Interactive Map | Oral Histories | About & Contact | More Trails...
 |
Babineaux’s Slaughter House & Meat Market C. Hebert's Slaughter House & Meat Market Coleman's Sausage & Specialty Meats Eunice Superette & Slaughterhouse |
Donald Link Cochon Herbsaint “It’s amazing to me how a dish with what, four ingredients, maybe, has so many different variations.”
A native of Crowley, Louisiana, Donald Link began cooking when he was fifteen years old. After gaining some experience in local restaurants, Donald moved to San Francisco. There, he realized his passion for food and local ingredients. He attended the California Culinary Academy and honed his craft in various restaurants. Donald referred back to his native Louisiana for ideas and inspiration, building his reputation as a leading chef in the Bay Area. Eventually, though, his roots called him home. Donald moved to New Orleans and opened Herbsaint Restaurant in 2000. Five years later and only a handful of months after Hurricane Katrina, he opened his second restaurant, Cochon. The menu at Cochon is a nod to Donald’s Cajun heritage. It’s also a venue for him to celebrate the traditions of Cajun cookery. The offerings at Cochon include everything from watermelon pickles to fried pig’s ears, pickled pork tongue to rabbit and dumplings. And, of course, boudin.
Subject: Donald Link --- Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans on Wednesday, March 21, 2007 for the Southern Foodways Alliance in New Orleans, Louisiana, at Herbsaint with Chef Donald Link. And Donald, if you wouldn’t mind saying your name and also your birth date for the record. Donald Link: Donald Link. Birthday July 18, 1969. Okay. And we have a lot to talk about here today, but we’re here to talk first about boudin and then a little bit about gumbo. But first I want to kind of couch our discussion in some history of your family and your Cajun background. My family is—my last name is Link, obviously, and my dad—that’s my dad’s last name, and his mom’s last name is Zaunbrecher [pronouncing this Zon-brecker]. It depends on where you come from; over there they call it Zaunbrecher [Zon-breaker]; in Germany it’s Zaunbrecher[Soun-bre-sha]. And they came from Germany in 1880 with a group of forty immigrants. Forty families came over, and they settled in Robert’s Cove, Louisiana, which is practically, I guess, in Rayne, and that’s a community there. And then from—that stretches from where I-10 first comes off in Rayne [Louisiana], coming from New Orleans all the way through Basile [Louisiana], I think. And you start at one end in Rayne, and it’s a lot of Link land—Link properties. And then when you get to Highway 13, you start seeing a lot of the Zaunbrecher fields, and they farm rice. Actually, Nicholas Zaunbrecher, the first immigrant, was the first person to sell rice commercially in Louisiana and sent the first load to New Orleans. And they developed a lot of the farming standards and irrigation, built some bridges to get other people’s rice to market, My dad on the Zaunbrecher side is one of eighty-eight grandchildren. His dad, Lawrence Zaunbrecher, who was Nicholas—Nicholas—his son is Lawrence and that’s my dad’s grandfather and that’s—that’s the tree that has the eighty-eight grandchildren just from Lawrence. So it’s—it’s huge, talking about ten kids—ten kids each kind of situation, ten or eleven kids. So it’s a farming community and—and back then that’s—it was important. And if you go there today, it’s—it’s something that I’ve always known about as a kid. I knew that we had big families, and I knew that we were from Crowley but up until I—my later teenage years, I never really got outside of Louisiana, so I never really understood the importance of what that meant and how unique that was. I just figured that was commonplace. I thought the food was commonplace and the family was common, and it wasn’t until I started getting a little older and kind of moved away for a little while that I started to realize that there was something very unique there. And, in fact, this community has been there since 1880 and is still—still makes—. So I went two months ago and made sausage with the Zaunbrechers and I thought—I know—I know they do it a lot. They have a camp, they call it, behind one of their houses that’s the Zaunbrecher Camp. So it’s a communal house that they have, and the front part of this house is all kitchen and table to eat at for the Tuesday night suppers, and then behind that is the sausage and boudin making area which has industrial equipment. And, like I said, I showed up there at dawn, thinking we were going to make 200—300 pounds of sausage and it ends up we did 2,000 pounds that day. And it’s ten of the cousins get together, and each of them has a slightly different recipe. So you have one guy that’s cutting all the different spices for the different sausage and to this—in this day, in particular, it was deer and pork, but like two weeks after that it will be straight pork and boudin. And it depends on—this was obviously deer—the end of deer season so it was time to use that. But the process was unbelievable. I mean ten guys made 