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Comeaux's Incorporated "I think Cajun has been broadened way too much. Everything is a Cajun this, a Cajun that and that was one of our… deals here that they asked me why I didn’t name my business a Cajun specialty meat--because I didn’t want that… enigma of having Cajun put with my name because so many people have turned that into pepper. Everybody thinks if it’s Cajun it’s pepper and it’s not; it’s all about flavor." – Tiny Prudhomme Comeaux’s Incorporated got its start in the small kitchen at Comeaux’s Grocery, a famiy-owned business near the University of Louisiana-Lafayette. Eula Mae, a school cafeteria cook, and Frank Comeaux, a fireman, started the grocery store in 1967. They managed the store, selling grocery items and fresh boudin from the back, through 1980 when they passed the business on to their children. Today their son, Ray, continues making the family boudin recipe in a USDA approved plant that he constructed. He wholesale ships Comeaux family products, including boudin, sausages, and meat pies, to grocery stores throughout the United States. 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. Subject: Ray Comeaux --- Mary Beth Lasseter: All right; this is Mary Beth Lasseter. Today is Thursday, January 22, 2009 and I’m in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana talking to Mr. Ray Comeaux. Could you please introduce yourself, Ray? Ray Comeaux: Hi; I’m Ray Comeaux, President of Comeaux Incorporated since 1980. I’ve been blessed with the fact that my father turned over the business to--to my self and a big task, but we take a lot of pride in what we do and I’m just proud to keep up doing what he did and the way he did it--the quality of what he did. Can you tell me what you do here? We manufacture 123 different products here; one of the main products we produce is boudin, but in a lot of different varieties. We make a pork, a crawfish, a seafood, an alligator, a turkey and in those varieties some is mild, original, and extra hot, so we make quite--quite a bit and we want to call it boudin world, you know. But it’s--it’s product that’s really brought us a long way. There’s a lot of interest, a lot of--lot of competition; the mainstay is keep quality control, keep making it the same way and I’ve caught myself a few times telling people if you don't like it today you won't like it tomorrow ‘cause we make it the same. But I should change that and say if you like it today you’re going to like it tomorrow ‘cause it’s always the same. Tell me a little bit about your family history and how you got into this business and your recipe if you don't mind? Okay; my--my mother is Eula Mae Comeaux Ramiro--or Ramiro Comeaux and my father is Frank Comeaux, no middle initial, from Scott, Louisiana--born in Scott. He was a fireman and a carpenter all his life and but in his younger days he worked as a butcher in some of the local slaughterhouses and what have you. And he associated with some well known people in Lafayette; the LaBeuf’s had a supermarket in Lafayette and he worked for them on his off days as fireman. And they--they really pressured him; I think they liked him a lot. They were good friends and they talked him into taking over a grocery store. And this was a little bitty grocery store at the corner of McKinley and General Mouton in Lafayette by UL and we were kids then. But the store was truthfully a hole in the wall; it was old. But there’s so much nostalgia with the store and the--the atmosphere of it. People would come in to visit my parents you know what I mean and that’s really what the whole trade was about. They’d just come in and visit. Lagniappe was always getting something good, something a little special you know. And my mother was the type and all the UL students that would come into the store, she’d see them with a fever blister on their lip. “Child, let me tell you how to take care of that,” and she would give them all the little things, you know you put vinegar on it or you put this and that, and so she was like a mom to a lot of these college students. And they ran the store from 1967 to 1980, so there was a lot of kids in their path than came through the store. One of the things that I really believe that made their business catapult because my father didn’t believe in advertising; it was a small store, no radio, no TV--word of mouth. And it was one of these stores where you went in there and it was--you were recognized when you walked in the store and when you left—“please tell your friends; thank you; come back” type thing which seems to be somewhat gone these days you know. But we try to adhere to it still; even in the business I’m in right now, we’re wholesaling and--and shipping out of state and what have you. We have a Web site that we do a lot of mail order business and we have some distributors out in Atlanta and New York, California, you know and we’re on the phone with them. “Thank you; appreciate your business; tell your friends--tell somebody else,” so it’s--I think it’s the upbringing of being in