|  T-BOY’S
SLAUGHTERHOUSE
T-Boy Berzas
T-Boy’s Slaughterhouse
2228 Pine Point Rd.
Ville Platte, LA 70586
(337) 468-3333
“One of the things that I always say that makes
a big difference [in boudin] is fresh meat. When you get some meat
that’s been killed in Kansas City somewhere and get it shipped
in a box, and you’re not sure how old it is and so forth,
your boudin is not going to taste as good as some that’s been
killed and de-boned and cooked and put in boudin right away. It
makes a large difference in the flavor of the boudin.”
– T-Boy Berzas
Paul Nathan Berzas is the youngest of nine children.
All his life he’s been known as T-Boy, a Cajun nickname for
the youngest in the brood. Growing up, T-Boy, along with his brothers
and sisters, pitched in on the family farm. They harvested rice,
picked soybeans, and slaughtered hogs, all of which they ate. When
T-Boy got older, he worked a variety of odd jobs in his hometown
of Mamou, including as a butcher at a meat market. In 1994 he had
the opportunity to purchase a local slaughterhouse that had gone
out of business. Today, T-Boy’s Slaughterhouse is the last
of its kind in Evangeline Parish. It’s the only place where
locals can bring animals for custom slaughtering. And it’s
the only place where a hog goes from the barn to boudin in only
about fifteen steps.
Listen to this 2-minute audio
clip of T-Boy Berzas talking about the last slaughterhouse in
Evangeline Parish. [Windows Media Player required. Go here
to download the player for free.]
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.
EDITED TRANSCRIPT
Subject: T-Boy Berzas
Date: October 11, 2006
Location: T-Boy’s Slaughterhouse – Mamou, LA
Interviewer: Amy Evans
---
Amy Evans: This is Amy Evans for the Southern Foodways
Alliance on Wednesday, October 11th 2006 and I am east of Mamou,
Louisiana, at T-Boy’s Slaughterhouse. And Mr. T-Boy, if you
would please state your full name and your birth date for the record,
please?
T-Boy Berzas: My full name is Paul Nathan Berzas, Jr. and I’m
known as T-Boy. My date of birth is July 15, 1968.
Can you tell me the story behind your nickname, T-Boy?
Well we were a big family of nine children, and I happened to be
the last one in the family born and they—and in French the
word tee means little, so and I was littlest one running around,
so they called me T-Boy. And that kind of stuck  to—with
it and I enjoy the name. Good Cajun name…My father was a farmer.
To raise nine kids, that’s something they had to do.
What did he farm?
He farmed rice, soybeans, and we had our own cattle and hogs, and
we butchered to feed the whole family. And then we farmed as a family,
and the kids would take care of the—the small, what you call
that—with the onion tops, green onions, purple hull peas—anything
they could sell to stores locally around here. Kind of like the
old days, the children would work that, so that they can sell that
to make their own money.
Can you talk a little bit about what it was like growing up and
growing up with the livestock and slaughtering your own meat and
all that?
Well when we grew up, I was the youngest one. It kind of figured
out that it would—did our own slaughtering at home. As I was
young and growing up, we started hiring slaughterhouses to take
care of ours, but as I was very young and—and the rest of
my brothers, they would take their own animals, and we’d kill
it and the friends would come over and help and they would put those—give
them each a share of meat to put up and we always had fresh meat.
We never were short of meat.
How far does your family go back in this area?
Oh, Lord, I’m not sure of the idea on that. We’ve been
here for—well the land that my daddy and them own right now
were homesteaded by his grandmother, so it’s a good while.
That’s two, three, four—that’s four generations,
for sure.
---
So when did you open the slaughterhouse here?
I think it’s about eleven-and-a-half years ago. I used to
work for—started working with the local meat market not far
from here. He trained me and was one of my cousins—a first
and third cousin—and he trained me how to cut a little bit
of the meat. And then I came to work for a guy that had a slaughterhouse
down the road here. He closed the building down and bought this
slaughterhouse, and then in the meantime his—his business
went down a little bit, maybe not managed just right but he taught
me a lot—lot of stuff. And he ended up closing it, and I went
to work somewhere else for a couple years. And then I saw it closed
for two or three years and I said, “I think I can do that.”
So I went ahead and got into it. And I had learned a lot in the
past, and I enjoyed it. So we opened it up, and we’re doing
very well now.
Did you start working right after [high] school, or did you go
to college?
