It’s a holiday so everyone can comment and no paywall break this week…and if you have any Louisiana stories yourself, please do share!
Happy Easter! Happy Passover! Happy Ramadan!
Did I miss anyone?
Anyway, in Louisiana, Easter is a pretty big deal. I was a reporter/editor in New Iberia – the home of Tabasco sauce - for 38 months, during which I gained 39 pounds (seriously.)
Of course no one noticed, let alone cared, in Louisiana – political campaigns spent 1/3 of their budgets on booze and food, the chief deputy of the sheriff’s office was so large he had to get a new patrol car every year because the frame bent towards the driver’s side, the boudin ball (you take the meat filling out of a steamed sausage, mix it with dirty rice ((that’s rice made with organ meat chunklets)), roll it into a ball, cover it in dough, and then deep fry it) exists, and every roadside stand has better food than you’ve ever had before and it costs six bucks.
Easter – depending upon when it is, thank you Council of Nicea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter - marks a number of very specific Louisiana points.
First, if you gave up booze for Lent (most Cajuns still actually give something up and alcohol is a pretty popular one, though I met someone who only smoked cigars from New Year’s Eve to Ash Wednesday specifically so he could give them up for Lent) it means you can drink again.
I cannot overemphasize the importance of that in Louisiana.
There was an area church that even offered a midnight Easter Mass to speed things along. It was a 20-minute no muss, no fuss service – stand, sit, kneel, pray, stand, kneel, pray, sit, stand, take communion and done. And then everyone would pile into the bar – a bar that was known for its rather esoteric interpretation of the timing of last call - about a block away and normality ensued.
Besides bourbon, there are other causes of Easter relief. Another popular Lenten swearing-off was meat; depriving a Cajun of his pork for any significant length of time can lead to very unpleasant events so that after church ham – and said boudin balls and cracklins and ribs and chops and feet and squeal – goes faster than normal politeness would usually allow.
And then there are the crawfish. The best time of year for proper local sweet rice paddy raised crawfish is in Spring, serendipitously about Easter time, so once the newspaper goes down on the table, 100s of pounds of the lil’ lobsters are dumped on and it’s time to pinch the tail and suck the head. In case you’re wondering, you order – even in restaurants - crawfish by the pound and a typical per-person serving is seven pounds, as an appetizer; admittedly there is not a lot of meat in them, but still…
A side note on crawfish and oysters: at a proper restaurant, people are not served “cocktail sauce” with either. Instead, everything you could possibly need – including at least four different hot sauces – is brought to the table to allow you to make your own and you take it from there.
Well, it’s a holiday so I’ll let you get back to your fun.
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And just in case you are now a bit hungry, you can order live crawfish, alligator, rose petal jelly, turducken, and, yes, the finest boudin balls in the world right here:
Not a “sponsored plug” – I would be so lucky – just a really good website for Cajun food and I know from personal experience that the live crawfish show up actually alive, even all the way to California.
With all my political work and family travels to Louisiana, I've never heard of a boudin ball. I have clearly missed out. Probably too much time in places like Slidell and Baton Rouge, and no time in New Iberia or Lafayette.