoles; and, of course, through music. In 2016, Ancelet and Sam Brous-

7 2 M AY • J U N E 2019

by Sarah Baird cartoon by Kacie Galtier

sard were nominated for a Grammy for their album, Broken Promised Land, which traces the tale of a great Creole storyteller, Ben Guine, who lived along Bayou Teche.

Below, Ancelet gives us a little bit of his own oral history of how humor plays into Cajun country folklore — from naughty priests to deathbed confessions and everything in between.

When you first started recording Cajun stories and folklore, what were your goals?

I was trying to understand: What are the themes? Why do we think it’s funny? What kinds of stories do we tell and for what apparent purpose? The only way to figure that out was to capture enough of them, first on tape and then transcription — writing down on paper what the people had said.

How would you describe Cajun humor, its general sensibility, to someone else?

The most profound thing I’ve learned about Cajun humor is that it’s very strongly carnivalesque. It revels in natural life, in bodily processes and in natural functions. Cajun humor loves to poke fun at authority — at power — not ever thinking that it’s actually going to dislodge it or overturn it, just that it’ll nudge it, you know?

Consequently, very little is sacred. For example, there are no sacred spaces. We tell jokes about priests in a church, and undertakers in a funeral home, and couples in a marriage bed, and people on their dying beds — any place that you would think ordinarily would be stately or somber or serious.

Is there a joke that comes to mind along those lines?

A priest in a confessional listening to confession on a Saturday, and there was one voice he didn’t recognize. So, after the young lady finished confessing, the priest said, “Well, I don’t recognize your voice. Are you from here?”

She said, “No, I’m just passing through.”

He said, “Oh really? How’s that?”

And she said, “Well, I’m with the circus.”

He said, “Oh really? What do you do with the circus?”

She said, “I’m a contortionist.”

I’ve actually heard lots of jokes in the aisles at Rouses! People would come up and say, “Hey, you can use this one!” for a radio show I used to host on Saturday nights where I’d often tell stories. They would try to tell me stories while I was trying to buy beans!

He said, “Wow! I haven’t seen one of those in a long time.”

She said, “Well, we’re going to be here all weekend. You’ll be able to come.”

He said, “No, I got a wedding and two funerals and a baptism. I'm going to be too busy. I won’t be able to get away.”

She said, “Well, there was nobody behind me in the line. Would you like me to give you a little demonstration here?”

He said, “Well, you would do that for me?”

She said, “Sure.”

He opened the curtain and she walked out and sat on the floor of the church right in front of the confessional. She took her left leg and passed it behind her back and grabbed it with her left hand, and took her right leg, passed it in front of her, and reached behind her head and grabbed it with her right hand.

Right then, Mrs. Boudreaux and Mrs. Thibodeaux were walking into church. Mrs. Boudreaux said, “Ooh, I don’t think I’m going to go to confession today. Father’s in a bad mood. Look at that penance he gave!”

Why do you think that nothing is off limits in Cajun humor?

It's profoundly a society that originated in peasant society — these same people that [French scholar] Rabelais was writing about.

They were the ones who would not have succeeded in revolting against authority

ROUSES

in Europe back then, but they could at least make fun. They could poke fun at authority. It became a social pressure release strategy.

A lot of Cajun humor has come to be called “Boudreaux and Thibodeaux” jokes, because the two names are used for main characters in different jokes over and over again. When did that begin?

That’s actually very coincidental. That started maybe, I don’t know, maybe 20, 25 years ago at the most. People just needed to name a character and they named them some typical name. Some well-known storyteller used that several times, and other people said, “Oh, that’s an easy way to name characters,” so everybody started doing it. In historical oral tradition, you hear many more ways to refer to the characters.

Does every community have someone who’s a designated storyteller? Where do you find them?