the retail grocery store that’s--that’s helped me develop this business and go where we’re going. This little store, my father started inside the store; he was still a fireman working at the Fire Department at Lafayette and my mother’s background--she was a cafeteria cook at the elementary school that I went to. And that was bad on my part ‘cause I couldn’t--couldn’t get away with nothing you know. They’d go grab my mom out of the cafeteria and give me my lickins’ you know. But she would run the store while he would work at the Fire Department. And a fireman works three days, three nights, off three days, so in his off three days he started making boudin. And we still have all the original equipment, the old stuffers that he used and it was a little hand-cranked stuffer that would make 15-pounds per batch. And that was some of his first batches of boudin that he produced--15 pounds at a time. He had quite a few people coming in the store in the afternoons and they’d come in and drink beer in the back of the store. So mostly telephone people ‘cause the telephone company was real close to our store, but a mixed breed of people that would come in, and he would make these batches of boudin and he’d pass it out to these friends and--and--and I remember the man’s name, and he’s passed away quite a few years ago, but his name was Cliff Neveaux. He was a little short Cajun man and he told my daddy; he said you know--‘cause my daddy would give them these samples and they’d try it. He said Frank; that’s it. And the recipe I’m using today in 2009 is the same recipe that Mr. Cliff told my dad that’s it Frank; don't change it and we’ve never sacrificed the quality of meat or the amount of ingredients, the amount of rice we’ve put. You always make alterations you know in the equipment. We’re using a--a V-Max Stuffer that will stuff 6,000 pounds in about four hours you see, so you know you adapt to the new equipment but you try to keep your quality the same especially the taste of it, you know. Can you tell me a little bit about your family’s cultural heritage? Yes; pure Cajun I would say--totally you know. My mother--I--I can tell you people tell me things about my mother--you either like her or you don't like her. I’ve never talked to anybody that ever said she didn’t like her. I know I always thought I had trouble with her correcting me when I was a young kid and I couldn’t quite understand how people would come to me and say oh we love her; she’s so nice. Well she wasn’t that nice to me. But she taught us how to work and taught us how to take care of ourselves and be clean and--and you raise your family correctly. We still get together; we’ll go and cook on Sunday afternoons. And my father is still around. He’s--he has some illness, some sickness that is somewhat bringing him down and keeping him from being mobile you know. He’s pretty much staying in the house but--. We’ve got five brothers and sisters; two girls and three boys and out of the five, four of them had their own either grocery store or restaurant. One of them, the youngest, decided to do computer repair work and that’s his niche and we tried stuffing him into the store business but it just wouldn’t work. He didn’t like it you know. We--in the Lafayette area have a grocery store on the north side of town. My oldest sister has that, M&S Grocery. My middle sister, Debbie Dwyer has Dwyer’s Café which her husband’s father founded Dwyer’s Café--downtown Lafayette--it’s real popular. My oldest brother had the store on Congress Street in Lafayette and he’s since got out of that business and he’s working for other stores now. And then myself and my ex-wife had the store by UL in Lafayette, Comeaux’s and we had the store on Kaliste Saloom Road. Back in the oil crunch, probably it was in the early ‘80s I mean sales was just horrible. We had a thriving business there but it was like most of our business was UL students coming in--in the oil field ‘cause the oil scene in Lafayette was next to our place also. When the oil crunch hit and things started really going bad I started looking out--out of state. And I always liked to dabble in different things, so my thing back then was to buy crawfish tails and turn around and--and buy them low and sell them high. So I started shipping them out of state and naturally you know you ship crawfish tails, people would call--well you have boudin, you have andouille sausage and tasso and what have you? So we started looking at how can we take those products and ship them out of state? We found out through negative resources that you needed to be USDA approved to ship out of state. And one day I had a Federal Inspector walk into my grocery store and I had big old signs all over in there; we ship all over the United States, the whole deal. And he walks in and he said you ship boudin? And I say yep. He says can I see your federal kitchen? And I said well sure; I mean federal didn’t catch the word with me--it was my kitchen. I showed him in the back and he said no, sir; you don't understand. And he showed me his badge and he says you