Babineaux Slaughter House
1019 Babineaux Road
Breaux Bridge, LA  70517
(337) 332-1961

“I’ve got friends of mine that have made boudin, and we all clown each other about who makes the best boudin, but it doesn’t matter.” – Rodney Babineaux

As purveyors of red boudin, the brothers Rodney and Larry Babineaux are the last of a dying breed in Acadiana. Also known as blood boudin, red boudin is made by mixing blood from a freshly slaughtered pig into typical Cajun white boudin filling. While the Babineauxs also sell an exceptional white boudin, for which they use the freshest meat possible, it’s the red boudin that truly sets them apart. It requires extra coordination to prepare, as a Louisiana State inspector must be present for the slaughter of all pigs whose blood is intended to enrich batches of red boudin. The brothers learned their trade, and their boudin recipes, from their parents (primarily their mother), who purchased the business in 1971 and only recently retired altogether. Rodney and Larry carry on their parents’ high standards of freshness, and also their Cajun heritage. It’s common to see an empty display case in the small market, because so much of the meat is cut to order; it’s equally common to hear Cajuns of all ages conversing with the brothers in French. Rodney didn’t even learn to speak English until he started elementary school.

NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

EDITED TRANSCRIPT

Subject: Rodney Babineaux
Date: July 24, 2007
Location: Babineaux Road—Breaux Bridge, LA
Interviewer & Photographer: Sara Roahen

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Sara Roahen:  This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Tuesday, July 24, 2007 and I’m in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Could I get you to say your full name and your birth date?

Rodney Babineaux:  Rodney Babineaux, Jr. October 2, 1954.

And could you say for the record how you make your living?

I process beef, pork, and I make boudin and cracklings. Basically that’s it: cutting and wrapping and processing for people, and then selling meat on the side.

How long has the store been around?

I want to say 37 years—actually, yeah.

And who started it?

My father—well actually, my mother started it. She’s the one that was working at the market before we had it, and she would just help out, and then all of the sudden the guy decided he didn’t want to put up with meat inspections and he wanted to get out. And when he got out my father was working with the railroad, and she decided it was a good turn for the best. And they did—they went out and they borrowed some money and they started it out in 1971. And they just basically started out with $500, and they came out and they had a business and we started off with that.

Are your parents alive?

Yes. My—both of them are 78 years-old. They’re retired. They don’t, they don’t do too much. Mama used to bake cakes. She worked over here ‘til she was about 62, and then she decided to go and bake cakes, and she baked wedding cakes for about 15 years. She just retired from that too. She got rid of that.

And so she was always sort of a food person, I guess.

Yes. She’s the one who showed us how to cut meat, and then she showed us how to start off in it. And then when I graduated I decided to go to meat-cutting school, which I went to in Toledo, Ohio for three months, in a meat-cutting course that you went and you were basically on the job training. And it was—it was pretty interesting.

And what is your heritage? Where are your ancestors from?

Right here. Cajun country. Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Do you know if they—if your, you know grandparents or great-grandparents came from Canada or France?

Oh definitely, yeah; yeah, they did. We have some—they have some Babineauxs that are Canadian originated. Yes they do. I’ve talked to some of them and I’ve met them, you know. We had a Babineaux reunion quite a few years back and they were there, and they all came down. But it—they do have a lot of Canadians that are Babineauxs, yes, and the LeBlancs. See, I’m half-LeBlanc.

You must have had half of Acadiana at your reunion.

Oh yes—oh yes, definitely. A lot of LeBlancs, yes. Oh yeah, and when we grew up my mother was working, and believe it or not when I went to school they had to teach me English. I’m not joking ‘cause I had—my grandma always talked French all the time. She didn’t have no English orientation, so when she—when my mother was working, while she was working we’d go visit with—we’d stay with her, and they would talk French and that’s all we knew. And when I went to school in the first grade, they had to teach me English.

Wow. Do you still speak French?

Oh very fluently. I’ve got a granddaughter seven months old, and [Speaks a few sentences in French]. And don’t think she don’t know ‘cause when I speak to her, when I walk in the room—she’s eight, seven months old—and when I walk in the room she knows I’m there and she—. Because I figured out in my, in my sense of view, how did I learn it? My grandparents. Well, if you don’t speak it to them, they won't ever learn it. How do you learn English? You sure don’t go to school and learn English. You have to learn French. Well they come, and we do it—that’s how we do that. I’ll speak to her in nothing but French.

