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Bayou Boudin & Cracklin’ Rocky Sonnier Bayou Boudin & Cracklin’ “I would guarantee if you hire somebody to come in and tell you what you’re supposed to be selling the stuff for—you know them experts that say you got to make this much profit on that…shew, it would be over $20 a pound. And you couldn’t sell no crackling for that.”
Rocky Sonnier might not have had cultural preservation in mind when he and his wife, Lisa, began building their Bayou Boudin & Cracklin’/Bayou Cabins bed and breakfast 20 years ago, but today the compound, which edges along Bayou Teche, is a virtual living history museum. Many of the cabins-for-rent have had multiple lives—as washhouses or residences—and at least one is insulated naturally with bousillage, a mixture of mud and Spanish moss formerly used in traditional Cajun homes. As guests wake up and take their places in the store for scrambled eggs or beignets fried in hog lard, they are greeted by a constant stream of local customers dropping by Bayou Boudin & Cracklin’ for a bag of cracklings and a link or two of boudin en route to work. Some of these locals address Rocky in a cheery Cajun-French dialect; others chat with him about the region’s Cajun music, one of Rocky’s passions, as evidenced by the paraphernalia crowding the store’s walls. The Sonniers and their staff make three kinds of boudin: a traditional Cajun pork boudin, a white bean and tasso boudin, and a seafood boudin with crawfish, shrimp, and crab. As Rocky says, “That’s some fine eating stuff.”
Subject: Rocky Sonnier --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Sunday, September 9, 2007. I’m in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana with Mr. Rocky Sonnier. —And I would just like to ask you, to start out, to tell me your full name and your birth date. Rocky Sonnier: My name is Rocky Sonnier, and my birthday is September 29, 1958. I’m 49 years-old. I’m almost—I’m going to be 49 this month, yeah—not pushing too much. Can you tell me the name of the place where we are right now, and kind of explain the business to me a little bit? Okay, the name—the actual name of it is Bayou Boudin & Cracklin’, and then we call it Bayou Cabins also. It’s called Bayou Boudin & Cracklin’ and Bayou Cabins. That cabin has a lot of lives then. Yes, it has, and it has a long life left to live, I believe, ‘cause it’s all cypress, and all the doors are handmade in it, and that’s—that’s the one that Hank Williams, Jr. stays in there—Bocephus—the Cajun cabin. That’s his cabin. He likes that one. Which one is that? It’s—it’s the one with the little red roof. It’s the first cabin—we call it the Cajun cabin, and like I said the bed is handmade, the doors are handmade, and in the bathroom we put some wallpaper, some newspaper on the door to—like they used to do in the old days just for information and stop that wind from coming in. But the newspapers are from 1945, and they got some good interesting stories in there. What’s the name of the bayou that this is on? This is Bayou Teche. It actually starts about 25 miles north of here and starts at the ditch in Port Barre, and then it flows through Leonville, Arnaudville, Poche Bridge, Breaux Bridge, Parks, Saint Martinville, New Iberia, and then it dumps into the little Atchafalaya in Morgan City, and then it goes and it dumps into the—the Gulf of Mexico. Do people still use it for transportation? No, not anymore. A matter of fact they used to have all the drawbridges ‘cause it used to be a main waterway years ago, but they haven’t—they did away with the drawbridges, and they just got some regular bridges but don’t open. So no, it’s not used for transportation. And Teche, the Bayou Teche — Teche is the, an Indian word for snake. Just a real curvy bayou—Teche is the Indian word for snake, so that’s why it’s called the Teche. Tell me about the business that isn't the cabins—the food end of your business. Okay, the boudin and the crackling. We got a place down the road. We used to go in there and get boudin and crackling, and it was always full of people, and we said, Well let me get some boudin and crackling. And we’d eat it and say, Man it’s—it could be better than that. I said, Well they’re making some money with all the people in there, but then actually we said, Man we could make it better. I said, Let me go talk to Miss Lun Thibodaux. She’s the lady with—had the slaughterhouse—32 years had the slaughterhouse. And her husband was Lee Thibodaux. They were friends of my mama and daddy. And so I said, Maybe we’ll open up a little place. I said, You going to come show me how to make some boudin? She said, Sure, I’ll come show you. And she showed us—come and showed us how to make—gave her recipe that she—we figured if she sold it for 32 years, we could sell it for a little while too, you know. And she came over here and she helped us with the recipe. We make it with some boneless pork picnics. We get about 50 pounds of the boneless pork picnics and then use like 15 pounds of pork liver; you boil that together, and you boil it for about two hours. And after you boil it you take it out your pot and you keep—your broth that it was boiling in, you take it out the pot and then you—you put your meat on one side in your big grinder, and then you go to—you put your liver on one side of the grinder. Then you get your meat and you take the—we take the little fat on the meat off, and you put it with the liver and you grind the liver and the fat together—small, real small. And then we grind the meat bigger, and then we mix that with 40 cups of rice and 10 pounds of onions, and we have our red pepper, salt, and a little paprika for color to make it a pretty color, and you mix it with the broth that was—you boiled it in. You mix it up by hand with the big black gloves. And then we put it in our water cylinder, and we put it in some natural casing. We making it with natural casing, and we make like 100 pounds in a batch. And that’s our boudin recipe.
