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The Sausage link Kevin Downs 2400 Napoleon Street “My little boy, he is already saying that he’s taking over. And he will actually go in and bark a few orders every now and then, and he’ll grab some of the plastic gloves and start rolling boudin balls in the afternoon sometimes.”
When you look at the way his family ate while he was growing up in Sulphur, it begins to look as though Kevin Downs was predestined to enter the meat business. His was a hunting family. Kevin’s favorite memory of his mother’s cooking: deer roast and gravy with butter beans and sausage on the side. Also, his grandfather raised, and then killed, roughly four hogs a year for the family’s sustenance—they would make cracklings and boudin, among other dishes, after each slaughter. Then, as a young man, Kevin became the market manager at Misse’s Grocery in Sulphur. While Misse’s is still in business, it no longer specializes in boudin. Ten years after he started working there, Kevin bought Misse’s boudin-making equipment, which he uses to make The Sausage Link’s liver-free boudin with long-grain rice and high-quality hog casings that snap when you bite into them. Kevin’s boudin comes mild, hot, or smoked; battered and fried in balls, or battered and fried in burgers. The Sausage Link is also a meat market and deli. Customers bring in their freshly killed deer for processing, and they stop buy to pick up stuffed pork chops or seafood gumbo for dinner.
Subject: Kevin Downs --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, September 10, 2007. I’m in Sulphur, Louisiana with Mr. Kevin Downs. And if I could get you to say your name and your birth date and the name of your shop, please? Kevin Downs: Kevin Downs, August 16, 1 Thank you. And can you, just to start, out tell me a little bit about the shop: how long you’ve been open, and what you sell here? Well today is our anniversary. We opened up September 10th six years ago. We specialize in fresh cut meats, sausage, boudin, and we have a full-service deli also. And what do you mean by full-service deli? We have daily plate lunches, or you can get hamburgers or rib-eye steaks, or grilled or fried shrimp, boudin balls—whatever you want made to order. In this part of the state, are there certain kinds of plate lunches that people expect on certain days? Well, for us Mondays is beef tips. Tuesdays, fried pork chops or stuffed chicken breast. Wednesday is always stuffed pork roast with rice and gravy, candied yams, and lima beans. Thursdays we have hamburger steak, and Fridays is always some sort of seafood special. Sounds good. And what did you do before you opened this shop? Years ago, I was in the meat business at a little place called Misse’s Grocery. I’ve always wanted to open up a shop like this, and it took me—took me I guess about 15 years to be able to actually get it done. We wrote our business plan for this place in 1990, and we didn’t bring it to the bank until 2001. What do you enjoy about working with this kind of product? What is it about boudin and sausage and meat that—that moved you? Well we’re from Louisiana. Do you even have to ask that question? That’s—that’s the main, the main part of our genre here is to always have food on the table and—but good food. Not too spicy, and not too mild, but just good food. And did you grow up in a family where food was important? Food was the number one issue everyday. We—we grew up, we worked, we were not a rich family. As a matter of fact, we were pretty poor. And but the one thing that my mother always said was that we would never go hungry because no What are a couple of your memories of your favorite sorts of things that she would make? I would think probably deer roast and gravy with butter beans and sausage on the side. So you came from a hunting family too? Yes, yes, very much so. And that—that was probably where I started with the sausage, was that we always would have our sausage from—from when we would process our deer. And then we started doing it at home. And—and then when I got into the meat market at Misse’s I really went pretty far from there as far as starting out as the cleanup person there and going all the way through the process, learning everything about meat, and then from that point knowing that one day we would open our own shop. What other sorts of things did your family hunt? Oh gosh, we’re from Louisiana—ducks, geese, squirrels, rabbits, and deer. That’s the main ones there. Let’s get to the boudin. So, can you tell me about how you developed, without letting out any secrets, but just how you came to a recipe for this shop? Well we kicked it around a little bit and tried to decide what all would go in the boudin, and I will tell you that we decided that we would not put liver in the boudin. People who like boudin with liver will still eat the one without the liver, and then the people who don’t like liver will—they’re, they definitely concentrate