can't be shipping boudin out of state unless it’s federally approved. And so you know we learned the hard way and--and that moment in time, I’m not sure if that wasn’t 1986 I guess or somewhere(s) around there I started pursuing a USDA kitchen. Little did I know what it would take to do it. I found this place in Breaux Bridge and bought it from a bank. It was a--a foreclosure and met with USDA, the whole deal; this was a perfect place to be able to do our wholesale of our products out of state and they came in when we come to finalize the papers and said I’d have to add onto this place 1,000 square feet and do this and that and you know we started out with a $250,000 budget and we had $1,200,000 in this place before it was finished. And it took me four years to do it, but of that four years I did all the work myself, all of the remodeling, the painting, the floors, the equipment, building equipment and doing everything. We are probably 12 years in business at this place right here and last year we finally made a plus you know so we’re feeling real good about it. We wholesale to distributors in Atlanta and one of the big items that we sell over there is the andouille sausage. Boudin--boudin is a product that’s real strong in this area and as you move away from here then it starts dissipating somewhat. But what I’ve found is--is if I can take boudin and put it in your mouth, if I can get you to eat it I can sell it. --- Can you tell me a little bit about your recipe for boudin? What makes it distinct? If--if my father was making boudin my biggest challenge then was to find out how much he puts in each batch and you know I remember I’d have to run around and catch him ‘cause it was like well daddy, how many--how much onions do you put in there? Man that orange bowl--you know and I’d say orange bowl? And then--and I used to teach him; I’d say well suppose that bowl breaks or you lose it then how many--how much onions? Well then I get me another bowl but--. I would go around and before they would actually put it in the pot I’d grab that bowl and weigh it. And I’d develop--I didn’t develop the recipe; they had it but I was able to transcribe the recipe into something that was weight. Being a Quality Control Inspector, my thing was is well if we put 10-pounds of onions today we’re going to put 10-pounds of onions tomorrow and so we took the recipe. We used pork picnic cushion meat. Well let me back up and say when he started, we used the pork picnic ham which is the front shoulder of the pig. We would go to Affiliated Foods and buy 2,000--3,000 pounds of it and him, my brother, and myself would sit at this table and debone all this meat, take the bones off. This was a chore; I mean it was work. And not to say that nicked fingers and the little you know things here and there, but we would debone all this meat. Well naturally when it came time to retire we didn’t want to continue doing all this--me and my brother, deboning the meat, but we found out that you can buy meat deboned already. So we started doing some cost things and figuring out well you know what? It’s cheaper if we buy deboned than it is us doing this labor. And then we can produce a whole lot faster. So what we had to do though when--when you buy deboned picnic meat there’s two portions of that. You end up with the cushion meat or they call it picnic heart; there’s different names for it but it’s the center most ball of meat in that shoulder that’s real lean. And then you have the outer parts of it which is just the--the regular picnic meat. That’s a lot fatter; it has a lot of fat in it. Boudin has to have fat in it, okay. Now we’ve done some things to control that but we would use the pork picnic meat; we’d use pork liver and take it and put our little recipe together. We’d use onions, celery, bell pepper, red pepper, black pepper, back then MSG, but we quit using MSG through time because it was just such a negative for the public and parsley and green onions. And put that recipe together; you’d boil the meat for two and a half hours. We’d get up at 4 o'clock in the morning, have all the meat cut and salted in the pot, sitting in the cooler, and then 4:00 in the morning, get there, take the pot out, put it on the burner, light it up, let it cook for two hours. At the end of two hours, take--we used a basket to be able to remove the meat to keep the broth left in the pot. We removed the meat separated from the broth and then take the meat and dump it in a grinder and grind it with the fresh green onions and the fresh parsley. And that was it in there; now the onions and bell pepper and celery was boiled with the meat. I hear stories and I--and I know of a bunch of people that’s doing the same thing but they’re grinding their onions raw and putting it in the cooked meat. In other words, when they grind their cooked meat, they add the raw onions and the bell pepper and celery and they grind it like that. I just--my experience has been with it--and it’s the same way with potato salad. When my mother makes potato salad we would not eat onions if they was