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MATT HACKLER Folklorist
“I think so much American food, sort of standard American food, is so obvious—there’s no subtlety to it—that when you eat something like boudin or gumbo, the foods that we like so much down here, you’re always surprised by sort of how sophisticated the taste is.” – Matt Hackler Matt Hackler, a product of two East Texans, grew up in Cajun country, where his father relocated for a job in the oil industry. At home, his mother cooked typical East Texan white gravies and chicken and dumplings, but also dark-roux gumbos and crawfish étouffée. As youngsters, Matt and his brothers were taught to eat boudin out of its casing, spread on crackers. Following high school, Matt attended college in Minnesota. He then shuttled around other boudin-free cities before recently returning home to pursue a PhD in the folklore program at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. While not Cajun by genetics, he identifies fiercely with the culture in which he was raised and aims to job-hunt on the Gulf Coast when he completes his studies. Matt now eats boudin casing and all.
Subject: Matt Hackler --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Wednesday, July 18, 2007 and I’m in Lafayette, Louisiana. Could you state your name and your birth date and what you do for a living? Matt Hackler: Sure. My name is Matt Hackler. My birth date is October 11, 1976 and I’m a PhD fellow in the folklore program at UL in Lafayette. And can you tell us what a folklorist is, or does, and how that relates to your love of boudin? Sure. A folklorist is someone who studies traditional culture, and so it used to be that we thought of traditional cultures as those cultures which were pre-modern—people who didn’t use modern technology, you know, like the Amish or people who were in some way separated from modernity. But now folklorists think of folk groups as any group which has at least one thing in common. Usually Can you tell me what your family’s relationship was to boudin when you were growing up—when you would eat it? And your parents aren't from here, and so you might have sort of a unique experience, but what it was like growing up? We never made it ourselves. Boudin for us was like a special treat kind of food. My—when I think of boudin, the memory that comes back: I remember my dad coming back every fall from a boucherie that one of the oil fields services companies, with which his company did business, would host for the men from the oil company. He worked for Pennzoil. And I remember him coming back from the boucherie with all sorts of things: he would come back with cracklins, and especially boudin, and we would sit around and eat whatever boudin he had brought, usually on crackers. [Laughs] That’s what we did with that boudin. And then the other times that we ate boudin, whenever we were either at a festival or a fair and we bought it from a stall—a food stall—and there are lots of festivals around here, so there was plenty of opportunity to do that. Or we would buy it from a gas station on a corner if we were out and got a hankering for boudin. Did you have a favorite place [for boudin] when you were growing up to go? By the time that I was at high school age, I—you know, we would—if we were going to have boudin we went to Comeaux’s, which was a gas station that the Comeaux family owned where they served boudin. When you were in school, was boudin something that, you know, high school kids would go get? [Laughs] No. I don’t think that it was a food that any of us would eat—eat socially, you know. It was—for a lot of the kids that I grew up with, the kids that I went to school with, you know this was a home food for them. I don’t know that any of them made it at home, but they would associate it, you know, with family gatherings and grandparents and that sort of stuff. Funnily enough the [Laughs]—the thing that we all did together was we ate Taco Bell. You know, I guess we wanted to be like American teenagers all over. You have an interesting story about Comeaux’s. Can you tell me about that? Sure. In eighth grade—so I was about—the year I turned 14, I was taking Louisiana history in school because in eighth grade, at least when I was in school, that was what the history subject was for you. So we’re taking Louisiana history and had a great teacher. Her name was Alice Fischer. [Laughs] She’s no longer Fischer, but she’s still Alice, and she encouraged all of us to study a Louisiana product or a Louisiana industry. And so my friend and I—her name is M’liss, and she lived just down the street from me—we chose boudin making. How we chose boudin making, I don’t know. Maybe we were just really hungry for boudin that day, and we chose boudin making. And the one place—and it was clear in our minds at that time, the place that you would go to watch someone make boudin, was at Comeaux’s main store. They had these gas station places around town, but they had the—the main store was on General Mouton Road, which is near the University of Louisiana. And so we arranged to go there; my dad brought his video camera. We had questions we had written for our interview, and we got up at I don’t know, 4:30 in the morning or something, and my dad drove us to Comeaux’s and we interviewed the guy who owned the place and videotaped him making boudin for the day there. And I remember it was a really big hit. I remember thinking it was really cool—especially, you know, who doesn’t want to watch a sausage stuffer doing his thing?