Interactive Map | Oral Histories | About & Contact | More Trails...
 |
--- BOUDIN TRAIL PLACES Coleman's Sausage & Specialty Meats Eunice Superette & Slaughter House BOUDIN TRAIL PEOPLE |
Peltier’s Specialty Meats “The first time I ate a burrito I freaked out, but red boudin was normal.” – Brent Peltier When Brent Peltier was growing up in New Iberia, his Cajun father made boudin at home for the family, using a bull horn to stuff the mixture into casings. They would eat the boudin either by the link or in po-boys. Brent also watched his father make cracklins, cutting the pork bellies by hand and distributing the finished batch throughout the neighborhood. It was somewhat of a natural progression, then, when Brent got his first job, as a teenager, in a meat market. He later worked for twenty-two years at Winn Dixie, before striking out on his own at Peltier’s Specialty Meats. Brent modeled the boudin at Peltier’s after his dad’s recipe—long-grain rice, plenty of vegetable seasonings, pork liver—though his main source of income at the shop comes from the meat case and the specialty products that he prepares from the slaughtered animals that customers bring to him. Deer, elk, moose, buffalo, bear, hogs—Brent turns these into sausages, patties, steaks, salami, tamales, jerky, and anything else the customer requests. At the time of this interview, his payroll consisted of all family members, including his wife, daughter, and nephew. Brent considers that the best part of owning his own business. “I don't have to go home to see them,” he says. NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here. Subject: Brent Peltier, boudin maker --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Wednesday, July 13, 2008. I’m in New Iberia, Louisiana at Peltier’s Meat Market. Could I get you to say your name and--and your birth date for me, and how you make your living? Brent Peltier: Brent Peltier. May 7, 1964. I own the meat market and butcher shop. You were telling me earlier that you worked in grocery stores for a long time. Right, I worked for Winn Dixie for twenty-two years, and also a local grocery store from when I was fourteen to seventeen. And at that point early on, were you also working with meat? Yes, made boudin, uh-hmm, and wrapped meat. I didn’t cut the meat there. So you grew up here? Correct. Was it just happenstance that you wound up in that industry or did you have family members there? My dad was a butcher when he was in high school, and also after high school, and then he left into the electrical field, but I ended up working in a grocery store and liked it. --- Tell me a little bit about the process of developing your own boudin recipe. The recipe came from my dad. My dad made it. It was our family recipe; that’s the way it, you know—just more or less kept the same recipe. A few things had to be changed, but not much. And so would your dad make boudin at home when you were growing up? Yes. Would you have a boucherie at home or would he just go buy pork? Just go buy the meat at the store and just make it at home. Mostly Boston butt and pork liver. What would be the occasion of his making boudin at home? A reason to drink beer. [Laughs] That’s it; you know, just to have fun. Everything was done by hand—no, no electrical equipment. How would he stuff it? With a bull horn. When you were working at Winn Dixie before you opened this place, were you making boudin at home? Yes, I was making it at home and that was—I probably make it about every three or four months, and we’ll run out. Can you tell me a little bit about your recipe? It’s taking—I use Boston butts and I—with pork liver—and ball it and make it. When (the pork) is cooked just take it out and you grind it with vegetables—your onions, you bell peppers, celery, parsley—and then mix it with your rice, your broth, and then stuff it into he hog casing. What kind of rice do you use? Long-grain, short-grain? Long-grain. Yeah, long-grain. What do you prefer about it? The texture. I just find it has—gives it a better texture. Are there customers who come in who won't eat the liver? A few—not many. But this--this is an old recipe. People who want an old-fashioned boudin know that we have that. So how much do you go through in a day? The days—varies. You know, you might sell 100 pounds one day and the next--next day you might only sell 10. It just depends on the weather, and I guess if people are hungry for it or not. Every two to three days, we normally make up—normally it’s about a 250-300-pound batch. So when you were growing up…would you mostly just eat it by the link or did--did ya’ll cook with it? We made sandwiches with it, or just ate it in the car coming home. Put it between two slices of bread or on a po-boy bun—French bread. ---- What are the advantages and the disadvantages of--of working for a place like Winn Dixie and then owning your own meat market? The advantage is everything you do you can, you know--you can experiment more; you know your hands aren’t tied. The disadvantage is you don't know if you’re going to make money from one day to the next. You know, you have a lot of expenses. Is that your family working here? My wife and my daughter. My other daughter was working with us but she’s going to college, so she moved away. And my little niece was working with us, and then she’s also going to college now so she got--got a job where she can put in more hours—more evening hours—when she’s out of school. So it’s just family, and (I) have my wife’s nephew, he’s working with us too. He’s a freshman in high school and he makes sausage and boudin with us. Tell me a little bit about the other sausages and prepared foods that you make here. We serve plate lunches daily and do all kinds of fresh sausages: green onion, turkey, chicken, rib-eye. We just, you know we take the meat and grind it and add different seasonings and vegetables to it and just put it inside the same casing you make boudin with. Bacon-wrapped chicken breast. We wrap it with a cream cheese or jalapenos, or just plain. We also have the bacon-wrapped thighs. And we do a stuffed catfish, stuffed potatoes. You know, we do it with crabmeat or shrimp, bacon, broccoli and cheese, butter and cheese. We just do different things. People ask us to—if we could do—if we can do things for them, and we just experiment with it and we find out it’s good and we call them up and let them know we have something for them. And