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Trahan Foods Mark Cormier & 601 N. Arenas St. “I’ve seen us make up to 1,000-pounds in a week, you know that Christmas week.”
“No, I don’t eat the casing.
In a way, Scott Menard has been in the grocery business his entire life. After the death of his father at a young age, Scott was raised by his uncle, Ronnie Trahan, who throughout Scott’s childhood owned and operated Trahan Foods. Scott became a full-time employee directly out of high school, and he bought the grocery and meat market outright in 2006. Throughout Scott’s history with Trahan Foods, the boudin there has been made according to a recipe developed decades ago by Ronnie’s grandfather. For the past 20-plus years, Mark Cormier has helped maintain the boudin’s quality and consistency. Still a young man by boudin-making standards, Mark also began working at Trahan Foods after graduating from high school. At the time of this interview, he is Trahan Foods’ only boudin maker, producing 400 pounds during slow weeks, and up to 1,000 pounds a week around the holidays. NOTE: Two interviews, Mark Cormier and Scott Menard, are featured on this page. Jump to Scott Menard’s interview.
NOTE: Subject: Mark Cormier --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Saturday, September 8, 2007. I’m in Rayne, Louisiana and I’m sitting here with Mr. Mark Cormier. Could I get you to say your full name and your birth date? Mark Cormier: Okay, Mark Cormier. I was born in October 20, 1968. I think you might be one of the youngest people I’ve talked to so far who makes boudin. Can you tell me when you started? I started right out of high school. I was 16, yeah. And they just taught me and The whole time at this store? Yes, ma’am. And how did you come to work at this store? Well I had a cousin that worked here, and she was going out to college, and we were talking one day and they asked me, to see if I wanted a little part-time job. I started cleaning up and then they started—then I started cutting meat and they showed me how to make boudin sausage. Can you take me through the process of making a batch? Oh okay. We get here around 7:00, prepare—get the meat ready. What cut do you use? We use pork meat, picnic steaks, picnic roasts. Yeah, and you part-way cook that for a couple hours, and then once it’s tender well we also—. You boil it in water, I guess? We boil it, yeah, with the seasonings. And like I said, it takes about two hours ‘til it’s tender. And then once it’s cooked, well we cook it—also we cook the rice off to the side. It [the pork] goes to the grinder, and then we separate the fat and the meat, and we also got pork liver in it. And then take that, separate that, and we grind it. It’s separate. I grind the fat and the liver with two different plates. One is a smaller than the other—that way it doesn’t, you don’t get a chunk of fat or chunk of skin or whatever. And then the rest of the meat goes through the—you grind that with a bigger plate. Okay. So the liver and the fat gets ground really fine? Yeah. And then you mix it with your seasonings, the juice that’s left—the gravy or whatever, pour that to make it moist. And then that goes to the stuffer, and then we go from the stuffer—you have the casing, and you make your links. And do you put any vegetables in there at all? Onion tops and green onions and parsley flakes. The picnic cut, does that have a lot of skin on it? Yeah, it has a skin on top. Some have bones and some don’t, but we usually use the boneless ‘cause it’s a lot easier to separate and you don’t have to worry about the bones. What kind of rice do you use? What kind of grain? Long-grain rice. Was there already a recipe for making boudin here when you started? Yeah. The original. The owner’s grandpa, he owned the store at the time. It was his recipe, and then they just carried it on from there. Now you’re the only person making it? Yeah, that makes it right now. I’m learning—teaching somebody right now to do it in case I’m not here or whatever. The boudin that you make here, does it taste like the kind of boudin that you ate growing up, or is it different? Yeah. I mean every—everybody’s tastes a little different. I mean you can buy it anywhere(s) else; they’ve got a little different—how you say that?