Letters: Feufollet And Boudin

ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

From NPR News, this is All Things Considered. I'm Robert Siegel.

MELISSA BLOCK, host:

And I'm Melissa Block. Now, to your letters about yesterday's program. More specifically, to my story about a band of young musicians called Feufollet. The group is based in Lafayette, Louisiana. It digs deep into the Cajun song book. One of the traditional Creole numbers on their latest album is called "Femme l'a Dit."

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(Soundbite of song "Femme l'a Dit")

SIEGEL: Band member Josh Caffrey told us that Feufollet recorded this song after he'd found an earlier recording of it in the Archives of Cajun and Creole folklore, a recording by Gilbert Martin. And we said in our story that Feufollet's recording was, as far as they knew, the only other recording of the song. Well, Wesley Moore of Seattle wrote in to point us to this version of "Femme l'a Dit."

(Soundbite of song "Femme l'a Dit")

BLOCK: That's Leonard de Paur's version of "Femme l'a Dit" on "The Black Music Anthology to Long Road to Freedom."

Well, Bradley Leishe (ph) from Estherwood, Louisiana enjoyed our story about Feufollet.

SIEGEL: He wrote, finally, an accurate portrayal of our culture. But Leishe did offer another correction. When setting the scene for this story, we described the band's dinner that night, boudin, as blood sausage. Well, Leishe explains boudin is actually a mixture of rice, ground pork, and seasonings which is stuffed into a sausage casing.

BLOCK: This is my bad, Robert, and I'm embarrassed. So out of curiosity, we made a few calls to learn more about boudin, and it seems to vary from town to town, many variations from kitchen to kitchen. So we ended up calling members of Feufollet back and ask them who made the boudin that they ate that night.

It turns out, Robert, that boudin came from a supermarket in Scott, Louisiana called The Best Stop. And the Best Stop's manager Dana Cormier joins us to explain how she makes boudin. She joins us from the supermarket kitchen.

And Dana, what's the secret to a great boudin?

Ms. DANA CORMIER (Manager, Best Stop Supermarket): Well, we do have a great boudin. We make about 2,000 pounds a day.

BLOCK: 2,000 pounds a day? A ton of boudin every day?

Ms. CORMIER: Right now, it's between 1,600 to 2,400 pounds a day, so an average of 2,000 pounds a day, and that's Monday through Friday. And the way we do it is, we take about 60 pounds of pork meat, and we put five pounds of pork liver with onions and bell pepper with a bunch of seasoning in there. We boil it for an hour and a half.

Once it's finished boiling, we take it off the burners, and then we grind it into big grinder. And then once it is ground, we mix it with our rice and some more Cajun seasoning. That's like red pepper, salt, black pepper, MSG. And then, the juice that we have leftover from the pots, we take it, and we use it to mix up the rice and the meat and the seasoning together.

Once we mix all that up, we stick it in some crankers (ph), and we crank it through, and it goes into a pork casing.

BLOCK: How long does all that take?

Ms. CORMIER: We only start the pots up to 5:30 in the morning, and they'll finished making boudin about either four or five o'clock in the afternoon.

BLOCK: And there's no blood in it at all?

Ms. CORMIER: No. Blood boudin used to be like along whenever they would butcher the pigs, they would save the blood, and they would make some blood boudin. These days, with the Board of Health and things like that, it's not too many people that can make that anymore unless they make it, you know, at their house.

And people these days don't eat a lot of things that the Cajuns used to eat way back when, like tongue and tripe and pork stomachs and different things mixed inside. And a lot of kids these days don't know what all that is, so they don't eat all that good stuff.

BLOCK: Everything but the squeak, right?

Ms. CORMIER: Right.

(Soundbite of laughter)

BLOCK: Well, how do you cook boudin - if I were to buy some, how would I cook it?

Ms. CORMIER: Well, it's already - like I said, it's already cooked. We eat - we serve it hot to our customers here. You could pick it up cold, or you could pick it up frozen, and we put it in boiling water to serve it to our customers. But my favorite way to heat it up is to put it on a barbecue pit.

BLOCK: And you just eat it on its own, or do you serve anything with it?

Ms. CORMIER: No, you will just eat like - but, just like that, or we either put it on a slice of bread or eat with it crackers or, you know, different ways. I always eat it for breakfast every day. I've been here since I've been in high school, and I graduated in '88, and I've been running the store for 15 years now, and I eat it every morning for breakfast.

BLOCK: Well, Dana Cormier, thanks for setting me straight on boudin. Appreciate that.

Ms. CORMIER: OK. Thank you.

BLOCK: Dana Cormier is manager of the Best Stop supermarket in Scott, Louisiana. She spoke with us from the kitchen. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.