Story and photography by Chris Jay
My father, Donny, is a retired pipeline welder from Taylor, Arkansas, who moves and speaks so lethargically that his friends have dubbed him “Turtle.” In his retirement years, Turtle has developed an all-consuming interest in sausage-making, a topic that he will discuss in depth and at length with little to no encouragement. He spends several hours each day watching YouTube videos about sausage-making, grinding meat, and stuffing sausage links in his garage kitchen. He has become particularly obsessed with the craft of making boudin, which he attempts to produce again and again, like Sisyphus rolling a boudin ball up the hill in Tartarus.
“It’s just so many things about boudin that get to me, that I can’t understand,” he told me recently. “Boudin should be the simplest thing in the world—you’ve got your meat and your seasonings; it shouldn’t be hard. But it is hard. The stars have to align for good sausage.”
A few years ago, he and my mother sold the rural Webster Parish homestead that I grew up roaming—44 acres of sandy hills and slow-moving creeks—and purchased a lakefront home in Arkansas. The summer before they were to depart Louisiana, I convinced them to join me for a quick road trip to Cajun Country, a part of Louisiana they’d only seen on reality television. It didn’t seem right, in my opinion, for them to leave the state without having spent any time exploring southwest Louisiana. That would be like living in Egypt and never visiting the Great Pyramids, I argued.
It wouldn’t have to be a long or complicated trip. We could make our way down the Red River from Shreveport to Breaux Bridge. We’d take a proper swamp tour on Lake Martin and eat some in-season blue crabs. My mom was sold from the start, but Turtle needed more convincing.
“Dad, the Cajuns are sausage people,” I said. “We’ll take an empty cooler, and we’ll fill it up with sausages the likes of which you have never seen.”
A few days later, the three of us were southbound on I-49, an empty cooler rattling in the trunk. Passing through Natchitoches late in the morning, we ate meat pies at Lasyone’s Meat Pie Restaurant and walked a few scenic blocks of Front Street before resuming the drive.
It’s tough for me to drive past the exit for Lecompte without stopping, knowing that the experience of visiting Lea’s Lunchroom of Lecompte—one of Louisiana’s greatest traditional American diners—is well worth the detour. We arrived as the restaurant’s famous pie case was being restocked with chocolate, coconut, and banana cream pies, each topped with a perfect dome of meringue, as well as fragrant double-crusted cherry, peach, and apple pies. The three of us drank good, strong black coffee and swapped slices of pie with one another as a crowd filed into the dining room for the lunch rush.
The best place to shop for sausage, I thought, would be Abbeville. Arriving in Cajun Country in the early afternoon, our first stop was Richard’s Meat Market, a weather-worn little butcher shop adorned with a mural of a hog simmering in a black pot. My dad agreed that the fresh boudin was outstanding, eating a warm link retrieved from a steam tray on the butcher’s counter before purchasing several dozen frozen packages containing different varieties of boudin and fresh sausage. We packed the butcher paper-wrapped bricks into his cooler and headed east on Highway 14.
Meyers Sausage Kitchen, a tiny operation located in a red cinder block building in Abbeville, keeps limited hours, but its fresh sausage is considered by many to rank among the very best in Cajun Country. My dad beamed with excitement—as much as a man named “Turtle” can beam—as he loaded frozen packages of the precious stuff into our cooler. A friend of mine from Abbeville serves it as a smothered sausage gravy, browned and simmered with whole baby carrots, onions, and a dash of Kitchen Bouquet seasoning sauce. She adds just enough water to submerge half of the browned sausage in a cast-iron saucepan, lets it simmer until the gravy becomes dark and meaty, and serves it with warm Louisiana rice.
Next stop was our home for the night, Cajun Country Cottages in Breaux Bridge. Out of the five available cabins at 1138 Lawless Tauzin Rd., we’d booked the two that were situated closest to a 5-acre pond at the heart of the property. Arriving in the late afternoon, we were surprised and delighted to be greeted by an old, black dog, who would check in on us throughout our stay, periodically wandering over to my father for her ears to be scratched.
Our rental included the use of an aluminum johnboat, a flat-bottomed skiff just like the one that I’d grown up paddling along the creeks back home. It was midsummer, and our brightly colored cabins were surrounded by clusters of gnarled, dark-green fig trees heavy with musty fruit. My mom picked and ate figs from the branches as my dad unpacked the car. I paddled the johnboat out into the pond and tried to catch a bass.
One of the best parts of our too-brief stay at Cajun Country Cottages was its proximity to so many of the Bayou Teche region’s acclaimed backroad eateries. That evening, we made the 10-minute drive to Crawfish Town USA in nearby Henderson, where we ate piles of just-caught, fatty blue crabs and enormous fried shrimp. We shut the place down, my father field-stripping trayful after trayful of perfectly seasoned crabs until all the other customers had cleared out.
We woke up early the next morning and drank instant coffee on the pier, the little pond as still as a mirror. Before we departed for a boat tour of Lake Martin, we stopped at the nearest crossroads—less than 2 miles from our cabins—for an unplanned, grab-and-go breakfast that remains one of our favorite memories of the trip. I’d seen billboards for Poche’s Restaurant & Market on the drive into Butte La Rose but hadn’t realized that our remote-feeling cabins were located just a stone’s throw from the bustling parking lot of one of southwest Louisiana’s most popular destinations for boudin and cracklin’s. I couldn’t have planned a better stop for my father.
My dad quickly filled the last of the space in his cooler with bricks of frozen boudin, wandering the aisles of the market, wide-eyed, casually chatting with other travelers who were also filling coolers. He was in his element, surrounded by other families who, like us, thought it was perfectly reasonable to plan a family road trip around the procurement of sausage.
Over the next few years, the three of us would face a lot of challenges together as a family, some of which would be even tougher than making a good batch of boudin in Arkansas—the COVID-19 pandemic, cancer, and divorce among them. But as I’ve learned from my father’s Sisyphean pursuit of the perfect sausage: If you love something, or someone, so strongly that people think you’ve lost your mind, then you must be doing something right.
I called my dad for an update on his sausage quest.
“I still make boudin but not every day,” he said. “I’ve made a bunch since we got to Arkansas, but I ain’t never got it made just like I want it to be yet. Honestly, I don’t know if I can please myself. I may never get there on sausage.”
I caught a lilt of hope at the other end of the line, a pause that felt more like a new beginning than a conclusion.
“What do you mean, ‘on sausage,’ Dad?”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve decided that I’m gettin’ into biscuits. Since we live in Arkansas now and all. Maybe I’ll get there on biscuits someday.”
