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Mowata Store & Bubba Frey’s Restaurant "People ask me, say, What’s the difference between the pure pork and the mixed sausage? I say, Well the pure pork you’ll have open-heart surgery at 60, and the mixed you’ll only have it at—you know, at 70.” – Bubba Frey Bubba Frey is a Cajun jack-of-all-trades and a keeper of traditions. While he professes not to have strayed much from his home turf of Mowata—a town so small that the United States Postal Service doesn’t even acknowledge it with a zip code—he possesses extensive knowledge about, and perspective on, the culinary history of his region. Straight out of high school, Bubba took to rice and cattle farming, just as his grandfather and father had done. He also dabbled successfully in crawfish farming, but when that market became saturated and the Mowata Store came up for sale, he made a life-change. These days, if you stop by the store for hot boudin or cracklings, breakfast sausage or hogshead cheese, you might just find Bubba himself behind the register discussing various ways to properly cook a turtle. Then again, he could be in the poultry coop tending to his guinea hens, or down the road assisting a neighbor with his first hog killing, or practicing the fiddle that he taught himself to play.
Subject: Bubba Frey --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, August 20, 2007. I’m in Mowata, Louisiana at Bubba Frey’s Restaurant, which is next to the Mowata Store. And if I could get you to say your name and your birth date, we’ll go from there. Bubba Frey: Okay, my name is Bubba Frey, and I was born on September 22, 1956. Tell me a little bit about how you [came] to own the store. Well you know I used to be a rice and crawfish farmer, and then around the ‘90s, the early ‘90s, all my equipment was stuff that I had got from my grandfather and my daddy, the equipment that I was using, it was obsolete. And I had a very Tell me about how you learned how to make boudin, and—and maybe describe what yours is like. Okay. Well you know when I was growing up the old-time—old-time boucheries were, they were fading away because modernization had taken ahold of people, and all the older ones—my grandmother, my grandfather, and—they did, they saw that all their life. And when they butchered, they had to butcher on the coldest day of the year; you know, the women got the nasty job. They had to clean the guts, and it was an all-day affair, and it was work. They had to—they cooked, they had to process the hog, you know, and then when they—they had to render the hog lard, the cracklings down to get the hog lard. Everybody talks about cracklings today, but I mean when they did it it was—they did it because they needed—the hog lard was essential to the people in this part of the country. I mean you didn’t go to the local grocery store and buy a gallon of LouAnna cooking oil. I mean there was no such thing. Everything that they did was done So, but when they did butcher, you know at the slaughterhouse you’d ask for your—your shanks; you’d ask for the internal organs, you know the head and stuff like that, and then that’s what we would use to make boudin. And that’s what they made, they used to make boudin with with the old-time boucheries—you know, stuff that they—that wasn’t going to be appealing to eat it this way, they boiled it down and they de-boned it. Like the head, the hocks and stuff, the little pieces of meat that they couldn’t do anything with. They’d boil it down and they’d take the meat off the bones. They’d grind that up, you know after it was cooked; they boiled it and it was tender. It was falling off the bone, and then they would mix the internal organs with it, and then the vegetables—they’d grind all that up together. They’d stuff it in the casings and they’d cook it all at one time, you know because they made 30, 40 pounds at a time. You know they’d cook it, and then everybody took some home and they ate it cold or they reheated it or whatever, but it was cooked when they—they brought it, you know, from the house. And I learned through my great-uncle Lawrence Frey, because every time he made boudin, you know I was there to help him, and I learned that the—the technique of making sausage and stuff like that through him too, because I was—I would follow him everywhere he’d go, and—and when he would make sausage or boudin, I was always there. And so I picked up that trade and—and not knowing at the time—you know I was learning every little bit that I could. I knew that one day, that I was going to do it because these people wasn’t going to be around here anymore, you know, and if I wanted to do it I was going to have to learn how to do it or just going to—it was going to be shoved underneath the table and forgotten forever. But not at the time thinking, you know, that I was going to come into the Mowata Store here and turn it into a boudin and a sausage kitchen. So you know it—it helped out whenever I was trailing around with him. And when we’d make boudin we’d grind it up, you know, and they’d taste it: What do you think it needs? A little bit more pepper or salt or whatever, so everybody would give their input, you know. And then when you were mixing it, then you took the broth that you boiled your meat in and you added that to the rice and—the cooked rice—and everything, and you’d mix it to where it was a little bit soupier than—wetter than dry because your rice soaks up a lot of your juice and that. And we’d cook it, and then we’d also, you know we’d make blood—blood boudin at the same time. Not everybody could—like I was saying earlier—cross that bridge, you know to eat it, but—and I was one of them. I got stuck in the middle more than once. But you know when they’d—they’d kill the hog, they’d bleed it and they’d catch the blood and they’d put salt with it and they’d shake it up so the blood wouldn’t clabber. So they’d save it to make their—their blood boudin. And the only thing blood boudin is, you know you take your white mixture like you would—going to make regular white boudin—and then you just