Next, Pableaux had us trying the wares of the Best Stop meat market, where they sell most any cut of meat you've ever seen, all rubbed with a brilliantly red spice mix and stuffed until they're as big as a side of my chest. Stuffed pork chops, stuffed quail, stuffed beef tongue, which I'm not sure what I do would with, despite my love of tongue. In the non-spice paste-smeared case, I saw an unusual form of pork: Cut saddle-style, with two loin chops joined side-by-side like butterfly wings. I suspect they don't get their meat pre-cut out a box from a factory. These people take their meat seriously.
It tastes real good, warm with spices and just a touch of earthiness to keep it round and mellow, but the act of squeezing a soft sausage out of a casing is, well, different. It's a little like eating a freezy-pop, only, you know, hot and made of squishy meat. Incidentally, it's eaten most appropriately off the tailgate of a pickup, right out of the market. "It's gotta be either that or the hood of a car," Pableaux instructed.
On to the cracklins. Cajun cracklins take pork rinds and do them one better—not just fried skin, they're chunks of pork belly, fried low and slow until the fat renders out, the skin is, well, crackling, and the meat is concentrated and chewy like jerky. Then they're tossed in that spice mix again, heavy on red pepper. Kay-Z ate one, then another, then a third, saying, "I just realized that I was eating fried fat, and I had to stop." Punkin pointed out the growing grease slicks on the paper bag they came in. "Funny what some people notice," Pableaux said. I reached for another one.
Letting a New Yorker eat off a tailgate can be dangerous, as I demonstrated by forgetting to bring the meat party back into the truck cab. Or tie it down, at least. Later, I watched through my rearview mirror a paper bag explode and fly away in a gust of highway wind. "Oh f***!" I shouted. " The cracklins!"
We had to bury my disappointment in oysters in Abbeville. Kay-Z had never had oysters before. The raw ones that night, I have to admit, were a little bland, needing some colder weather to bring out their brine, and consequently they weren't an ideal way to begin someone's oyster-eating career. But the garlicky broiled ones, well, she didn't have to work too hard to like them:
Behold! The come-hither look that draws oysters to their doom!
Incidentally, Abbeville is also home to Steen's Cane Syrup. Since I've been down South, I have grown to love cane syrup, with its deep, slightly musky flavor and mellow, ringing sweetness. I eat it on my pancakes, toast, biscuits, from a spoon, off my fingers, and while I'm not proud of this, I have at least on one occasion licked the side of the can. So unknowingly arriving at the birthplace of Louisiana's favorite cane syrup was, well, exciting:
Net: 16682 Gal. (Photo: Kristen "Mojito" Zeiber)
The next morning, I made coffee while my friends nursed the sort of food hangover that I've long since forgotten exists. Pableaux had to run back to New Orleans and we were left to our own devices. I dug through our pile of stuff to find the lid to my coffee press when I shouted, "They're back! They're here!"
The cracklins. I found the cracklins. Turns out they didn't blow off onto the highway, and I chose not to think about what had. Instead, I ate them with my coffee, and this… this was a magnificent combination. You know how coffee after a bite of doughnut makes the fried flavor bloom, filling your mouth with richness? Yeah, it was like that, only spicy and piggy. Crunch crunch sip sip. Breakfast of champions.
While I was getting my day going this way, my friends were perusing the local festival calendar. "Hey, did you know we missed the Shrimp and Petroleum Festival?" they asked me. I have to confess that I wasn't terribly broken up over that, even if it is "Louisiana's Oldest State Chartered Harvest Festival." But when they told me about the Boys and Girls Club Wild Game, Seafood, and Jambalaya Cook Off that happened yesterday, I was distraught. I tried to assuage myself by saying that they're just boys and girls. But then again, people here probably learn to cook when they're 6.
I started to wish that I'd grown up here.
We took a leisurely route back home, detouring to see the Tabasco hot sauce factory, because I'm a sucker for factory tours, and Avery Island boasts an alluring swamp garden. Plus I kind of remember growing up on Tabasco sauce, dousing it on noodles when I was a kid. The tour was fine, interesting if a little greased up with PR unctuousness. But I didn't foresee how I would instinctively react when I saw that massive, iconic Tabasco bottle:
(Photo: Kristen "Kristen" Zeiber)
Maybe I was home, after all.