—little different way of doing, you know, putting different—. Seasoning might be a little stronger, or some might be a little milder. I’ve noticed that people eat boudin for breakfast a lot. When do most of your sales happen here for boudin? Morning, noon, afternoon. And in wintertime more. For some reason wintertime Well this time of year [late summer, early autumn], how much boudin do you make a week? Summertime I’ll make between 200—about 400 pounds a week. We make it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Tuesdays I’ll make a 200-pound batch, and then Thursday I’ll make another 200-pound batch, and then by the following Tuesday again it’s time to make more. But the wintertime it will go from 500 to 600 pounds. It varies. And then Christmas, around the holidays it’s more—get visitors that come in. And I’ve seen us make up to 1,000-pounds in a week, you know that Christmas week. But most of your sales—do you think that it’s people who sort of eat it on the go, or do a lot of people take it home? Some eat it on the go. Some of them have parties, you know. They have, some have wedding showers, bunch of occasions I guess. They—it’s like a little snack for them. I don’t think it’s just a main meal. It’s just something to snack on, like an appetizer. I think I saw on the internet that your boudin is pretty spicy. Well we have a spicy and a mild, you know. You got your choice. It’s not, well I mean it’s spicy but it’s not overpowering. And how do you get that spice? Is that with cayenne pepper? With pepper, yeah, red pepper. Do you make any other kinds of sausage? Yeah, smoked sausage and fresh sausage. We’ve got a pure pork, and we got a beef and pork, and a fresh: we have an onion top and parsley and a hot. That’s basically it, and we also have a chicken sausage. You started, you told me earlier, as a meat-cutter here. Is that the same thing as a butcher? No, not the same thing. The butcher, they more or less start from scratch all right: the pig or the cow is alive, you know, and they go, they go from the whole process. We get all our stuff boxed. Like picnics come in one box, butts come in another box, and then your pork loins in another, and you basically cut it for the case. Subject: Scott Menard --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Saturday, September 8, 2007. I’m in Rayne, Louisiana with Mr. Scott Menard. And if I could get you to just say your full name and your birth date, I’d appreciate it. Scott Menard: Right. My name is Gregory Scott Menard. My birth date is July 22, 1970. How long have you been involved in this store? Is it a family business? It’s a family business, yes. I’ve been involved practically all my life, since I’ve been about five years-old, and been working here full-time since I’ve been out of high school, which was in ’88, until the present. I bought this store October 26 of ’06, so we’ve been here almost a year now. Did your parents run the store? My uncle, yeah. And Mark was telling me that the original boudin recipe came from—is it your grandfather? It was my, my uncle’s grandfather. I mean I’ve been involved with the family all my life. I’ve—my aunt and uncle raised me since I was, you know, been a young And do y’all speak French? Not a whole lot. But you must get people from the older generation who come in here and—. We get some and we have, we have some cashiers that’s been here 26--28 years that speak fluent French. And I mean I remember Ronnie, some of Ronnie’s grandparents, that’s all they spoke was French. I mean there wasn’t really hardly any English at all that—that his grandmother spoke. So there’s not many people today that come in and speak a lot of French. I mean the older people but not—it’s kind of fading away you know. Ronnie—was that your uncle? Yes. And have you ever made the boudin? I’ve helped them make it. I mean Mark has been making it the past 10 years. Well I mean, just you making it probably the past 10 years, but I mean he’s been making it for probably 20 years or better. When you were growing up, was the store—did it look like it does now? It was actually very small, almost like a convenience store. Ronnie took over the business. He was 18. I think he had four employees. And then rebuilt that store in [Sighs] ’84—rebuilt a new store in ’84, and then we added on in ’86 maybe, a couple years after. And we added on again in 2000, which is the original store we have now. So it’s, it’s grown you know quite a bit since—since Ronnie has had it. And he was 18 when he bought it years ago from his grandfather. Now I don’t know how long his grandfather had it, but I know the time—he always tell me when he, when he bought the store there was 28 stores in town, like mom-and-pop stores. How many are there now? There’s only—there’s one chain store, which is Winn Dixie, and there’s four—there’s three independents. We’re the biggest independent in town. Now you have convenience stores, but a lot of the mom-and-pop stores just shut down. What do you think your customers come to you for that they don’t get at the Winn Dixie? I think our other biggest strong point would be our meat department, you know meat. I mean we have people come from all over, all over the parish you know, neighboring parishes that—you know, different small cities around this area that come here just for the meat. They