—but I remember showing the video and presenting the project to the class at school and that they really enjoyed it. I think maybe boudin is one of those things that we kind of take for granted, so to kind of see where it comes from, it was kind of a surprise to everyone. I know it was to us. We went to a gas station today. You were saying that you would go to gas stations to get boudin. Can you talk a little bit about the gas station culture? [Laughs] You would go to a gas station because it was, you know, convenient. Around—around Lafayette, gas stations often have a hot food counter. I don’t know how it started or where it started, and it had—they have a reputation for being good. It isn’t the kind of processed food; it’s not like the Chevron home company sends out, you know, these little sandwiches in bags that you can heat in the microwave. It’s like every gas station, if it’s locally owned, would have a And that culture is still pretty strong, it seems to me. I think it’s actually getting stronger. I don’t know why. I think that people have—I—you know, I often see new places opening up with sort of professional looking food service, you know gas stations with food service built into them. And I mean locally owned food service, not like a Subway built in you know a Chevron or something. But people, I guess they see it as an easy way to add profit, and it—people are so used to it that, you know I think there—there are a group of people who if they’re eating on the go would naturally look for that, so we’ve come to expect it in Lafayette as a good place to get tasty cheap food. We ate boudin at a couple different places today. Can you tell me what one was your favorite and why? Yeah. We were thinking a lot about this earlier. So far the boudin places that we ate today, and of the boudin that I’ve eaten in Lafayette, my favorite is Billeaud’s in Broussard. And I think that the reason I like it compared to the other things we ate today—what really set it apart was the sort of fullness of the flavor. You could taste more of the liver, the organ meat in it, and it had sort of—the flavor seemed to have sort of layers. It wasn’t a simple sort of one flavor: you bite into it and it’s hot, or it tastes like meat or just meat or rice—just rice. But it seemed like there was—a little more complex. And that made it, you know, more fun to eat and so now, from now on whenever I get boudin I know that I’m going to go to Broussard to get it. Some people I’ve seen, and this is what I tend to do, squeeze the filling out and don’t eat the casing. You eat the casing? Yes. [Laughs] Part of it is because I don’t—it’s—that’s what makes boudin so portable, so if you eat the whole thing then by the end of the meal you have nothing left. You don’t have this sort of sticky gooey casing left to worry about, you know, throwing away or anything. But also I—I just feel like the whole thing is edible so you should eat the whole thing. I don’t know what those casings are made of. I don’t like to think about what those casings—I’m sure it’s a food grade plastic or something. I know that in the old days they were cased in intestines, that they used the intestines as casing. And when I was a kid I thought that they were—I thought that I was eating intestines, but I’m sure I wasn’t. I’m sure I was just eating these food grade plastic things, but I like to eat the whole thing. [Laughs] Maybe it’s more authentic. Maybe I’m trying to kid myself into thinking that I’m eating more—I’m eating more authentically if I eat the whole thing. Did your parents ever buy boudin at the grocery store, just in the meat section, and cook it up at home? No, no, they never did. I’ve always eaten it hot direct from the vendor. Though my dad did hear from one of his brothers that boudin was good grilled, so I have had him take boudin that was prepared hot, bring it home, and put it on the grill, and that sort of made it more like—especially if you cut it into little discs, that made it more like sausage like we’re traditionally used to eating, that you could stick a toothpick in and eat it off the toothpick. So that’s the only alteration that I’ve ever made. Otherwise it was exactly like it was handed to me in the—in the waxed paper from the store. And what about boudin balls: what kinds of places serve those, served those, while you were growing up? Usually the same places that served boudin, so the place—the gas station at the end of my street always had boudin balls, in addition to sort of fried pistolettes and fried chicken and whatever. And also, like at a festival, if you go to eat something at a festival, the—the vendor will usually have boudin and boudin balls. I don’t know, just sort of a fun variant to boudin I guess. We were talking earlier about the Christmas song, the Cajun Christmas song. There was a Cajun Christmas album that came out, it must have been the mid-‘80s, and I’m not sure that it was popular anywhere other than the greater Lafayette area, but they would play it on the radio and there was a song called Boudin Balls to the tune of Jingle Bells. And so every time I see the word boudin ball, the phrase boudin balls, or I eat a boudin ball, I sing the Boudin Balls song. How does that go? [Laughs] I was trying to get away with not doing it. Okay, it’s the tune of Jingle Bells in case you can't tell from my singing. It goes, boudin balls, boudin balls on my Christmas tree; you can eat a dozen; I can eat two dozen, meeee—. There you go. I don’t remember the rest of it. You’ve noticed that places like Super Wal-Mart and fast food places don’t No. It seems like in the minds of the people—I mean you’d have to ask other people to see if they had the same experience, but it seems like in the minds of the people in this area, there are places you go to buy cheap groceries like Super Wal-Mart, you know, just your everyday things, and there are places you go to buy the sort of special foods. And you know, one tradition that we have here is that you get really great meats, for