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.
In the Cajun, "T" is short for "Petit," so T-Coon's means
"Little Coon's." I can explain to you that much. I can't
explain why you would name your restaurant after a vicious,
carnivorous scavenger.
I have to confess that I arrived at T-Coon's disappointed, because we came on a Saturday and the specials list painted on the window said that Tuesday is short rib fricassee day. I wondered if we should sit in the parking lot, have a snack, and wait out the 72 hours. Luckily, every day is meatball fricassee day at T-Coon's. Score! If there is one thing more perversely delicious-sounding than short rib fricassee, it's shaped-ground-meat fricassee.
Pableaux surveyed the table, spying my meatball, his smothered beef, Punkin's smothered pork, and Kay-Z's crawfish etouffee, and smiled. "This is like what I ate in school growing up," he said, "when little old lunch ladies still cooked food for kids in school." The rolls, he said, tasted particularly of his childhood. I took a bite of one, and it was fantastic: tender, chewy, buttery, sweet and yeasty.
The rest of the food followed suit. The meatball was slightly spicy, rich and brown-tasting; the salty, slightly vinegary razor-thin coleslaw tarted it up beautifully. And I could have mowed down my body weight in that rice. "Medium grain is the rice of my people," Pableaux said. Not quite long grain, not quite sushi, it's got a beautiful toothsomeness, a nice chew, slightly sticky, and it traps gravy like a jealous lover.
I thought about what it would be like to grow up on food this tasty, this carefully made in school cafeterias. Pableaux's been writing about food for a dozen years, but he once said to me that he thought anyone could do what he does. "Anyone, anyway, who grew up like me, in a place where everyone just cares about food as much as I do." Well, since he is possessed of a singular wit and a love of words, I have to think that he's wrong. But then again, the food in my school cafeteria wasn't like this, either. What's school lunch like here now? "My goddaughter was eating McDonald's and Subway last time I checked," he said.
Next week: a dalliance with boudin, a bivalve massacre, and grown men hugging novelty-sized food containers.