We make it like three times—we make like 400 pounds a week, and then we make 200, and then—that’s the regular boudin, which everybody has. Breaux Bridge is known as the Crawfish Capital of the World, but it should actually—they make more boudin I would think than any other parish in Louisiana. There’s 62 parishes, 64 parishes. And you got, Poche’s probably—I would guess he sells about 5,000 pounds a week. He’s been—and he’s got a big commercial outfit. Baudin’s Acadiana Farms Sausage Kitchen, they sell like 7,000 pounds a week. We sell like 500 pounds. Charlie T sells like 500 or 600 pounds. Champagne’s sells about 1,000 pounds. That’s right here in Breaux Bridge with the 7,000 people living in it, you know. So it should be the Boudin Capital of the World, really. Who is eating all that? Beats me. They—they love the boudin. A lot of—some of these are commercial, and they go on the road and they sell them at the Winn Dixies and all the big stores. Some of them even go to Texas and sell that. And we got a new boudin we started making called white bean and tassoboudin. If you like white beans, you going to like that. And we make a seafood boudin; it’s shrimp, crawfish and crab, and that’s some fine eating stuff too now. And that’s the three boudins that we make. Tell me about the white bean and tasso. Well we get some—you cook—you get your old Camellia dried beans and you put them in a big army pot. I think maybe we—maybe eight pounds—no, 16 pounds of them, and with your onions. You put your water, your onions, and your bell pepper and your garlic and your salt, and you fry your bacon and you put it in that pot. And you just boil the beans for about four hours, and it’s actually just white beans [Laughs] and we mix it with rice. It’s white beans with rice, and then you mix it up and you put it in the casing, so it’s white bean boudin. It turns—it’s a boudin once you put it in that casing, and it gets that name for that. I wanted to go back for a minute before I forget. Miss Lun, did she have a commercial business? No, it was a slaughterhouse. It was just they—they slaughtered their own pigs and cows and lambs and stuff like that—the goats. But she—they’d make the boudin and sell boudin, and her husband would cook the cracklings, and they made the hogshead cheese. And then she—she’s the one that gave me the recipe for the hogshead cheese too. And then the crackling, they had just about seven old guys that would all want to show us how to make it, and they all had a different recipe. You know them Cajuns—nobody wants—they all got to do something different. And then, but we ended up—his name is Claiborne Hebert; he’s from Abbeville. He used to have the racetrack, the bush track in the back, and the rooster fights, and he had a slaughterhouse. And my wife, Lisa, worked at a doctor’s office in Lafayette and he was a patient over there. And every time he’d go for a checkup he’d bring her a little bag of cracklings. And I tasted those and said, Oh those are good. And I said, That’s the ones I like the best. And she—she called him and asked him if he would show me how to cook them. And he said, Oh yeah, tell him come tomorrow at 4 o’clock. So I went over there and he showed me how to cook them and—which was a big, big help ‘cause cracklings and pralines, that’s probably the two hardest things to cook ‘cause they all cook different every time. But, and everything is by temperature. What did you like about his cracklings especially? His crackling were kind of, they were light and they were long. Everybody—nine out of ten people cut them or—nine out of ten people cut them into little squares, you know maybe like one and a half by one and a half or something like that. And they—most of them used the pork bellies, which is uncured bacon, and he used the ham skins. And he’d get them in a box like a chicken box, them waxed boxes I guess—they’re about 30 inches by 14 or 16-inches. And then when they would cure hams they would take that—the fat off of the ham, the fat and the skin, and then that’s when you buy the hams in the store. But anyway, then they would stack them in a box on top of each other, and when he cut them he just would take a big block of the—take the whole box frozen, and then he cut it one time sideways and they were—they were long. And instead of being in the—cut them about an inch, and they was real long. And then when you put them in all frozen, once you cut them sideways one time, and they’d start breaking up in the box, and he’d show me how to cook them. And then when you would—when they would start floating—after about an hour and 45 minutes they start floating, and they start breaking their skin, and then we called them little eyes. They start blistering and just start doing that, and you get about half of them to do that and you take them out of the hot grease. And then you just strain your grease