What about, you work with your brother, and what’s his name?

Larry.

And do ya’ll speak French to each other, ever?

Well once in a while—not often. I speak more French with my customers than I do with anybody else ‘cause I—in this kind of business you have to know French because some of the people that come here don’t talk English. They speak French.

Huh, the older people I’m guessing.

No, not always. Not necessarily older people. Some of the younger people, they’ll walk in and they’ll fluently just talk French.

And so well, let me just say one of the more unusual things that you do here is you make red boudin. Can you describe what that is?

It’s a regular boudin that we make. It’s a plain boudin, and all you do is add pork blood to it which the—. We have a regular boudin with the meat, the rice and everything, and then you just put in pork blood and it makes a red boudin. And you thoroughly cook it.

So you use the same kind of seasonings and everything that you put in your, what you call white boudin, huh?

Right. It’s the same seasonings, same type of boudin and everything is made. The only thing that’s different is the blood, pork blood.

And why do you think hardly anybody makes that in Louisiana anymore?

The red boudin is hard to come by because it’s only made inside of a slaughterhouse. The only reason you can sell it is because you have a meat inspector inside your plant and the inspector is there while you’re processing your pork blood, and he’s there to see that you’ve done it properly. That’s the only reason why.

And so people who don’t slaughter their own animals wouldn’t have their own pork blood.

No. But there’s only about three, four plants around in this area that do it. And everybody knows that it comes from a slaughterhouse, so that if you’re selling it in a different store it’s not the real thing. And they all know that, so—.

How often does the meat inspector come?

Once a week. Once a week he’s here, yeah. I don’t have a very large plant. I just got a small plant and so it’s—I just need one for once a week and that’s it.

Do you know about how many pounds or links that you make a week?

Approximately 400 pounds a week, you know that I’ll make 200 of each: 200 of white and 200 red per week. Wintertime a little bit more: we might go 500-600, a little bit more than that in the wintertime. People eat, tend to eat more boudin in the winter ‘cause it’s too hot in the summer. When it gets in the 90s and stuff like that—90--95 degrees—people won't eat pork in the hot weather. They’ll eat it in the cold weather, but they won't eat it in the hot weather. And it’s—meat is the same thing. People will tend not to eat meat as much in the summertime because it’s too hot. So they’ll slack off and eat vegetables or other things besides pork or beef, you know. They might eat it once a day, but like in the wintertime they’ll eat it maybe two or three times a day.

Can you describe for me the difference in taste between the red and the regular boudin?

The white one, yes, it’s very good. And then the red one, I eat it once in a while. It’s like everything else: when you work in something and you cook it all day long, it’s hard to say that you can taste it, but it has a very—totally different tate. And the red one is good. It’s a very good-tasting boudin, but I just—how to see the difference, I just can't. Let me back up on that one [Laughs]. I’m trying to think of, you know, like—. It is different, I know that, but like I tell all my friends, I’ll eat—the only time I’ll eat boudin—. I’m going to give you an example. The doctor—I have a high blood pressure and I’m a little bitty person. He tells me, he said I’ve got to lay off the boudin and the cracklings. And I said, Doc, you’re wrong. Why? I said, Because I don’t eat it. I’ll eat it—I’ll bring it when I go camping, and I’ll taste it there, and I’ll eat it there and it’s only maybe two--three--four links. Not even that.

Did your mom teach you how to make the red boudin?

Yes, right, definitely. My mama is the one that showed us how to do it. She was doing it before we started into it, so she basically showed us how to do—she showed us how to make the red, the white, and cut meat. When I graduated I started working with my dad, and it was a black man that was working back there, and he showed me how to skin cattle. And that’s how we started. You know we just started from there on out.

Can you take me through the process of making a batch of boudin?

You get your black iron pot and put your water boiling, and put basically all the meat that you want to put in there—your meat, your liver and everything. A lot of people say the season—I’m going to give you an example of how we make our boudin different. A lot of people say they put their seasonings in the meat. I don’t.

Their spices or their vegetables?