mix the blood in it. You stir it up. Now it’s—it’s not pretty when you’re doing it. It looks like a murderous mess, and that’s what—what stunned people, and you know, I’m never going to eat that, or—. You know because it wasn’t pretty, I have to admit, but when I decided that I was going to eat the blood boudin, it was actually better than the white boudin. And—and until we quit making it, you know when we made blood boudin, that was my favorite. I wouldn’t eat the white; it was just the blood boudin. And over here at the store, when I came in you know they were making it one way. I’m making it similar to the way they were making it, but I’m making it almost identically to the way that my uncle was making it. Now I don’t put the internal organs in it for the simple fact that that generation is all dead and gone now, and you have to look at the—another generation that comes—that comes up. And you know as well as I do, you know the young kids today, if it doesn’t look like a chicken nugget or a French fry they’re not going to eat it. Now if you tell somebody that you got kidneys and heart and liver in there, you know they You know grease, I don’t have—I have very little grease in mine. I don’t profess to have the best boudin in the world, but I—mine is the less greasiest, I can tell you that. And it’s just—it’s just a simple fact that I did. I don’t tell too many people what I do around this part of the country because everywhere you look there’s a boudin shop. You know I’m—I’m out here, out of Eunice, and right there in Eunice there’s three or four major boudin operations right there. Which, you know and I do business with most of them. One of them since went out of business—Johnson. They were the ones that started making boudin first in this part of the country, you know. If you got boudin anywheres in the Eunice area, you got it at Johnson’s or you didn’t get it at all. And it was only on Saturday mornings, and—and I seen it over there to where if you drove at 5 o’clock in the morning people were already lining up outside the door of his—his grocery store waiting in line for boudin. Now if you got there late on a Saturday morning, you know, you—if you stood in line and didn’t get no boudin—I mean that was the worst part, that you didn’t get any boudin. The best part was you knew what went on in Eunice the whole week before, because that’s all they did was sit in line and—and, you know, and visit until they got their chance to get at the window to order their boudin. And Johnson’s was the ones that—that got boudin on the map right here in the Eunice area. Since then the Poultry House—the Eunice Poultry House—the Eunice Superette Slaughterhouse, and then now there’s a new one that came in. It’s called T-Boy’s of Mamou. He makes it. But I sell my fair share. You know I’m in between Eunice and Crowley. I’m—I’m 12—8 miles from Eunice and 12 miles from Crowley. But I sell my fair share, you know, so—. I don’t—I don’t want you to divulge any secrets, but can you tell me what part of the animal you use? Okay, what I use—I use the boneless pork picnics, which is the trimmings off the Boston butts, and I do use head meat. It’s called temple meat; you know it’s not the whole head. Back then you—if I had to use the whole head, I’d never finish, you know so the stuff that I use is all boneless. It—I don’t have any loss other than the shrinkage of what you got when you boil it. Now the temple meat, everybody—your temple has a little socket on the hog there, and it—they scoop it out, and there’s only two little chunks that look like the inside part of a big turkey gizzard. It’s round, and you can buy it by 60-pound boxes all day long, you know. We figured there was probably 200, 300 hogs have to bite the dust in order to fill up that 60-pound box of meat because there’s only two little chunks of temple meat per head, you know. So there’s really, at these packing houses there’s nothing that gets thrown away. And then, you know I use that probably half and half. Your boneless shoulder has a tendency to boil down, and when you mix it with the rice it doesn’t show, and everybody says, Well you ain’t got no meat—no meat in your boudin, you know. But the temple meat, it cooks firm; it’s a firm meat. It has a better flavor than the boneless picnics, and it—it doesn’t take a lot of it to show up in your boudin, so it makes it look like you got 10-times more meat than you normally would. And do you ever make blood boudin? No, I don’t make it. You can't make it to sell because the Board of Health, you know, is very, very strict about it. I heard there was one place that does still make it, but then you have to have a state inspector there the whole time. And—and you know I don’t want somebody else looking over my shoulder when I’m doing something. So I’d rather keep it like it is, you know. So your Uncle Lawrence, did he make sausage and boudin—was he a meat guy by trade or by just interest? No, no. It was just, he did it you know because that was their way of life at the time. He was a farmer by trade and—and most of your farmers in this part of the country, they—you know they had their own recipe on what they did. But when he—his freezer was running low on sausage, he’d make him a batch of sausage. Like I said, in the wintertime you know, if we—if I killed a hog or he killed a hog or whatever and we saved the head and the internal organs and we made a homemade boudin—that, we made it at his house. I wanted to ask you—do you make hogshead cheese? You know I make hogshead cheese, and I’m still surprised that people eat it as much as they do. A lot of them, it’s like I was talking—telling you that bridge: you know they won't eat it because it’s—they got hogshead written in the description. But actually all that—the way that I make it, it’s—I make it the same way that we made it back then. When all—everything was ground up together in the pot, we just took it and put it in a pie pan, mixed it with a little bit of broth that we boiled the meat in, and we seasoned it to the way that we wanted to taste it, and we just put it in the