When looking for storytellers over the years, many times I would find a grocery store, because they knew pretty much all the people in town. For instance, one time, I went in a store in Bayou Pigeon and I said, “My name’s Barry Ancelet. I’m from UL in Lafayette, and I was wondering if y’all knew anybody who’s known to tell stories.” There were six people in the store. They all pointed to the bar next door

BOUDREAUX & THIBODEAUX Boudreaux’s Cajun Grill, Daphne, AL This Cajun charmer on the Eastern Shore in Daphne offers one of the best views of Mobile Bay, and it’s easy to see why the deck is the restaurant’s most loved spot. Brothers Aaron and Matt Brant and cousin Michael Geronemus offer an extensive menu that rivals that of Louisiana’s best Cajun restaurants. The star of the menu is smothered catfish topped with their signature crawfish étouffée , but you can’t go wrong with their chicken macque choux, blackened redfish (and gator) and fried boudin swamp cakes.

Boudreaux’s is open daily for lunch, dinner and Sunday brunch. Enjoy live music and a spectacular sunset on the deck.

Boudreaux & Thibodeaux’s, Baton Rouge, LA This popular Cajun-themed bar in Downtown Baton Rouge serving Cajun food and bar bites has an open-air balcony overlooking Third Street. Enjoy live music including Baton Rouge’s own Chase Tyler Band.

Boudreau & Thibodeau’s, Houma, LA This is the kind of restaurant that locals love and visitors get excited about. The decor is a nod to the city’s (and restaurant’s) Cajun heritage, and there are Boudreau and Thibodeau jokes written on all the walls and tables — but the food is no joke. A playful menu includes traditional Cajun dishes like spicy alligator sauce piquante, grilled boudin links and fried alligator bites. Dig in to a 10-ounce Boudreau burger, or a smaller 6-ounce version named T-Claude. (“T” is an abbreviation of the word petit, and translates to “small” in Cajun French.)

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 7 3

on cue. I said, “Oh, that’s a good indication.”

I went into the bar, and there was this guy behind the bar. I said, “Everybody in there just said that you’re a good storyteller.” He said, “I could tell a few.” I said, “You mind if I record?” He said, “Turn it on.” Two hours later, I ran out of tape.

What makes a good storyteller or joke-teller?

A good storyteller is somebody who can tell the story and make it come alive. A good storyteller is somebody who doesn’t just know the story but can perform it in a way that has you rapt. It has you on the edge of your seat. It just pulls you in. It’s a performance. It’s not just a report on what the story is. It makes the story come alive.

that used to be invited into house parties because they could fill the evening. Back then I recorded lots of storytellers who told me stories that lasted 15, 20, 25 minutes — long narrative stories. Not a whole lot of people would put up with that today unless they were going on purpose to a storytelling evening or something like that.

Where do these pieces of folklore and stories find their way into the culture now? Are they continuing on?

Oh, yes. Nowadays, stories get wedged into what’s otherwise happening in real life: waiting for a bus or an elevator, or standing around a barbecue pit, or whatever it is. In those pauses, people say, “Oh, did you hear the one about…?” That’s how typical storytelling happens today. It’s inserted into the bustle of everyday lives.

One of the best storytellers I recorded was a Creole guy from Parks, Louisiana. He was amazing. His voice was so animated. It was like music. In addition to that, he would take care of everybody there listening. He’d reach over and pull your shirt and tickle you or pinch you, touch your hat. He was physi- I’ve actually heard lots of jokes in the aisles cally engaged with whatever audience he at Rouses! People would come up and say, had. It was amazing.

“Hey, you can use this one!” for a radio show I used to host on Saturday nights where I’d That kind of storytelling comes from a time often tell stories. They would try to tell me before television, before radio, before other stories while I was trying to buy beans! imported forms of entertainment. People like

74 M AY • J U N E 2019

And, of course, one last question: Do you have a favorite food-related joke?

There’s a man on his deathbed, and he’s got very little time to go. He’s fading fast. His family has gathered at his house. He sees one of his grandkids walk in front of the door. He calls him in, and he says, “Honey, it seems like I can smell a gumbo. Is your grandma making a gumbo?” The little boy says, “Yeah, I think so.” He says, “Man, I don’t have much time left, but I sure did love your grandma’s gumbo. I would love to have a bowl before I go. Could you go down and ask and send me up a bowl of gumbo?” The little boy leaves and he comes back a few minutes later with nothing in his hands. Old man says, “Well, where’s my gumbo?” The little boy says, “Grandma says that’s for after the funeral!”