The spices. There’s no vegetables in there at all. So you put your seasoning in there. Everybody says they put their seasoning in there. So one day we were working in here and we had the boudin; a batch of meat was finished cooking, so the meat inspector—one of the guys, the meat inspector we work with is friends of ours, and he walked in and he said, Boy, that meat smells good. Oh, I said, You want some just to sample? Yeah. So I put him some meat on there and he said, Man, your seasoning is good in there. I said, There’s no seasoning. But you got to understand: fresh meat. Fresh meat and boxed meat­­—what I call box meat is like store-bought. You know it’s different, ‘cause he [the inspector] said he goes to another plant and the meat don’t taste like that, and they season theirs. And mine wasn’t even seasoned and it tastes good. So you know that fresh meat is better for you any day, any day.

So it was just meat in water in yours?

That’s all. Nothing else. Then after that, after that we take it and you cook your rice, and then we got to bone out everything. When you bone out everything, you take all the meat and you pass it through a meat grinder. And about the only thing I put in mine is onions, and you—you pass it through the grinder. When you pass it through the grinder, you put it in a food mixer; you got to put it inside of a food mixer. Once you put it inside the food mixer, you season—that’s when I put my seasoning in there, and we just taste according to what we need. And then after that you just stuff it inside of a casing. And after that you put it in your cooler and let it refrigerate until the next day.

Do you put green onions in yours?

I tried green onions one time and the people got mad. They didn’t like it over here, so I had to stop. It’s different people in different parts of the country that—see some other part, like in the northern part over there, everybody uses green onions. Around here nobody uses green onions—none of us.

And then how much blood will you put in one batch?

We just basically put to what we decide is good, you know…you know the red takes the whiteness out of the white boudin. That’s what we do.

What parts of the animal do you use for boudin, or maybe what parts don’t you use?

Basically you use like the pork hocks, head. I use the heads. The heads make a delicious boudin.

And so you grew up in the culture of boudin eating.

Correct. Oh yes. Definitely, oh yeah. I’ve been—I’ve got friends of mine that have made boudin, and we all clown each other about who makes the best boudin, but it doesn’t matter. I got like one, two, three, four—four of them that make boudin.

There isn't, like, angry competition?

Oh no, definitely not. No, not at all. Because they—in a sense of way they have their customers, I’ve got mine. And like I got one friend of mine in Cecilia. He makes boudins, and his is so peppered you can't eat them, and I clown him because of that. But some—the people over there, that’s what they like: they like his boudins because they’re peppered. I said, Well, I can't eat them. Mine don’t—people come, they leave Cecilia and come eat mine because it’s not peppered. Some of them, not all of them you know.

Why do you think there are so few places selling fresh, you know, freshly slaughtered meats these days?

It’s getting harder and harder to put up, you know, with the employees? The employees is number one subject, ‘cause like I’ve hired some people like to go on the kill floor to work, the processing floor, and I said, Well, you want to get work? He said, Yeah. Damn good money, but you put them on the kill floor, and you show them what they want to do. The first time they see blood they run. [Laughs]

What products do you make besides the two boudins?

I do burgers, chicken burgers, and sausage. I do fresh sausage, and we process deer. That’s a sideline thing that we do.

Where do you get the pigs and the cows that you use for the products that you make?

The pigs I buy through a stockyard that I’ve been dealing with for 37 years, and then the cattle I buy from farmers, local farmers around here in the area.

Do the pigs eat anything in particular?

Oh, when they get here all I feed them is corn. I just put them straight to corn. I don’t feed them—some of those animals that they’re feeding, they put them on a mixture, but then by the time they get—when they get here they’re off that mixture.

And how long might you have a pig before you turn it into boudin?

Approximately a week. Maybe a week. I buy about eight or ten at a time or whatever, and I’ll put them in the pen and then when I need them—I use them as I need, yeah.

What about, I saw a couple different kinds of pig in the back? A couple were brown and smaller and then a couple were fatter and white. Can you tell the difference in flavor between the different pigs?

The little ones, the little ones are what they call a cochon de lait pig. A cochon de lait pig is what you cook in them little boxes that [Rodney points to a photo on the wall of a “Cajun microwave,” or a box in which whole pigs can be cooked]—and that’s what that is. Now that’s basically very, very, very tender.

I’m curious. I asked your brother about this too, but is there a certain type of person that buys the boudin made with the blood, or is it all kinds of people?

All kinds of people, oh yeah. It doesn’t matter. Kids, older people, middle-class, everybody. They all buy it. Oh yeah.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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