and, but you leave your grease go—leave it on. And then the hotter the grease gets they going to start making some little white bubbles on the top of the grease, and your pot is going to eventually fill up with the little white bubbles and be solid white. And then the hotter it gets, then they start leaving. So when the bubbles start leaving, about halfway—that’s how he gave me the recipe, halfway, but I put a thermometer in the pot. I wanted to check what the temperature was when it was halfway. You throw them back in that pot, which takes about 25 minutes for that—the bubbles to get halfway, and when they get halfway that—the crackling that you took out of there was cooled and that grease was hot, and—over 450-degrees. And when you take those cold cracklings and you throw them in that hot grease, they go to the bottom and they would pop up like popcorn. And then you’d take them out and you’d just sprinkle them with salt and they were real light and—a lot of—a lot of people like those cracklings. We shipped a lot of crackling like that though all over. Was that common for someone to share their recipe [with] another business? Yeah, because we was—Abbeville is about—down the road here, you take a left at the end of the road and go about—it’s about 25 miles, you know. We’re not in no competition, you know. He was just a nice old man to do it. I guess some people wouldn’t do it, but I’d—I’d give it to people if they want to know too, you know. Those ham skins, has that—they’ve been cured already? They’ve been cured. Now we having trouble getting the ham skins. As a matter of fact, while we talking right now there’s about three months we not cooking those kinds because we can't get the ham skins. Sometimes you get them and it’s—you know, sometimes you get a salt-cured ham, a honey-cured ham, or stuff like that, and lately we’ve been getting like the all salt-cured ham and it’s so salty you couldn’t eat them. And then when you take them out the first time—you know I told you when—about when they were most cooked they start blistering their skin? They would never do that, and we’d throw them back in the grease and they wouldn’t—wouldn’t pop, so we’d throw a lot of cracklings away because of that problem. So we started—when we started back working on the cabins, it’s a lot of work to cut the cracklings and clean up, so we got the pork bellies which almost everybody cooks now, which is—it’s really considered the traditional cracklings, and we started cooking those. Is there a good profit off of crackling, or just demand? It’s just a—shew, we started with boudin and crackling and let me tell you something. If we had to open up another store it probably be a Bayou Sunglasses and Batteries or something like that. Yeah, crackling is so hard to cook. And we just have it for our customers now, and—. But I would guarantee if you hire somebody to come in and tell you what you’re supposed to be selling the stuff for—you know them experts that say you got to make this much profit on that…It’s—but if they come and they tell us how much we’d have to sell it for, them experts—shew, it would be over $20 a pound. And you couldn’t sell no crackling for that. What do you sell it for? Eight dollars and ninety-five cents a pound. I will go right now—we been serving crackling and boudin and that stuff there for, it’s going to be 20 years this December—to get our 15 cabins done. And we would like to just do cabins ‘cause man, [yawns] we getting wore out. We started working—I used to wake up at 4:00 and we work—come over here at 5:00 and work ‘til 7:00 seven days a week. We did that for eight years, and then we ran ourselves in the ground. And we don’t have—it’s not like we make all kind of money. We just—everything just paid, and then the money that we do have—we don’t have any—we have a little bitty savings, like $8,000. We put everything in the cabins, so that’s our savings right there. So we’ve been doing it 20 years, and then my wife worked at a doctor’s office like for 16 years. We both been working 30 years already; I started working in the oil field at 17 with the minor’s release—…I wouldn’t recommend anybody getting into the business, to tell you the truth. [Laughs] Just being nice. Well I’ve stayed here and, I can't—I definitely couldn’t tell by how friendly and welcoming you were that you were worn out. Yeah, but hey, I might be too tired to get mad. [Laughs] One thing that I noticed when I stayed here is that there’s definitely demand for your product, and I was shocked to see people buying crackling and boudin for breakfast. Oh yeah. Well most of it—that’s when they eat it, mostly for breakfast. Most cracklings are sold before 10 o’clock in the morning So the cutting of the crackling is the hard part. What do you cut it with? We cut it with a meat saw, but years ago I remember Joe Boudreaux—one of the old men that showed me how