raw in that potato salad. But if she cooked them the flavor was there and you couldn’t tell they were there, so it’s--I think that’s where that came from in our family, why we cook the onions with the bell pepper and the celery. Once the meat is ground up and--and with that mixture it’s set aside, we then take the broth out of the pot. And again when my father was making it he’d dump that ground meat inside the mixer, dump his cooked rice in the mixer and then he would start using a certain pot he had, and I would tell you we probably still have that pot somewhere(s). But he would dip in that mixture and he would dip in as such where he wouldn’t get the grease that was on the top. He’d scoop it in and always stir it up to get the seasoning mixed with it. A challenge--how much broth are you putting, dad? And I’d count sometimes; sometimes it was like 12 pots; sometimes it was like 12 and a half, 13 and--and all he could tell me--. And I mean my parents are--my parents are smart people. They’re hard workers; they really are but they just couldn’t--it wasn’t--it didn’t make sense to them to say go and measure this--and use three gallons of broth or even weigh it. It was so many of these pots, but he would tell me--I’d ask him. And--and this is a true thing here; I would pray. Lord, help me see what my dad sees because I’m struggling right here to try find out why is he putting sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less? I can give you an answer for all of that in just a little bit--why it was happening ‘cause--and I would ask him and he would tell me, it’s the moon. It’s the moon. You ever dig a hole when the moon is a certain way? When you go take that dirt and put it back in the hole some days it’ll just pile up; some days you won't have enough dirt. I had a hard time believing that; I mean that was just like an--an old type thing. I found out what it was but it--we eventually got to a point where I was able to measure it. And when I say took time, we might have made four or five batches of boudin in a week. It probably took me five or six weeks to get the recipe. It--it was almost as if it was a game. I was trying to find out the weight and they didn’t want me to know. And it wasn’t that; no, they were just busy working and doing--doing and they wouldn’t pay attention it. And I’d say mama; you need to let me know. Well I’m sorry; I’m busy, you know and--and gone with it. Well that recipe I was able to put it into weight and--and have it down on paper and--and do things like buying the meat all cut already. We would get the meat in, cut it in smaller pieces, put it in tubs and salt it. That enabled us to be able to produce boudin on the fly. If--if--I mean we’ve sold up to 1,000 pounds a day. And I know there’s places that sell more than that. But in this little bitty grocery store 1,000 pounds was a lot. I’d mean we’d finish making a 200-pound batch and was wore out and then you’re talking about 1,000 pounds to have to start all over again. It was a job. All right; we’re back and we’re on track two, so the recorder is working. We were talking about the boudin and how you make it. I was going to ask you how you like to eat your boudin and what do you recommend people serving boudin with? Well I’m going to tell you what I like personally, but then I’ll tell you what I hear and--and from people and what have you. In the grocery store, we would probably go through 100 to 150 pounds of boudin by 8 o'clock that morning, so a lot of people eat it for breakfast. That’s my thing. First off, I like boudin heated in water. It’s a trick though; if you boil the water too long, if you leave it in there boiling it’ll pop and you eat up with gumbo. You can't eat. So you got to know how to heat it up that way. Over here at the plant, we don't have a method to be able to heat boudin in boiling water. We--we have a stove but it’s just--it--it--we’re too fast, we’re too running, so I’ll heat it in the microwave. My craving is a link of boudin heated in water with an A&W Root Beer. That’s--I’m simple as that. Now I’ll tell you some favorites; I like taking the boudin and cutting it out of the skin and putting on a bread with mayonnaise--and mayonnaise and bread--period. I’ve heard all kinds of stories I mean from Cane Syrup to bananas to cracklings mixed in it you know. When we would--we made cracklings big time in that store for years like 15 years made cracklings. Well when you scoop up all the cracklings and the sellable cracklings is the big chunks--you’d always end up--we’d call it the grimmes that’s the little crumbs that’s all in the bottom. When you take those grimmes and mix it with your boudin and eat it that a way, it gives it like a bacon taste you know. Another favorite way for me is putting it on a barbeque pit grill you know. You put a piece of foil down on your grill and just take the boudin out of the package and put it on that grill and just you don't want a high fire. You’re not trying to burn it or anything. All you do--when you heat up boudin, the only thing you’re doing is cooking the