on coming here. We actually, the day before we opened—we opened on September 10th and on September 9th we created the recipe for the boudin here at The Sausage Link. So had you made boudin before? Did you have something to go on? I had. I had made boudin previously at Misse’s Grocery. But just like in any business, you have trade secrets, so we—you know, I didn’t know what his recipes were. And—and as a matter of fact, his boudin consisted of having liver—very little liver. And he would actually cook his onions, where my onions are not cooked until the final process. Is his store still open? Yes, it is. And we’re still very good friends. As a matter of fact he doesn’t make boudin anymore. I have all of his equipment. Describe your boudin for me and what you think it’s, you know, most outstanding characteristics are. Well it has a very nice taste to it. We use the best hog casings available. They’re—they’re hog casings, and they’re about twice as expensive as a normal casing. But the casings are real thin and very edible, and the rice to meat ratio is—is very consistent. It’s always—our boudin is always the same. It’s very consistent. The seasoning is made by myself, and it’s made one batch at a time. And we—very good reports from the public. Everyone seems to enjoy it. And when you go for the rice to meat ratio, do you—which one do you want more of? Well actually, you want a little more rice than meat. So you would—I would And your casings, I noticed when I was eating it they’re very—they snap. They’re not rubbery. Is that because of the quality of the casing, or because of your technique in cooking? That is definitely the quality of the casing. You have to start with a good casing to have a good boudin. And what grain rice do you use? It’s long-grain. It’s a 96/4, meaning 96 of the kernels have not been broken. And do you think that it’s because of the length of the rice, or how you cook it, that it’s very—that it gives good texture? Probably both, probably both. You—anyone can cook a mushy rice, and then you still have a mushy product. But if you get your technique down and—‘cause you don’t want your rice too hard or too mushy, so you got to get your cooking technique down. And once you have that, then I would actually—I would definitely say that long-grain is the way to go in boudin. Can you characterize the boudin in this area in general, as opposed to say boudin recipes closer to Lafayette? Ours are good; theirs are not. In what way? I really, I feel like the further toward Lafayette you get, I think that you—the amount of liver is a lot more than what we would put in this area, which to me gives the boudin more of a—more of a bitter taste. And they also down that way—the ones that I’ve eaten is more of a medium-grain rice, so it tends to be a little mushier. Right. And they, like if you go down East—I won't name any names—but if you go down East you’ll have sometimes maybe a 20 or 25-percent meat, you know, and 75-percent rice. So it gets—some of them get a little too ricey. But I have also seen it go the other way, where you can't hardly see very much rice in the boudin when you’re—when you’re eating off of it. Was boudin a part of your diet growing up? Definitely. We—we’ve been eating boudin ever since I can remember walking. It—I don’t know if it was as common when I was growing up. You only had just several places to—maybe two or three places in this area. So boudin was probably maybe a once a week or—as a matter of fact boudin, well boudin was kind of like fast food to us when we were growing up because if you—. Now you have McDonald’s and Wendy’s or Burger King or whatever, but then you would stop through the little shop, pick up a pound or two of boudin. Mom didn’t have to cook. Everything was ready. How old are your kids? They are 10, 12, and 14. Wow. And do they spend any time here at the shop? Yes, they do. And my two oldest are girls, and they really don’t have much of an ambition towards The Sausage Link, which is okay by me. But my little boy, he is When you opened up the shop, was it in your consciousness that you were helping preserve a very deep culture? Yes, because I think that, as a matter of fact, years ago they were telling us market guys that all of the meats from the—in the future would be pre-cut and brought in like, just like now at Wal-Mart. If you go to Wal-Mart, everything is brought in pre-cut. There’s no butchers at Wal-Mart anymore. They’re talking about doing it in some of the other chain stores, and that’s okay by me because I think that people still want fresh cut meat. They still want to go to a butcher and say, you know, Can I have this cut a certain way? And—and they want somebody to talk to if they have a problem of not knowing what sort of meat or cut of meat they want. You have—you have guys on hand all times that can actually answer those questions. What kinds of different sausages do you make? We make an all-beef, an all-pork, a pork with