2,000 pounds of sausage in five hours. I mean the German efficiency is at work. I mean it’s unbelievable. It’s an old smokehouse right outside, maybe twenty yards from the camp, and they have these little carts that they fill up with all the sausage and hang it in there on the poles. Amazing. And in—it was a good experience for me because, like I said, I had—I had gone there, and I know that they made the sausage and I know for German Fest they make 2,000 pounds for that festival. [Phone Rings] But none of this gets sold, which is the really amazing part—that it’s still a community that gets together and kind of feeds each other. So all the sausage gets split up between the ten of them, and then that’s kind of their food supply. And on the same day I broke off with my dad’s cousin JW, and we went to his farm and because he was like, “Well,” you know, “well, I got boudin there.” So he actually has—and everybody has their own sausage making equipment, as well, for stopgaps, I guess, for the three weeks, you know. [Laughs] And he had boudin that he had just made, so we tasted his and it was unbelievable. And I met another one of the cousins, Dale, and he—and I have in my wallet, actually, on the back of some random business card I have his recipe for boudin that he gave me. So everybody has their own thing. And the cool thing about the Zaunbrechers in this community is that they all make their own. I mean they’ll go buy it and, if you show up, you know, for a project, like if you’re about to go out on the rice fields, maybe you’ll stop and pickup some boudin for breakfast. And these stores are open at six o’clock in the morning for boudin and that’s something I don’t think that a lot of people really understand about boudin is that it’s an all day food. And when I went over there to make sausage, I stopped and picked some up and got five pounds, and it was devoured in fifteen minutes. But it’s a very common thing, you know. So I went to tour the Eunice Rice Mill and that was like nine-thirty in the morning, and everybody in the office—there’s like the butcher paper is just open, and there’s a knife and there’s the boudin and black coffee. You know, just to see that that’s just like all day. But Do you have a sense of how the recipes within the family vary at all? You know it’s interesting talking to different people out there because everyone has their opinion, and liver seems to be one of the main opinions people have. Some people love it, some people hate it, some people wouldn’t know the difference if it was in there or not; I know Bubba Frey, who is a cousin of the Zaunbrechers—same grandparent, different last name but same grandparent—and Bubba has got a tremendous store [The Mowata Store] in Mowata [Louisiana], which is on Highway 13 on the way between Crowley and Eunice. And, in my opinion, that’s the best boudin in the whole area, and I’ve eaten a lot of it. But his, I think, is by far my favorite. Could describe what you love about it so much? What makes it your favorite? I think there’s a lot of factors that go into boudin that make it, like how much liquid it has, how much it’s been churned, you know, what kind of spices are in it, how much MSG is in it. Because not all of them have MSG, but I’d say, for the most part, it’s a pretty good bet that all the sausage and boudin has MSG. I know I don’t think JW’s did at his house, but there’s a difference. I mean pretty much from my experience making boudin, if you put liver in it, you pretty much have to have either some sort of sodium nitrate or MSG, and that was a problem I had when I first started a long time ago experimenting with making boudin. I’d make it, and it tasted great that day, but then the next day it had this kind of off-liver taste to it. And that stuff is just weird, that pink salt, but just a tiny pinch of it in a batch of boudin will completely eradicate that flavor. And it will keep for days, rather than one day. Does your family—because traditionally, I know a lot of boudin was made with a lot more organ meats that were put into the boudin, instead of just the liver, as kind of a way to use every part of the pig. Does the boudin that’s made for home consumption, personal consumption, does it have additional organ meats in it? Do you know? No. No, I mean I was curious about that too, and I was always curious as to why you don’t see boudin noir [or blood boudin] around anymore, and so I asked the—you know JW, Dell, Reggie—I asked those guys—and Loretta—all my dad’s cousins about why you know—because when they all make boudin now, it’s all processed—or all cut meats. Nobody is cutting—killing pigs anymore, you know, which is really interesting, too, because now they have it all cut down, and they can pick and choose what part of the pigs they use for the boudin. Like Dell was telling me temple meat, which I’ve never even heard of, but he makes his boudin with temple meat, you know, from the temple of the head, and you can order that. You can order temple meat in a case. And JW was telling me he likes using the jowls mixed with some of the pork butt, so they all have these very