probably have a wide selection of meats at the bigger stores, but what makes your meat different? I think the biggest stores don’t—they don’t cut meat; they more—a lot of stuff is packaged meat. If someone wants, you know—we just do it the way it was done years ago. We still cut meat on a daily basis, you know. If you go to Wal-Marts and stuff you won't, you probably won't find a saw. You probably won't find a grinder. You won't—you know, just things to process the meat. They get everything packed in just like a—just like canned groceries. It’s just they—it comes in a box, they unpack it, put it out there, you know. There’s no meat-cutters in those stores. You can, you know—lot of them stores you can't go in and ask for, you know, a rib-eye cut. They just, they just don’t have it. They don’t have the personnel to do it, you know. Some do and some don’t. Most of the Wal-Marts don’t have that. I think Sam’s is starting to—Sam’s has some—some Sam’s have the, you know, meat—fresh cut meats—so they have butchers and stuff, but for the most part that’s—. I think that’s our strength, you know. And what are some of your top sellers as a specialty meat? Well our boudin is a real, real good seller for us. Our sausage, fresh and smoked. We sell a lot of stuffed roasts, pork, beef, stuffed chickens. Barbeque packs. People buy different things different times of the season. You know, I mean things sell better, like you know boudin sells a lot more in the wintertime when it’s colder—they eat more of it. Summertime, it’s hot. They don’t eat as much of that. What’s a barbeque pack? It’s a pack that we put together with pork—seasoned pork steaks, a whole chicken cut in half, some fresh sausage. And we sell a lot of that. Do you eat boudin? Yes, I eat boudin. I like boudin. And how do you eat it? Do you eat the casing? No, I don’t eat the casing. I don’t. Now if you—I’ll tell you what: my preferred way to eat boudin is barbequed. Now if you barbeque it, you eat—then you eat the casing. And by barbeque, what do you mean by that? Just like you’d barbeque a steak or a hamburger, and you put it on the pit until it—the casing—turns golden brown, and take it off and eat it. And why do you eat the casing then? It changes? Because it’s—it dries it out. It’s real—it’s not moist like if you boil it. It’s not stringy. It’s real tough, and when you bite the boudin it—you know, when you bite into the boudin it just breaks the casing. You got a pretty high rating from www.boudinlink.com, and I’m wondering what you think sets your boudin apart from other ones. Well I think our recipe just speaks for itself. We have a real good recipe that’s just a mixture of the meat and the, and the spices, and you know it’s not too But you’ve been wrapping it in plastic for a long time? Quite a while, yeah. It’s just, it’s more efficient. It’s less messy; you know, it’s just not as messy. You just, you can serve it quicker to your customers and you’ve got to realize our—we serve our boudin with our meat department, and we have a full blown meat department. A lot of these other stores, that’s all they do. You know, you go to some of these stores and all they do is sausage and boudin. They don’t have a whole meat case. So it just works for us; that’s how we do it. When you were deciding to buy the store and take over as the owner, did—do you think at all about how you’re sort of carrying on what might be a dying tradition? Yes. I mean I see the—a lot of meat department, like the workers in a meat department, is a dying breed. You don’t, you don’t have as many young people coming up that want to cut meat or do those things, so it is definitely a dying breed. But it’s, you know, it’s an interesting job. It’s a challenging job. And yes, there’s a lot of rewards because you know what you put into your product is what—what goes out. So you get the rewards as well as, you know, doing the hard work to get it to that point. --- To download the entire transcripts in PDF form, please click Scott Menard full transcript or Mark Cromier full transcript.
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I’ve been doing since—since ’84.
they want more—more boudin in the winter ‘cause it’s cold out.
child. My dad died at a young age, so they took me in, and so that’s—that’s how I came accompanied with them, and the recipe was from his grandfather, David [Pronounced Di-veed] Trahan.
much meat and it’s not too much rice. Just an old recipe we had that—that’s been successful over the years. I think only from what, from what I read on the link the only—the only rating we didn’t get A-plus for was because of the way we sell it. It’s wrapped in plastic and not butcher paper. I think the ones—the guys who write the link, that was their downfall to our boudin: the way we present it, we sell it to our customers.
