The Boudin Casinos
One of my first assignments in Louisiana as a Red Cross volunteer was to go with a local volunteer named Wes to visit two Red Cross shelters and get their kitchen computers connected to the Red Cross network. We stopped at the Cajun Dome in Lafayette, fifty miles to the west of Baton Rouge, and the Civic Center in Lake Charles, another fifty miels to the west of Lafayette.
I learned from Wes that Lafayette is smack in the middle of "Cajun Country", which runs from Evangline in the north, Lake Charles on the west, Baton Rouge to the east, and the Gulf to the south. The Cajuns that live here are very provincial, many having been born and raised in the same house that their grandparents were born and raised in. Many have never travelled outside Louisiana, and consider anyone outside of Cajun Country as somewhat of a foreigner.
Later on during my stay in the Gulf, I would meet a woman from New Iberia, just south of Lake Charles. She had gone to Nevada to escape Rita, and I met her in the Baton Rouge airport on my way home. She asked me where all I had been in Louisiana. I mentioned all the places I had been, and when I mentioned Shreveport, only 250 miles to the north, she said "Oh, that's Yankee Country up there!"
On this, my first trip to Red Cross shelters, I discovered that it takes hours in the turmoil and confusion of the shelters to figure out what is going on and who is in charge. We got to Lake Charles late in the day, after having spent hours in Lafayette at the Cajun Dome shelter. When we arrived at the Lake Charles shelter, we had to wait for several hours just to speak with the shelter manager, because news had just arrived that four children of one of the mothers staying in the shelter had been found dead in New Orleans, and the manager was dealing with informing her. The palpable sadness, the lack of privacy, anxiety and turmoil in the shelter that day hit me in the gut like a hammer. I thought, "this is the real deal here; I'm seeing this vast disaster from a few feet away, not sitting on the couch watching it at home on TV like I had been just a week earlier". What a difference a close vantage point makes.
While at the Lake Charles shelter I met the "Fat Boys", two men who had closed their Cajun gourmet chef school when Katrina hit the Gulf to come run the kitchen at the Lake Charles shelter. With the help of many other volunteers, they were preparing incredible meals for the people who were staying in the shelter. It must have been one of the bright spots in the lives of the people in the shelter to at least be getting really good, hot meals served by master chefs. Later in the month, on a trip to Lake Charles that turned into the evacaution for Rita, the "Fat Boys" served crawfish etufee for the last dinner before the evacuation, and it was delicious.
We spent hours at Lake Charles, and before we left, we put a local volunteer (who before Katrina hit had been the theater manager for the civic center theater) in charge of arranging to get an Internet connection for the shelter kitchen computer. What should have been a six hour trip had turned into a 16 hour trip. It was nine in the evening before we left Lake Charles and headed back to Baton Rouge.
On the way over to Lafayette and Lake Charles, I had noticed many billboards along the freeway advertising "Boudin". I saw this again on the way home and mentioned this to Wes. I asked if it was a chain of casinos. Wes howled with laughter, and said "No, boudin is Cajun food, and it's not pronounced 'boudin'; it's pronounced 'boodan'". Hmmm- very strange, this Cajun language! When he stopped laughing I said, "What is it? Let's stop and get some." He replied that if I knew what it was I wouldn't eat it. I assured him that I was extremely couragous when it came to new foods, so he told me that it was hot, spicy pork mixed with onions, cooked rice and herbs in a pig's intestine. I think he also mumbled something about pig blood under his breath, but I let that slide. I said, "I'm game- lets get some!"
So, as we drove east towards Baton Rouge, we kept a lookout for a boudin billboard. As we drove, Wes told me more about Cajun food; the proper way to prepare gumbo and jambalaya, and the various types of etufee. Soon we saw a boudin sign, and stopped at a convenience market (the REAL boudin markets were all closed for the day) to get my first sample of Cajun food. Wes said the proper way to cook boudin was to steam it in a rice cooker, but since the convenience market only had a microwave, he improvised by wrapping up two big boudin sausages in wet paper towels and nuking them in the microwave until they were steaming hot.
The store clerk, a woman with a strong Cajun accent, commented that the microwave would toughen the sausage skin, and Wes agreed, but said that the insides would still be good. It was indeed very good. It had just the right amount of spice to give it some zing; all in all, it had a very satisfying flavor and texture. We were on the road again and enjoying our hot boudin, and I asked him, since he appeared to be a connoisseur of Cajun food, if this was good, bad or middling boudin, and he drawled that it was, indeed "pretty good fixins". I noticed that this recent intake of boudin had enhanced his previously dormant Cajun accent.
We pulled into Baton Rouge after midnight, and Wes invited me to crash at his apartment, rather than go back to the cot at headquarters, an invitation that I accepted. As I fell asleep, I thought about the day and the amazing things I had seen and learned. Louisiana was an interesting place.