interesting combinations of pork. But I started asking them about when they were kids how it worked, and they were actually the last generation that butchered pigs, you know, and they told me a story about how they would—their dad would—or granddad, Lawrence Zaunbrecher, their grandfather, would tie the pig tails on the kids, and they’d run around and act like pigs. And I asked him, I said, “Well why doesn’t anybody do that anymore?” And, I guess, pretty much the answer is that the kids these days seem to be the issue. They said they get grossed out by the blood, and the organ meats is kind of an off-flavor…And for me, too, when I grew up, my granddad on my mom’s side, I mean he was from Alabama so his food was whole squirrel, rabbit, liver, and that’s what we ate. And at that time I didn’t really think much about it either. I was just like, “Well this is how we eat.” But now days everybody knows the kids—you know, even my daughter, unfortunately—I mean they know they don’t have to eat that, and it’s like well, I could just get a pizza or I could just have a hamburger. I don’t have to eat organ meat. And it’s changing, and that’s my theory on why you don’t find blood sausage anymore. I do know of two places that still have it, but in general you don’t find it anymore because they’re not killing pigs anymore for home consumption. All that’s done at slaughterhouses, and they’re onto doing other things now. And not only that, but if you look at the size of the family, like the 2,000 pounds of sausage that we made that day, I mean do you know how many pigs you’d have to kill to get that much sausage? I mean that’s a lot. So I think the pure volume has a lot to do with it, too—just that you can't keep up with it and—and then also now what’s really the point for them to do that when they can just order up 1,000-pounds of pork meat? That sure is a lot easier than killing ten—five pigs, whatever you’d have to do to get that kind of meat. So it’s changed, but it’s changed, I think, in ----- How did you develop your recipe that you use [at Cochon]? Mine? Mine I just kind of, you know, from my memory of different types of boudin I kind of tried to recreate what I liked. And I don’t use MSG. I have once or twice just to check it out, and I can tell it has MSG in it, and so I don’t really—I think with sausage it works a lot better, MSG, but I don’t think with boudin it’s very necessary. But mine was a process, you know. When I first started doing it, I didn’t really ask anyone how they made it. And I braised the pork with it with all the onions and seasonings. I put it in the oven and braised it. And it was good but it wasn’t quite like the boudin I grew up with. So I forgot who I—I actually went down to Steve Zaunbrecher’s store in Basile [Louisiana] and watched him and then realized from going to different places that nobody braises it; everybody boils it in water, not chicken stock. Nobody uses chicken stock. They might use bouillon for a few things and we’ll talk about that, I guess, with gumbo, but everybody boils it. So I’m like, well, what’s the difference you know? So I tried Now let’s talk a little bit about—or a lot about your culinary experience and how that translates into what you’re doing now here in New Orleans. I think that what—what we do here is, you know, it’s a very classic bistro style restaurant. Or Herbsaint is. And Cochon is just something completely new. I mean I can't—I don’t really have anything to compare it to. It was like Cochon, in particular, was a very interesting concept to put together because we didn’t want to make it catchy and like old-fashioned like ice water in Mason jars and red and white checkered tablecloth kind of [place]? But we didn’t want to make it too modern or too over the top either. I mean basically, what I wanted to do with Cochon is cook the food I grew up with just like really—that—those flavors and—and those concepts that, you know, like my granddad’s cooking and the sausage making and the boudin, just to really have that flavor and that depth in a restaurant. But we are in New Orleans, downtown—a lot of people coming here. I wanted it to be something that straddled that line of old world and new world, you know, but mostly keeping the food in the old world and keeping the design of the restaurant a little more contemporary, just so that you have a more upbeat energetic metropolitan feel, which is, again, like I said, straddling that line is—it’s a fine line to not go over…And the thing is, it’s like the food in here, too, it’s new because it’s old because nobody is doing old food anymore. And I’m sure a lot of people are but there’s the whole trend with new modern, what to do next, where to go from here. And for me, it’s about going back, you know. It’s about butchering your own meats; it’s about using different parts, about curing our own meats. When we started here at Herbsaint years ago making our own bacon and making the guanciale [cured Italian bacon made from pig’s cheeks] for the spaghetti dish, and we’re making salamis and we cure our own fish, if we’re going to do salt cod, and we started butchering pigs and