No, we started working right afterwards. To be honest, I didn’t
graduate. We got married when we was young; Laurie and I and started
working right away in the farms, with the other people making a
little money and then—and then we—I did a lot of different
things. I went in the oil field; I rough-necked in the oil field
and went back to working with some farmers because I enjoyed it
so much—farming. And then I started in the meat business and—.
Well no, I had a spell where I went through four years of managing—about
three-and-a-half years of managing a furniture rent-to-own business,
and it gave me some managerial experience.
And when you started working in that first slaughterhouse, is
it something that you wanted to do and wanted to learn, or was it
just kind of like happenstance that you ended up working there?
It was just a good opportunity. I always did like to learn about
new things, and I always liked new tasks and enjoyed that, so it
was something new for me. And I enjoyed it when I started, and I
still enjoy it. But it wasn’t something I just went out for;
I kind of like took the job and enjoyed it once I learned it.
And what do you enjoy about it?
Well it’s not a real bad job, you know. You don’t have
to stand outside in the heat or freezing cold; most of the time
you’re inside. One of my favorite things is when I have time—because
as the owner and the worker, you don’t have time just to be
with the customers all the time—but to visit with the customers
when they come in, you know, give them a few minutes and satisfy
the customers is what I enjoy.
Can you talk about the culture of this area a little bit and
how, you know, there’s a lot of hunting and a lot of raising
of livestock and the culture that is behind the demand for slaughterhouses
here?
In the past we had several slaughterhouses in the parish [Evangeline
Parish]. I am the last slaughterhouse left in this parish and neighboring
don’t have any at all, so it—it’s kind of—was
a fitting tradition of getting your meats—raising your own
meat, killing them, and putting them in the freezer and feeding
your families with all the big supermarkets and so forth. They come
out and—. [Laughs] They come out and they—and they have
all these meats and the younger people were not educated as far
as where a piece of pork chop comes from. They think it comes from
a box; they don’t know it comes from a hog. So anyway, the
young people are not as educated, so the slaughtering kind of slacked
off in the past. And there’s not as many slaughterhouses like
they had in the past, but now the—there is still a demand
for it because they still have people raising their own cattle and
their own hogs and their tradition that they were raised with was
to eat fresh meat that they kill themselves. They know that it does
not have any kind of chemicals and stuff in the meat so it’s
still a tradition, and we still stay pretty busy with it.
Are there still some folks who are raising their own livestock
that process it themselves?
There’s a few—not as many no more because it’s
just so much easier to have it done where you have a facility that
makes sure your meat is guaranteed, as far as the cleanliness and
so forth. There’s still some that do, like when they go in
the wild game, as far as for deer, they’ll skin their own
deer, gut their own deer, and skin it and some will cut it themselves—de-bone
it or they bring it to us. We do a lot of deer during deer season
and a lot of deer sausage and just different things with deer we
do.
Can you talk about where you get—where you
get your animals and how that works?
Well like this guy right here was probably dropping off a hog that
he raised himself. We’re going to kill it, cut it, possibly
wrap it, or he may wrap it himself. My animals I buy straight from
feedlots. In other words, there’s hogs and calves that—that
people raise and they put them straight in feed-lots where they
eat just feed, and it makes a better meat, so I buy directly from
them in lots of, you know, 20, 30, 40 sometimes as I need them.
So what might be your schedule of slaughtering hogs when you’re
processing meat?
Well we have—our government controls a lot of our money flow,
so the beginning of the month we have more money flow, so we kill
more hogs and calves at the beginning of the month and as we need.
We kill only as we need. We—we may get thirty of them and
leave them in the pen and kill ten, fifteen the first week, you
know, ten, fifteen the second week, and then a few the third week
and so forth. The same thing with the calves. As we need, we kill.
That way it’s fresh. But we keep them handy in the pen under—under
feed and we can kill them as we need.
Is there an average weight of the hogs and calves that you like
to get?
My calves, I like to get them about 750—750-pounds average.
I find that they’re just getting—just getting off of
sucking on the mother which is a real good high protein milk and
stuff and there have been in what we call a dry lot for 60 to 90
days, so that they can make the marbling into the meat in those—those
60 to 90 days and the same thing with the hogs. I like them about
approximately 180—180-pounds to 200-pounds, where they’re
still young and tender. They don’t have too much fat on them.
That way we can—because around here the heritage is to leave
that skin on the outside and without a lot of fat but with the skin
on it to give it some extra flavor.
---
Now have most slaughterhouses always had a retail element where
they made their own sausage and boudin and all that?