example, at a Cajun meat market. You would never—I mean unless you just couldn’t afford anything else, but I don’t know people who go to Super Wal-Mart and buy steaks, for example. I mean I wouldn’t—the idea of that sounds kind of gross to me. Maybe you would buy ground meat there, ground beef there to make hamburgers or something, but in general you know the—. Especially you wouldn’t serve a guest that. Maybe you would have it for your own family, but you wouldn’t serve a guest that. You would go to Hebert’s in Maurice, or you would go to one of the places—Earl’s on Verot School Road or, I can't think of it but there’s a place in Broussard—Chop’s, a place called Chop’s in Broussard, and in every town, every community, has these places. And the meats are always really well seasoned, the cuts are good, they look great you know. We saw some today. The cuts are good and they’re always—they have all this interesting sort of local variance, so they’ll have pork chops but they’ll be stuffed with crab or shrimp meat or something like that. And they’ll have seafood sausages and just sort of different stuff like that in addition to just t-bones and that sort of thing. So that thing is—I think that really matters to people. I can't imagine that that would go away no matter how cheap the groceries got at a big, you know, chain like Wal-Mart. That’s sort of irreplaceable. What about, have you ever introduced, you know, friends from out-of-state to boudin? And if so, what was that like? I think people are really surprised at sort of how—I said this before, but how complex the flavor is: that it kind of mellows. One flavor kind of mellows into another. I think so much American food, sort of standard American food, is so obvious—there’s no subtly to it—that when you eat something like boudin or gumbo, the foods that we like so much down here, you’re always surprised by sort of how sophisticated the taste is. Especially when you think it’s just a folk food, right. Can you talk a little bit about what it was like to grow up in a household of not-native Louisianians, and what kind of food you generally ate, and maybe the trajectory of your mom’s cooking? Well you should know that South Louisiana has a long history of absorbing people into its culture, and they sort of modify their culture. So you have Cajuns around here name Schexnayder and Smith and Jones, so they’re the—the descendants of men who came into this community and married Cajun women. And then, you know the English or the German or the whatever was long gone, and they’ve become absorbed with the Cajun culture. So I think even though by the time we moved here in the late ‘70s you had a much more, I don’t know—American pop --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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they have a number of things in common. So a religious group, a group that lives in a local area, a community, people that have some sort of occupation maybe in common—that sort of thing. So my interest—the way it connects is to my interest in boudin is that I grew up here in Lafayette and I’m very interested in the culture of this region of Southwest Louisiana. And boudin and the—is one of the foodways that makes the place so unique. 
cook or two that would come in during the day and usually fry things. So boudin, cracklins, often plate lunches, and also things like crawfish and shrimp pistolettes, which is like a bread pocket, you know stuffed with—fried bread stuffed with like a crawfish mixture or something like that; often fried chicken and things like that too: something they could just fry quickly in the back and serve. But local people, like men who are out working and people working on road crews, and painters, carpenters, those kinds of people from construction crews would often get their lunches there because it’s cheap, it’s convenient and it’s tasty—not necessarily healthy, but really tasty. And so boudin would be one of those foods that was really common. It’s a very portable food, so you would either go there, and sometimes they had places to sit, sometimes they—you would sit in your truck or your car and eat it, and you know it was another—those places were also places that when we got out of school, you know kids would pick up food there too. You know—so. 
necessarily seem to detract from the sort of cultural interest in boudin and foods like that.
culture had sort of moved into this area in a bigger way than it ever has before. I think it’s still sort of absorbing people. So my family—even though they had been born and raised and lived into their 20s in East Texas, they raised children here and because our—you know we were at school with other kids mostly from here, that we were at church with other kids mostly from here, and you know all of our after school activities, and my mom got involved in community organizations and tennis teams and stuff. So very quickly our foods, I mean our lives took on a Louisiana tint. The kinds of foods that my grandmother, my mom’s mom, who was a great cook, would make, the stuff that mom would have known how to make early in her marriage to my dad, would be stuff like chicken and dumplings, chicken fried steak with gravy—white gravy. I had a teacher once in school; I told him I was going to Northeast Texas for the holiday and he said, Oh, white gravy. That was his response. He was from Ville Platte, but the thought was disgusting to him, so—. White gravy is one of those things, fried catfish, that sort of stuff. But then you know, early on my mom would start—she learned how to make gumbo, seafood gumbo or chicken and sausage gumbo, or étouffée or shrimp fettuccine, and all the kinds of stuff that her friends, these women that she was spending her time with, were making.