skin on the outside which is real thin--it doesn’t take nothing to cook it, and you’re bringing the rice back to a cooked stage. You take rice; put it in the refrigerator overnight it gets hard like little rocks. That wouldn’t be good to eat that a way. You heat it up until the point where that rice is spongy again and that’s the only thing you’re doing when you heat up boudin. So whether you heat it on a barbeque pit or you heat it in the pot of boiling water or you heat it in the microwave or a little toaster, all of those give you a different taste but it’s the same thing. It’s a cooked--we say an easy way to eat rice and gravy you know. You can eat it on the run. My mother started in the store and--and we were raised poor in that store; I can tell you. Dad was a Fireman; she was a cafeteria cook but when they first took over the store, I--truthfully I bet the sales wasn’t $100 a day. You know and we had five kids and all of this. Well she would take the little boudin mix that was left once daddy would finish stuffing it; there was a little handful that was made. Well she would make the little boudin balls and--and I see them now and one of our customers we’re talking to, boudin balls right now is a big thing around this area. It--it blew me away because it was like my mama invented that. I don't have no proof to that effect but I don't know who was doing boudin balls back in the ‘70s--they were you know. She was--she was famous for taking a boudin--the mix and making a hamburger patty with it, just form it into a hamburger patty and pass it through a little egg batter and Italian bread crumbs and then take it and refrigerate it and what it’ll do, it’ll get to be just like a hamburger patty and then you take it and put in a skillet, like maybe a little Pam or a little butter and just brown it, and then serve it on a sandwich. You have eaten anything until you’ve eaten something like that. One other favorite and this--she was real popular for this; this was hers. This is my mother’s and I don't think anybody could take that away from her. In the college area kids would come in and I know it was a college student that asked her one day--‘cause she would take smoked sausage and boil it and take that water, put onions in it and what have you and then turn around and some put Kraft plain barbeque sauce in it and make a sauce for this sausage. And so she had sausage burgers and she had--I think that was the only thing; sausage burgers with the barbeque sauce. Well one day this college student came in and said Mrs. Comeaux; I want some boudin on that thing. So she took a Po’ Boy bread and she put the barbeque sauce on it, took a link of boudin, cut it out of the skin and spread it on there, took three slices of this sausage and put it on there and then put some more barbeque sauce on it. It was a man-handler; I mean it was something--when you finished eating this you knew you had a meal. That was the big thing in that grocery store around the UL students. And I bet if--I don't know how far out this thing goes but I’d love to see how many people out there ate a boudin Po’ Boy at Comeaux’s Grocery back when they were in college at UL and I think it would surprise people how many she sold of them things. It’s--you probably couldn’t find a store today that does it. I mean I don't know of any anywhere(s) and so if I ever want the nostalgia--go back in time--I’ll do that. I’ll take like a link and put me the barbeque sauce and put it altogether like that. It’s a real good way to eat it. It’s a different taste. Just like fried boudin balls that you see; that’s a different--the same meat but when you fry it, it makes that little gummy crust on the outside so when you--you have something to chew. I believe this; even with the boudin or the boudin balls; when you put it in your mouth you have to have some kind of texture, some kind of chew. If your rice was mushy and the meat was overcooked you know then you have no texture; you have no chew. You need to have a chew. Well my machine looks like it’s getting--the memory is full, so I’m going to ask you is there anything else that I haven’t asked or that you want to share about the family business or--or what boudin means to this area? I'm going to tell you; I--I--as long as I was a kid and as young as I can remember boudin was a real strong influence in our life. Sometimes other things like cracklings or you know people talk about chaudin or they talk about blood boudin--things like that—it’s dying off. You know I would truthfully, I mean boudin is a great thing and it makes me a good living. I would wish French--French-speaking because French is something that is--I learned how to speak French from my aunts and my uncles and what have you. Now I’m not a fluent French speaker ‘cause I don't speak it enough but I love talking French. And we would tell people--and I would want to end this like this Bien manger du bon manger Cajun [French Phrase] and what that is--is come. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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