Some rules to live by come about suddenly. I was hanging out with my friend Pableaux when he started talking about taking me around the land of his people, the Louisiana Cajun country. That's when the rule appeared: when a food writer named Pableaux offers you a tour of the Lousiana Cajun country, you take him up on it.
So I loaded up a borrowed pickup truck with some friends and drove out west from New Orleans, leaving the city on I310, passing for a moment a landscape I'd never seen before. The highway lifted us dozens of feet in the air, the concrete grays of its interchanges and exits spiraling in the sky, high above the swamp. And below us, that swamp showed itself to be stunningly beautiful, a fantastic merging of land and water. The algae-coated bayous were rivers of pistachio ice cream. The trees , turning muted orange, wore scarves of Spanish moss to fight off the chill. I think that I'd never really seen a swamp before, and maybe never before has so gorgeous a thing been captured by so ugly a word.
Hey, I think Billeaud's might have some boudin and cracklins.
(Photo: Kristen "Kay-Z" Zeiber)
We passed through that sight too quickly; we weren't quite ready to leave it behind when Punkin looked out the window and said, "This looks kind of like Minnesota." And it was indeed flat, only instead of corn or wheat we drove by swaths of sugar cane. They stretched to the horizon, broken up by a barn or a church and the occasional pillar of smoke from a field under controlled burn.
We were definitely not in Minnesota though, when the billboards appeared: enormous messages that blocked out the sky, proclaiming "BOUDIN & CRACKLIN". These weren't normal billboards. These were like double-wide billboards. They were like messages from above, or beyond, or wherever the temptation of pork products comes from.
We met up with Pableaux in a parking lot off the highway, and he began our tour as all tours should begin: with lunch.
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