When I was growing up, yes, most of them have. When I was younger,
almost everybody had their own slaughterhouse, and there were some
kin and some friends that had their own types of slaughtering that
they would do in the backyard. And they wouldn’t retail it,
but they would take it and share it with their friends. And you’d
use it as soon as you could because you didn’t have air-condition
back then.
So when you first started working in the first slaughterhouse
meat market where you worked, did you also learn how to smoke sausage
and make boudin and all that then?
Yes. I had some familiarity and, like I said, whenever I was younger,
the—my parents and them had started using the slaughterhouse
as I grew up. But I learned a lot with the first guy that I had
worked for in the first slaughterhouse, and that’s when I
learned how to smoke, how the losses were, just in general just
a lot about meat from the start to finish, from live until it was
sold over the counter.
And how about the boudin? Is that something that was your family’s
or that you developed on your own?
Well that goes back to a couple of the friends that I had that I
worked with—the first job I had and the second job in the
meat, which was with the slaughterhouse. I learned a lot with them
as far as what boudin is made out of and how it works as far as
the quantity of rice and meat and onions and so forth—ratio.
So whenever I ate boudin and I thought I wanted to change it, I
knew exactly—I knew rough about—a rough figure about
how boudin was made, what it was made out of. And I wanted to change
things to my taste, so I changed different things to my taste, and
that’s when I called it my recipe.
And so I wonder what, to you, what is your taste for boudin and
what do you think makes a good boudin?
Well, of course, we have a lot of different parts to boudin that
makes a large difference. One of the things that I always say that
makes a big difference is fresh meat. When you get some meat that’s
been killed in Kansas City somewhere or—and get it shipped
in a box and you’re not sure how old it is and so forth, your
boudin is not going to taste as good as some that’s been killed
and de-boned and cooked and put in boudin right away. It makes a
large difference in the flavor of the boudin. Another thing that
I find that’s very important is the spices. We call it seasoning
over here. The right salt, pepper, and the other spices makes a
big difference. And, of course, I use the T-Boy’s [brand]
spices in there. And the right equation of onions and onion tops
and parsley and your correct equation of the liver—the pork
liver makes a good—big difference and just putting the right
equation together really makes it good.
Can you talk a little bit more about the liver because Mr. [John]
Saucier yesterday was saying that it’s important to keep it
moist. But some people, from what I learn, like to—like to
have a really liver-y and some people not? Is that a personal preference
or is that something that you think is a little more specific for
a good boudin?
Well you have different types of Cajuns, I guess we’d call
it. And some people prefer a boudin with not as much liver. You
know, it goes back to some of these people around here may have
stomach trouble or something and liver is a little hard on the stomach
troubles and so forth, so they may not—they may have a tendency
to lean away from the boudin with liver. But the majority of the
old Cajun boudin has the liver in it and a good bit of it. They
used to even use what they called the whole set of organs as far
as the liver, the spleen, the kidney, what—the heart—all
that was put in it in the older days. But now boudin has come such
a long ways and has become a—a large-scale—sales that
we can't find enough organs for it. So the liver, we end up using
the liver because there’s way more liver per set of organs
than pound-wise than the other parts.
And talking about the old ways, do you have an idea of the history
of boudin?
I listen to a guy on TV before, like I said, they started this before
I was young—when I was young, they started way before me.
I listened to a guy on TV that—and it made some sense that
a lot of the blacks in the old days started a lot of these Cajun
products—boudin, andouille, smoked ham hocks—a lot of
different odds and ends that may have been bony or something that
they—the white people that would hire these black people to
help them, the white people would take the pretty meats and leave
the scrappier meats, which the boudin has—the casing on the
outside is actually a gut that we clean and the inside, the organs,
the bigger wheels didn’t want to mess with that. And so they
used a lot of these things and that’s—and I was taught
that those people started a lot of this. And we kept it in our Cajun
heritage and Creole heritage around here. So I think that’s
where it started from, is what I understand.
---
And so being, like you said, one of the last slaughterhouses
in this parish and in the area, but now you’ve generated a
reputation for good boudin and cracklin’s and sausage and
what not, what do you think about that?
Well when I first started, we—my wife and I—we started
with nothing when we opened the place and as far as—we have
come a long ways in life and money-wise. We’re way much more
better off than we were when we first started. And being that there’s
no slaughterhouses around it helped us to hang in there and keep
more business than normally, if they had five or six of them. So
it helped us out a lot being the only one.
But as far as producing food, instead of just being a slaughterhouse,
and actually making food that you’re becoming known for, like
your boudin, especially, since you’re in Louisiana Life and
all that. How does it feel to be recognized for your boudin?