cajun Allons (al-lohn): Let's go

Allons danser (al-lohn-dahn-say): Let’s dance

glossary Courtbouillon (coo-boo-yon): A rich, spicy tomato-based soup or stew made with fish fillets, onions, and sometimes mixed vegetables Couyon (coo-yawn):

Andouille (ahn-do-ee):

A Cajun French term used to describe a foolish or crazy person

Bayou (bi-yoo):

Cracklin’ (crack-lin): Pork fat and skin fried in hog lard until crispy

A coarse-grained smoked sausage

A marshy outlet

Bébé (beh-bay): Baby

Bon(boh-n):

Good

étouffée (ay-too-fay): A smothered dish usually made with crawfish or shrimp Fais do-do (fay-doe-doe):

Mais (meh):

But. Mais non means no, mais oui and mais ya means yes

Minou (mee-noo): Cat or kitten

Mirliton (merl-uh-tawn or mel-e-tawn): Green, bumpy, pear-shaped squash known elsewhere as chayote Nonc (nonk): Uncle

Parrain (pa-ran): Godfather

Boudé (boo-day):

A Cajun dance party with a fiddle-led band

Pa-tot (puh-tot): A little chunky baby

Boudin (boo-dan): Cooked pork, rice and seasonings stuffed in sausage casing

Filé (fee-lay): Ground sassafras leaves

Pauvre Bête (pawv-bet):

Frissons (free-sons): The chills or goosebumps

Pedro (peedro): A Cajun card game

Ça c’est bon (sa-say-bohn):

Small

It’s good

Gumbo (gum-boe): A thick, robust soupy-stew thickened with roux, okra or filé

Cha-chut (sha-shoot):

Honte (hont):

Pout

Bourré (boo-ray):

A trick-taking Cajun card game

A Cajun word to describe anything you don’t know the name of

Cher (sha):

A Cajun term of endearment

Cher Bébé (sha beh-bay):

Darling baby or oh, how cute!

Chevrette (she-vret):

Shrimp

Cocodril (ko-ko-dree):

Alligator

Cochon de Lait (coo shawn duh lay):

A suckling pig roast

Couche-Couche (koosh-koosh):

A Cajun breakfast hot cereal made by frying cornmeal and topping it with milk and/or cane syrup

Embarrassed or ashamed

Jambalaya (jum-bo-lie-yah):

A rice dish with any combination of beef, pork, chicken, sausage or seafood

Joie de vivre (jhwa-da-veev):

Joy of living

Lache pas la patate

(losh-pa-la-pa-tot): Don’t drop the potato or don’t give up

Lagniappe (lahn-yop):

Something extra

Laissez les bons temps rouler

(lay-say-lay-bohn-tohn-roo-lay): Let the good times roll.

Macque Choux (mock-shoo):

A dish made by scraping young corn off the cob and smothering the kernels in tomatoes, onion and spices ROUSES

Poor thing

Petite (pe-teet):

Pirogue (pee-row): A Cajun canoe Ro-day (row-day):

Run around town, to run errands

Tante (taunt): Aunt

Ti (tee):

This Cajun equivalent of ”junior” is placed before the name instead of after. The feminine version is ’tite (teet)

Tooloulou (too-loo-loo): crab

Veiller (vay-yay):

To spend the evening talking with friends

Zydeco (zi-de-co):

Creole dance music that’s a mix of traditional Cajun dance music, R&B and African blues

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 7 5

76 M AY • J U N E 2019

laissez les bons temps rouler every day!

If you’ve got an envie (craving) for crawfish, we’ve got you covered.

We’ve got our famous Louisiana crawfish chaud du pot — hot out the pot — 11am to 7pm, every day. We’re also boiling Gulf crabs and shrimp with family recipes that go back three generations. Grab a case of beer while you’re here!

ROUSES

W W W. R O U S E S . C O M 7 7

www.rouses.com

Fais Dough-Dough Our recipe for the sweet-dough Cajun pie known as Tarte-a-la-Bouille has been passed down from generation to generation. We fill a sweetdough crust with a traditional custard bouille made with real butter, cream, milk, sugar and eggs, and top it with a lattice crust.

It’s been voted your all-time favorite pie!

7 8 M AY • J U N E 2019

www.rouses.com