ice-box and let it gel. And I do the same thing, Before I start my And you use the head? Well I use the same mixture as I use as a boudin. You know, there’s head meat in it. I don’t use the—I don’t use the actual head because the head would take up too much—I’d have to have an 18-wheeler cooler in the back of the store for the amount of the stuff that I make just—just to store hogshead in, and—. Right. I know that you have to go here, to go kill a hog. Yeah, one of my neighbors went to the sale and bought him a hog, and he—he wants to clean it, and he said, You know more about that than I do, which is probably true to the fact. And if he—you’ve got to have it just right because if you got your water too hot, boiling too high—your temperature is too high—everything is going to sit on your hog, it’s going to stick, it’s going to gum up; you won't get the hair off. So you got to have it at certain degrees to where it just—it peels the skin, the outer layer of the skin, and—and then the hair comes off. So—. So you’re talking right after you kill it, you take the hair off. That’s like the first thing? Yeah. What you do, you kill it and then you bleed it, and then you got to scald it. You got to put it in hot water, and your hot water—hot water is about 140 to 145-degrees. You don’t want it any hotter than that. You dip him in there, you pull him out, you dip him back in there, and you start plucking it like you would a chicken. And when it starts to come off very, very easy you take it out and you just splash your hand and it wipes—most of the time it wipes right off. Are you going to shoot it? Well more than likely, yeah. It will be shot, yeah. I might not be doing the actual shooting, but it will be shot. It’s a little bit, you know—they used to catch them, my great-grandfather, to not to upset them or bruise them or whatever. And they’d use the head, you know, so they didn’t want to mess up the head. They just would stab the hog and bleed it, but that’s—it’s a little bit too cruel for—. So we put him out of his misery the easy way. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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small farm, and it—for me to stay into farming, I would have had to pick up probably 1,000 more acres and spend a bunch of money on equipment. And at the time the store came up for sale over here. I pretty much knew, you know at the time when I bought it, it wasn’t—the store wasn’t what it turned out to be now. Back then you know it was still a little grocery store and people still shopped instead of going to the big Wal-Marts or Winn-Dixies and stuff like that, you know. And you still had canned items; we still had bread and milk—you know some of the basic staples that people want. But I bought the store, you know, and it was pretty much snacks and everything and they—they were making a little bit of sausage here before, and boudin. In fact they were making something like 400 pounds of—of boudin a week, and it turned into sometimes I will make 400 pounds of boudin in one given day. And then through the years, you know, things were changing, and—and canned items, you know. I’d go through them and sometimes they were a year old; I had to take them home and use them myself, canned vegetables and—or throw them away because they got too old. So it just come to the-— come to the conclusion that home staples—you know groceries and stuff like that—just wasn’t going to cut it in here because I wasn’t—you’d have to sell in such volume to make money. So through those years I started making sausage and the tasso, de-boned stuffed chickens, bacon, you know. And since then I’ve started raising guineas and chickens and stuff like that. 
with hog lard. So on that day, you know they might have butchered a big old fat hog and—and that was one person’s job, just sitting there sometimes you know stirring the cracklings. They’d render down sometimes 50, 60, up to 100 gallons of hog lard a day. You know, and everybody would take a little bit because they’d preserve their stuff in hog lard. They—everything was cooked in hog lard. So, but that was all fading away because they were tired of it, you know. The local slaughterhouses had opened up and it was too easy to go buy that hog hanging up, you know already cleaned and processed in there, and they—you’d tell them how to cut it up. They all had electricity by the late ‘40s in this part of the country; they had a freezer to put everything in there. Now a lot of them would still raise their own hogs, but they wouldn’t butcher them.
ain’t going to touch that with a 10-foot pole. So I make mine, and you know I leave the internal organs out. There’s—there’s no liver, there’s no heart, no—none of that. And—and people come in and say, It tastes just like the boudin my mama used to make. In fact I had one man come in here; he argued with me that I put too much liver, and I just had to tell him—you know the customer is always right, so I just had to tell him, Well, you know, next time I’ll cut back a little bit on it. Actually I didn’t have a pound of liver in it. But I stay away from that. You know it—everything is done; it’s, I know what to do if I’m going to make 100-pound batch or if I’m going to make a 400-pound batch. It’s just—it’s all seasoned in 100-pound batches at a time. I don’t want—I don’t do more than that because I have a big machine that mixes it. And I use long-grain rice with it because of the fact that short-grain will mush up. You know the machine that I have, you got—you know it took me a little while to learn how—what to do with it in order to get the texture of the boudin exactly the way that I want it. But I’ve been having the machine for well over 10 years, so I know exactly what to do with it. And—and mushy boudin, you know people don’t want mushy boudin. A lot of places you stop and you eat it, you can't tell—well, what starts and what finishes. You know, it’s all mixed up together.
boudin, I just take my meat out of my vat that’s ground with all the vegetables and that, and I add in a little bit of boudin broth and—and let it gel.