they’ll come and try it, and they like or not you know. Have you had anything really strange or really delicious that somebody has asked you to do that you were surprised by? Made some deer sausage for a guy. He wanted to put spinach and shredded…Swiss cheese in his sausage. And it was kind of strange. I did it for him and took a link and we cooked it and it was pretty good. And then one of the guys that we buy—one of our distributors that we buy from, the guy he’s a real health fanatic, and he wanted to know if there is anything else he could put with his deer sausage that would actually add fat to it without being unhealthy. So I said, well the only thing I can think of was avocado. So we added avocado to his deer sausage and it was pretty good. So yeah, you can explain that a little bit? I see on your sign that you do deer processing. What does that mean? People go out and hunters go out and kill the deer, and a lot of them don't know how to process their deer. They’ll bring it to us to cut, wrap, and make sausage; deer patties; salami, jerky; beef steaks—deer steaks; tamales; whatever you can think of—bologna. Whatever you can think of you can make with anything we can make that deer out of. Do people bring any other game animals in? Oh yeah. We did buffalo, hogs, elk, bear, any--any kind of game really. What do you make with people’s bears? Jerky is the only thing we’ve—they brought it in just to make jerky. We have a smoker. We just—a homemade smoker we smoke it in. What about the cracklins? Did you do that at your previous job? No, we did it at home. My dad always did—cooked cracklings just basically—about every Sunday he would sit down with a pot full of pork bellies and make cracklins. He’d buy the whole bellies and slice them into cubes himself and then put them in a pot of water and let them boil ‘til they made grease, and then he’d start frying them. That’s a lot of work. Yeah, that would take—the process he used would take probably about four hours and he would only end up—he’d start out with probably five pounds of cracklins and he’d end up with a pound and a half or two pounds. He gave it to the whole neighborhood. Now over here, to cut down the time I start it in the lard from the previous cooking that I’ve done, which cuts the cooking time down and it—I can have cracklings done in about two hours. You just keep cooking and stirring, and when the cracklins float you pull them out and then when they—you let them cool. When they become room temperature you turn the grease back on and let it get to about 400 degrees. Throw them back in. And once they—you throw them back in, the skin will start to pop, and then now you have some—skin. You can eat the skin. It becomes real crunchy like a pork rind. I’ve never heard of that boiling in water step. You know, everyone I’ve talked to so far does what you do: they do both batches in the lard. My dad does it from the old way. When you killed a hog when he was growing up, you had no lard to start it in, so you had to start it in water to be able to boil the--the lard out of it, to be able to fry it. And you just keep cooking it; the water evaporates as it’s cooking, and while it’s evaporating you’re making lard. Can you tell a difference in flavor between the two styles? I can't. It’s—you can tell it with the different cooks, but I wouldn’t say between—if I was to cook it with water versus starting in oil it would be—probably be about the same flavor. It would just be maybe a different taste if my dad was cooking it. Is there an average amount of cracklin’ that you make a day? We probably make—probably about 50 pounds. We start out with 50 pounds of bellies a day. And as you can see, we empty them and we’re trying to cook some more. Do you have one of those—the automatic stirrer things? No, everything is done by hand. ---- You mentioned earlier making platters for the oil field workers. You have some oil field companies that come in and they’ll buy it for their customers where we’ll make breakfast platters with bacon, egg, and cheese with biscuits; we’ll do—cook some of the bacon-wrapped chicken breasts and bake that; smoke some Boston butts and mix it with —make pulled pork po-boys. Just different things for them every morning just to—they can go out and feed people, their customers. These are people working for the oil fields, or like salespeople? Salespeople selling to the oil fields. Do they buy boudin also? Oh yeah. They’ll buy—sometimes you know you’ll sell 50 pounds to one. Like they’re having a big thing for oil field companies and they’ll--they’ll call and say, I need 50 pounds for Saturday morning. You know you sell a lot too like for funerals, for people coming and eating because it’s a quick easy meal, something you can just wrap and go. ---- Is there a certain time of day when it’s—when boudin is in higher demand than others? I think right now between—after lunch until about 4:00 or 5 o'clock. In he heat of the day you don't want to eat the rice. What about like early in the morning? Do you get that at all? Yeah, we’ll--we’ll get like school kids heading to school stop in and get a soft drink and a link of boudin, or people heading to work looking for something other than an Egg McMuffin…When the kid leaves the house you’re not going to know what he’s doing. [Laughs] ---- So do you still eat a lot of boudin now that you’re making it every day? Hmm, not like I used to. Now I can't eat it like I used to because of health. I still cheat. That’s the problem out here. I hear that from everyone. [Laughs] It wears on you after a while. Yeah. [Laughs] What about red boudin? Did you know that at all growing up—blood boudin? My dad’s brother, my Uncle Kurtis, he made red boudin occasionally and we you know—but I don't know of any operation other than they have one in Abbeville I think is still making it. But that’s the only one I know of around here that’s still doing it because of the bacteria and the problems that can occur from making it. Did you like it when your uncle would make it? Oh yeah, it was good. I really did like it. It didn’t freak you out as a kid? No, because you grew up with it. It wasn’t something that was—the first time I ate a burrito I freaked out, but red boudin was normal. [Laughs] When was the first time you ate a burrito? I think about seven. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
Home | Introduction | Map | Oral Histories | About & Contact |