Well I feel it’s a real big honor. And especially when we
saw it in the Louisiana Life Magazine and being invited to do this
with you, it—we have been growing and we even opened a second
store, and we’re still growing very much, so I feel it’s
a very big honor that we have a good quality product and we’re
starting to spread out more with it, and I think we can grow a lot
more.
And your second store is in Eunice, is that right?
Yes, we’re located in Eunice. We’re just starting it
out. There’s about approximately six months since we’ve
opened, and we had a nice guy that was kind enough to rent us a
spot in the corner of his truck stop, and he’s giving us a
big start and now we’re looking for a place of our own as
we speak and—which is good because we have outgrown the little
corner we have in there. And we decided once we get into our own
place, we think we’ll blossom very big.
When I was talking to [your daughter] Katie yesterday, we were
talking about that store and that people in Eunice are starting
to get a taste for your products now. Is that kind of difficult
to overcome what some people, who are used to eating boudin in Eunice
and you coming in with boudin and you’re only like eight miles
away, but is there a taste kind of difference that you have to accommodate?
Well being only, like you said, eight to ten miles away, I think
it’s helped me a lot to get it started over there because
they already know my quality, and when they hear my name they know
it’s a high-quality product. Some of have tasted it before,
so when we did move to Eunice and started putting the boudin, we
had a few customers ready to buy with us and those customers—and
they come in and we talk to them. We ask them—tell everybody
else and spread the word because word of mouth is the best. You
can buy radio advertisements, which we did—newspaper advertisements.
But word of mouth, people that have tasted the quality, is what
helped spread the word and—and that’s what helps it
to grow. But yes, changing—people that have been used to eating
their boudin that is in Eunice and ours is a little bit different.
It does take a little while to change them over but after the word
of mouth has spoken, you know—one person to another and tells
them it’s good and they try it a couple times, they get hooked
on it.
Can you explain how yours is a little different?
I really don’t know what they have in theirs, and I don’t
want to cut down any of the businesses. I know that I keep the freshest
and the best products in my boudin and I’m not talking about
Eunice people, but I know there’s a lot of stores in Louisiana
that use boudin for disposal; they’ll put their older meats
and stuff, and it makes a difference in the quality of the taste.
I mean and that’s why we’re selling more than a lot
of people are right now.
Can you describe your boudin? Like what it looks like and smells
like and kind of the texture of the casing and all those things
that people talk about when they talk about boudin?
In describing the boudin, as far as this—see, as far as what
I believe it tastes and feels and looks like, I feel that my boudin
has a good casing, as far as we cook it properly to where it—the
casing does break, so that you can eat it and not have to just take
the meat—the stuffing out of it. The smell is just—it
gets to you; you can't do without it. That’s why I eat so
much of it. I keep smelling it all day long. And as far as the taste,
I find it—I find it very good. We find that we have the right
amount of rice, so that it’s not too meaty and the rice is—the
texture of the rice is not coarse so that it’s—it’s
flaky like long-grain rice coming out of—falling off your
plate or something and we have a good medium-grain rice that we
use that absorbs the flavoring, the broth that we put in there,
and not too mushy and not too hard and we put the right amount of
liver, so you have that great liver taste to it. And it’s
not really a liver taste, but it adds the flavor to it. And we use
the T-Boy’s Season-All in it, which is just the right amount
of salt, red pepper, and black pepper in it and a certain amount
of onions that are put in there raw when we stuff it, so that when
you cook it, it’s cooked in it very little and it still gives
 that—that
onion spice flavor. And I like it a lot, and a lot of other people
like it, so we’re selling a lot of it.
---
Do some people eat your casing, or do they just push it out of
the casing?
The majority of the people eat the casing. Sometimes when we—like
on a Saturday when we sell—we cook so many pounds consecutively
and it doesn’t get a chance to stay in that rice pot that
we have here that we set it in, sometimes it does not get a chance
to sit for a few minutes and the casing doesn’t break just
right at times—right when it comes out of the pot it sits
a few minutes, it breaks easier. So some will not eat the casing,
but the majority of the people eat it.
And yesterday, when Katie was serving the boudin, she cuts it
with the scissors. How long have y’all been doing that, cutting
links like that?
Well we’ve been doing it since the day we opened. I learned
that from the guy that used to own that slaughterhouse before me.
And 90-percent of the people in—or 99-percent of the people
in Louisiana use a knife, and this is so much easier, so much more
sanitary; you don’t cut your paper underneath and it gives
a good clean cut across the boudin, and it’s much easier and
faster because we serve so many people, we have to keep a good pace
up.