lambs here whole. And now Cochon, we get whole pigs there, and now we’re at a point now where we’re starting to talk to farmers about growing certain pigs, so it’s growing, you know, and it’s—and again, this is all going back to an old world way of cooking and not the new way. ----- But it’s nice to see the Zaunbrechers are still doing it. And that’s my next thing that I really want to do is I want to go down there and kill something and then do it from the start—just to experience what an all-day process of doing something like from the first step to the table, you know. It’s something that I’ve never gotten to do. But they’ve done it their whole lives. They don’t eat at restaurants. You know, when they want dinner, they go kill it. Can you talk about what that means socially, too, to the members of your family? And then what it also means for the men to get together and make Well I think it’s a communal effort, obviously. And being that they’re all German, it’s a very get-it-done kind of process. There’s not a lot of goofing off. I mean there’s a few jokes thrown back and forth but, for the most part, it was a very impressive display of efficiency. I mean I just was blown away. I mean you start out with one group that all cuts and as soon as you’re like a certain percentage through, four of them break off and start grinding, and then they just keep moving to different areas but socially, it’s just like it’s something they do and it—you know, and it’s sad because talking to them, it sounds like it might be the last generation that does that. There was one kid there that was about eighteen years old, and the rest of them were, you know, mid to late 50s, and they’re all concerned that that’s going to be it. In that large of a family with eighty-some grandchildren, is there anyone who has an interest in reviving the hog killing—the boucherie tradition—even around the holiday or something that’s a more annual event? Not really, not that I gathered. I mean they don’t really think about it that way. I mean and that’s—and that’s the thing that’s—that’s hard to explain to people. Like I would never have been able to see the side of that country and that area if it weren't for me being family. You know?...But they’re not—you know, they’re—they’re different from the French part of the culture in the fact that I think they’re a little more reserved—or some of them are—and so like I was talking with JW about rice, and he was complaining about rice, “The price is down, and you can't get what you used to for it.” And I’m like, “Well, have you tried like slapping some sort of specific label on it or saying it’s Louisiana rice?” And they’re like, you know, don’t know what I’m talking about. ----- Do you think anything you have on the menu at Cochon is a nod to Crowley or people could recognize as being from that area? Well, I mean, I think the boudin, I mean the—one of the things, I’ll just tell you real quick that I was worried about that with restaurant, too, was lima beans, greens, we can get this at home. But that’s from that area because people still do ----- Is there’s anything you’d like to end on, either regarding boudin or gumbo or your Cajun heritage that you’d like to share? Yeah, I would just, like I said, I just find myself where I am right now with my age and my kids really appreciating a lot more my background and my culture and the culture that we have, and the importance of preserving it, you know. It’s just one of those things you have always taken for granted, like it’s just the way it is and it’s never going to change. But I have seen signs that things are changing and—and I’m glad that I’m going to write a book about it. And I have two kids that hopefully will—will understand where they came from one day. I mean I named my son Nicholas after Nicholas Zaunbrecher and, you know, that they will have that culture. And I don’t wish this business on my kids by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m—I’m almost to the point where I’m going to demand that they learn how to cook some of these dishes just so that they carry it on and that this—this food doesn’t go away—that it doesn’t become processed and—and cheapened. And hopefully, with the cookbook and through my children, I can really preserve it in some way. But I think we’ve got a lot of family members that can carry that on, too. So but, like I said, it’s just really, really important, and it’s really a special thing in my life to know that I can drive out tomorrow to Cajun country and eat at JW’s house and—and visit with them and go pull crawfish out of the rice fields, and it’s a very cool thing. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Home | Introduction | Interactive Map | Oral Histories | About & Contact
|
Cochon & Herbsaint
Coming soon! Listen to this 
and that’s pretty much all they still do over there. It’s a long history of rice farmers and now, of course, they’re farming crawfish and they make sausage and boudin—not for sale. Well, a couple of them do it for—have a store. But for the most part it’s done for personal consumption for the families. They are big families. 