green onion, a pork with jalapeno and garlic, and a beef and pork mixed. And if you want something different than that, we have guys that come in sometimes with their deer and ask us to make some with habañero peppers, and so whatever you want. If you can dream it up, since we make our own seasonings and we don’t have to go by a guideline recipe, we can do anything you want. And so of those sausages that you mentioned, are any of them smoked? Yes, all of those sausages are smoked. And—but you can also get them, and it’s the fresh rope sausage—or down here we call it “green sausage.” You can have it that way, or if you just want it ground a little finer into pan sausage, or—or even the coarse ground, which a lot of people like that too. Whatever you want, it’s—we’ll do it. Is tasso a popular in this part of the state? Yes, yes, it is. It’s—tasso, we make pork tasso and beef tasso. The pork tasso is the best seller by far, probably 20 to 1 over the beef tasso. I think this is the first time I’m hearing of beef tasso. Why do you make that, and what would people use it for as opposed to the pork? Some people don’t eat pork, so the beef tasso is basically giving that person the same opportunity to have tasso in their beans or soup or whatever they’re going to put it in. Tell me about your boudin balls. I met a man who was raving about your boudin balls and buying a bunch of them. The boudin ball is just basically our boudin dressing, rolled into a ball, and then we batter it with our homemade batter and fry it, and that’s a boudin ball. And I’ll—I’ll go as far as telling you that we sell thousands a week. And do people just eat them plain like that? We have them eat them all sorts of ways. From—from a mustard and mayonnaise concoction to a—to our spicy ketchup that we make here, or even pouring hot sauces and our seasonings outside. But most people just eat them plain, just like they are. So this man that I met, he was buying—his name was Jeff—. Jeff Byrley, yeah. He’s a really good friend of ours. When we first opened he felt like he needed to be part of helping us get on our feet because a business, you know the first few years is always tough. And then after he, after he came for awhile getting our boudin balls and boudin and whatnot to bring to his clients, I believe it’s a necessity for him to get those products for those clients now because they ask for us by name. What’s his business? Jeff is a salesman. He sells to—to the major industries in this area. And Jeff says that if—if he’s got a deal that’s on the line with one of these customers, he brings them a couple dozen boudin balls and closes the deal. That is a regular thing in the mornings that—we open at 7:00 a.m., and that we sell quite a bit of boudin and boudin balls by—by 8:30 or 9 o’clock in the morning. Did your family butcher hogs? Yes, we did and did all of the—my grandpa every year would—would raise four hogs a year and that was to help feed the family, and pretty much nothing went to waste. At the time was it just another day when you saw a pig killed, or was it—I don’t know—emotional for you? Never really emotional. We—you know we actually fed the animals everyday and had names for them, but I guess when—when you’re growing up and you know that hog is bred for that purpose and—and fed out for that purpose, you never really think about it other than one day you’re going to be eating Pork Chop’s bacon. Your interest in this sort of [boudin-making] thing could have been starting back then. Could be, could be. And we’ve always, my family has always hunted and fished and—and actually relied on that for a lot of our meat during the winter. We’ve always—we’ve always had a freezer full of wild game. I used to tease my parents and say I didn’t know what beef meat was until I was 12 years old, because we ate so much wild game. But you know, just—just a big joke, but we did rely a bunch on what we, what we actually raised and—and actually went out and got in the field. Oh and seafood, yeah. Shoot, the industry here is—. My dad was a welder and a—and an outboard motor mechanic, and he would always work on the shrimp boats in this area. He would, he would fix their motors or he would—he would weld their butterfly frames. So sometimes we would get home and there would be two or three ice chests of shrimp on the, on the front porch waiting for us to come home and clean. So we always had freezers full of fish or shrimp or whatever, you know, to go along with the meat. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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967. And the name of the shop is The Sausage Link. 
matter what else, we—she would always have a good meal everyday.
basically say you probably have about a 60/40 mix. 
already saying that he’s taking over. And he will actually go in and bark a few orders every now and then, and he’ll grab some of the plastic gloves and start rolling boudin balls in the afternoon sometimes.