How much boudin do you think you sell a day?
Well here—just in Mamou we sell 150 to 175-pounds a day; in
Eunice we—there’s only six months we’re opened
and we’re already selling 100 to 125-pounds a day. That is
on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday; on Friday the Eunice
doubles and Mamou doubles and on Saturday Eunice and Mamou at least
triple and in the winter months sometimes quadruple—up to
four times as much. In Mamou—in Eunice we haven’t had
a winter month yet, but it’s coming; it’s going to do
the same.
And are you selling all fresh boudin, or is some of it frozen
that people take with them?
The majority of the boudin that we sell are fresh, as far as we
make it fresh every morning, so we sell it fresh like that. Some
will call in and request it, and we’ll vacuum pack and freeze
it for them, so the majority of it it’s either fresh-cooked,
fresh made raw, or sometimes we’ll—what we do is we
have we call it a microwaved boudin; we cook it, vacuum pack it,
and freeze it in two links per pack so that people can just grab
it and go home with it and throw it in the microwave either frozen
or defrosted, seven to eight minutes they’re eating hot boudin.
And on Saturday I know you do boudin balls. Can you talk about
that?
Yeah, we started with the boudin balls, and it’s been climbing
slowly but surely. We didn’t start—about a year ago
with them and it’s growing a little bit at a time and it’s
a different taste. It has, you know, your crust on the outside from
the batter and a fried boudin is a little bit different than boiled
boudin, and it’s pretty good.
---
You were talking about in winter you’re selling a lot of
boudin. Is there a time of day when you sell a lot more?
Not necessarily. It’s throughout the day. You know, you have
a breakfast rush and a dinner rush and then sometimes a mid-afternoon
snack rush. But in general, the bulk of the boudin is just sold
throughout the day. And in the wintertime, the reason you sell a
lot more in the wintertime is first of all because of the cooler
weather, people—a lot more people can eat pork. In the summertime
they don’t eat as much pork, and they go out in the hot sun
and it might give me a little heartburn. But in the wintertime we
also have the holidays and you have out of town people coming in
and they load up on either the raw boudin or the microwave boudin
also to bring home, so it increases the sales of the boudin.
---
Back [behind the retail store] you have your little barn—stable
area. How many animals can you hold in there at one time?
We can put quite a few. Normally—let me see if I can guess
this now. We could probably put right at about 125 head of hogs,
if we were just putting just hogs or pigs in there that are regular
sized hogs. Calves, we’d have to put less. Of course, they
take more room. But normally we keep on stock—I keep about
six or eight calves for myself and anywhere from thirty to forty—thirty
to forty hogs for myself, and I still have room for custom animals,
people that raise their own. They’ll bring them in for me
to kill them and process them.
---
Do you think that this area with the Cajun Mardis Gras and the
traditions that are still intact in this rural area, do you think
those will stick around for a long time?
Oh, yes, it will stick around for a long time. And because, like
anything else, some things start to fade out, and when things start
to fade down a little bit, everybody started looking it and saying,
“We can't have this!” So everybody is promoting  Cajun
products, promoting Cajun music and all the different things that
Cajuns do, so it’s growing more now than ever.
---
Is there much of a kind of trade culture here, where people come
in and trade meat for sausage or services for food or anything?
Well not here, no—not now. In the olden days they would, you
know, trade in eggs for sugar or something they couldn’t grow
and so forth and so on. The hogs, they would raise some little pigs
and trade that in at the butcher shop. Now days you don’t
see any of that anymore.
---
Do you get many tourists through here who maybe have not had
boudin or cracklin’s or anything like that?
Especially around Mardis Gras and the other holidays we have a lot
of tourists, especially during Mardi Gras. They come in and they
don’t know what boudin is, and so we just tell them it’s
similar to a dirty rice that they have eaten in the past. But if
you tell them it’s inside of a gut casing they’re not
going to taste it. But this way you get them to taste it, and they
don’t realize what it is, and they enjoy it.
---
Do you feel like what you’re doing as a businessman day-to-day
is part of a traditional culture that should be maintained?
I feel I am taking a part because a lot of things we do here in—in
this area we donate things to different organizations around here—fire
departments, there’s five or six different organizations and
schools we donate to throughout the—throughout the year and
we help Hospice also. It’s a lot of different organizations
that are non-profit that God has blessed us with a good business
and—and so we, in turn, give back to our community as much
as we possibly can.
---
To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please
click here.
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