it’s never so much a meal as it is a snack or just something that you eat, you know. I’ve got to be really careful because I can eat boudin. I have to make a real good effort to stop eating it because, for some reason, it doesn’t like fill me up. [Laughs] 
an interesting way. I mean, like I said, I think the difference in what makes boudin special is how much liquid goes in it, you know. Everyone has a percentage liver—it’s either half, a quarter, or none, you know. I think mine is a quarter. The one I make is a quarter. But if you’ve ever seen the machines that turn the boudin, I think the amount of time it spends in there has a lot to do with it. I mean when I make my boudin, when it first gets put together it’s loose, and it’s tempting not to put anymore liquid in it, but it has to look kind of wet and loose because once you churn it—and that’s what these machines do. They have like a combine that churns it; it starts to break the rice up. And I’ve done it by hand before, so I can actually sit there and watch it happen. And you stir and stir and stir and then it starts to get that—meats start to break out and the starch comes out of the rice, and it gives it a certain texture. And everybody that I know from that area is—has very specific things they like and dislike about boudin—how wet it is, how dry it is, and it’s just different. Some people go, “Oh, I don’t like that.” And everybody knows all the boudin, too. You can talk about each one, and they go, “I don’t know. I don’t like theirs. It’s a little too wet for me.” Or, “No, that one has too much liver.” And everyone has an opinion. I mean Bubba Frey’s, I think, is the best. It’s got the right consistency of moisture in it, the pork is broken up, and he uses a dull blade, so the pork gets kind of smashed a little bit. I mean he has very specific ways—when—when do you put the green onions in, when do you put the onions in? Are the onions cooked, or are the onions raw? And that’s something I—you know, I cook mine but he puts his in raw, and they push it through the grinder. So all those things, I mean it’s amazing to me how a dish with what—four ingredients, maybe—has so many different variations, but it really is four ingredients anyway you cut it you know. It’s pork, rice, water, and onions, and maybe liver—so maybe five and your spices of course. But I don’t think Bubba uses too much red spice at all; his is really white. It’s real white-looking boudin, which I like about it a lot. It’s got a more pronounced like white and black pepper flavor than a muddled red paprika, garlic powder kind of thing.
that. I boiled it, and it makes all the difference in the world. It changed the texture; it changed the flavor; you get a better stock out of boiling it. Like I said, you would think that slow braising it would make—bring out most of the flavor that way but it—it—for some reason, it doesn’t. And then I realized you can't overcook it; it’s got to be—have some texture left to it, so you can't boil it until it’s falling apart. You have to boil it until it’s just done, so that when it grinds, it still holds some texture, and then it breaks out in the rice, you know. And then, of course, I learned about stirring and breaking that and the different seasonings and experimenting with how much liver to put in. So we did different stages of, you know, half, third, quarter, none, you know, just all the different things. I made it without liver and it’s like, well, I think it needs liver just kind—just from tasting and trial and error. And I think the recipe we have now, I’ve tested it now seven, eight times and it’s definitely, I think, the one I like the best.
sausage just from a social perspective.
eat like that over there. So when they come here and they’re like, “Well I can get this at home, why do I have to pay for it?” But you know some of the things, the greens, the lima beans, I think, you still see a lot of that going on—black-eyed peas, but I haven’t seen a rabbit and dumplings in anyone’s house in a long time.