to cook out of the seven of them, Joe Boudreaux was an original crackling cook. He was getting his crackling for eight cents a pound he told me. And his—when the kids would get off the school bus they’d go cut crackling at nights and go cut crackling all day long. He was the first one, and he sold a lot of—a lot of crackling right there. And he came and he was a friend of the family’s. Matter of fact, he recently passed away—well about a year ago. And he wouldn’t eat anything—he had cancer, and he called and I brang him a pound of crackling [Laughs]. He’d eat a pound of crackling by himself every two days. Wait, he wouldn’t eat anything—? He wouldn’t eat nothin’; that’s all he ate, some cracklings, for—I think it was lik --- So onion is the only vegetable you put in your boudin, huh? Yeah, just onion and shallots—onion tops—the shallot, that’s it. And what kind of rice do you use? What kind of grain? We use medium-grain rice. We—over here in Louisiana I think everybody—well not everybody, but most of them use medium-grain rice for everything. And then, well I got one of my buddies, he uses long-grain. But we grew up with medium-grain for some reason. But when you make a rice and gravy, you put that gravy on there, that rice is like it’s—the long grain, it starts—it floats, it’s like it floats. It all breaks up, but some people love that. I don’t know. We just not used to eating that, and if you would use it in a boudin I guess it would—it wouldn’t—it wouldn’t stick firm or somethin’. It would all be, I don’t know. Some people who deliver our rice, I asked that guy, I said, You know everybody uses medium grain? He said, No, they got a place that just opened up. He said, And they use long grain. But I don’t know. They just opened up and they might switch to medium grain, or they might just close up. What about the hogshead cheese? Do you use the head? We started off with the head, and there’s not much meat on the head, you know. You boil it and you just got the—like the cheekbone area. You take that off, and after that you ain’t got much left except the big skull. And we did it a little while but you didn’t get no meat, you know. You have to buy so many heads, and they weigh the skull too, and it was—. So what we started doing, we started buying some Boston butts, and you boil that. But it has to have some fat on it; you boil the fat too to make it gel. So we just use the Boston butts and boil it, and after you boil it you grind it up, and then the broth it was boiling in— after you grind it up—you grind it in a pot, and after you boil it you grind it up and you put it in that pot, and then the broth it was boiling in, you put that in the pot with it with some onions, and you cook it another two hours on the stove. And after it cooks two hours on the stove, you put it in like in them little square little pans, and you just let it cool overnight. And it cools and it makes it—they call it hogshead cheese, and it has no cheese product in it at all. It’s not yellow. I don’t know why they call it hogshead cheese, but that’s the name of it. And then you put a lot of seasoning in there? Cayenne, salt, and paprika. If you don’t put the paprika it kind of stays like a gray color. And over here is hogshead cheese, but up north it’s like a pâté. A pâté, I think, is just boiled meat. I don’t know what a pâté is, but that’s what I tell the people it is anyway. But then you heat it down, and you eat that with some—if you heat the hogshead cheese and you eat it with some—some Fritos or some crackers, now that’s good. I like it like that. I don’t like it cold, me. Ninety-nine-percent of it is eaten cold. But we started that like—like if we used to cater a wedding or something, you heat up that hogshead cheese and boy, they say, I think when I stayed here we had like a welcome platter of different things. You had a welcome—your room comes with a sampler of—we call it the Cajun Platter. It’s boudin, crackling, hogshead cheese, and a glass of homemade root beer; that’s your platter. Not like the Hilton: no wine and cheese. Somebody signed our book, Don’t ever change your welcome platter to wine and cheese, so we put a little comment in a brochure like that. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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We started out with just Bayou Boudin in 1987, and after about three years or something one of my buddies had a little cabin. He was going to make a houseboat with it, and he never did do anything with it, and I asked him if we could just take it over here, and if he wasn’t going to use it, we were going to use it. And that’s how we—we started with the cabins, and that was in ’93, so—.
How often do you make that?
e six months he lived on cracklings.
What kind of dip is that? I say, That’s some hogshead cheese. [They say] Oh no, you—get out of here. Yeah, that’s what it is. 
