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Vincent Fontenot “Boudin here is a very, very important part [of our culture] because we eat it for breakfast. We eat it for lunch. We eat it for supper. It doesn’t matter, you can eat it any time of the day." – Vincent Fontenot When Vincent Fontenot’s parents moved from Louisiana to Texas following World War II so that Vincent’s father could work in the petro-chemical industry there, they couldn’t have guessed that their future son would turn into one of Acadiana’s greatest boosters and cultural preservationists. While Vincent grew up in Texas with his parents speaking Cajun-French at home, and while he visited Louisiana often as a boy and loved to eat boudin sausage, it wasn’t until he moved to Louisiana at the age of twenty-one that he really delved into his Cajun roots. At one point Vincent simultaneously operated a saloon in Eunice, had a Cajun band, and worked part-time for the National Park Service. Eventually he helped found the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center in Eunice, using many of his own belongings as artifacts to start the museum’s collection. He is now a ranger and educator at the Center, fielding visitors’ questions on every Cajun topic—from the Acadians’ exile from Nova Scotia in 1755, to why so few boudin outlets specialize in blood boudin these days. For the truly boudin-curious, Vincent even has tips on how to turn the sausage into a dip using Velveeta cheese. 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: Vincent Fontenot --- Sara Roahen: This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Thursday, June 19, 2008 and I’m in Eunice, Louisiana, with Mr. Fontenot. And I’m going to let you state your full name and your birth date, if you don’t mind, and if you could tell us your profession and where we are right now? I can hold this. Vincent Fontenot: Well my name is Vincent Fontenot, and I’m a United States National Park Ranger. And we’re here in Eunice, Louisiana, at Jean Lafitte National Historical Park and Preserve. This is the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center. And I was born March 9, 1948 in Pasadena, Texas. My parents are from here; my father is from Eunice. My mother is from Ville Platte; her last name was Veillon. My dad moved to Texas right after World War II to work in the petro-chemical plants. So I was born there are raised in a Cajun family in Texas. Talk about different. At what point did you move here? I moved to Louisiana when I was twenty-one years old, and I’ve been here ever since. I lived in New Orleans for about twelve years and came out here to Eunice, opened up Fontenot’s Main Street Lounge in Basile, Louisiana. I was approached by—in fact I was a co-founder of the Cajun French Music Association, and I was approached by the National Park Service to work with the Cajun French Music Association in a cooperative agreement to design and help facilitate this cultural center that we’re in. And then the Mayor of Eunice at that time, Curtis Joubert, invited me to join the Advisory Committee for the City of Eunice, so I was on two advisory committees to the National Park. And one day they said, “You know, in the near future we’re going to need a park ranger in Eunice,” and I jumped and hollered, “Hey, I know the guy; he’s right here.” So they hired me part time and—which it worked out perfect, you know. I had a saloon; I had a Cajun band; and I worked part-time for the National Park Service. And for the first four years before we built the center, my job was to collect the artifacts that we put in here. So the majority of the artifacts in our cultural center either was mine, my relatives or my personal friends, so everything in here means something very special to me. It’s interesting to me that—that you have become his ambassador of a culture that was yours by birth but not necessarily—wasn’t part of your life, really, until you were already an adult. Oh no, no, no. You have to understand, although we were in Texas, Cajuns in a foreign land tend to gather together. They meet, so in Houston there was several clubs and meetings and so forth that the Cajuns would get together. So my parents spoke French, but they would not speak French to us, the children. They would speak to each other in code; they thought it was a code, so we wouldn’t understand. And you do that to a kid that kid is going to learn what they’re saying. So I learned to speak French because my parents didn’t want me to learn to speak French. [Laughs] And in our neighborhood we were always different. Number one were Catholic, you know, in a Protestant area; we were Cajuns, that’s, you know, what kind of alien creatures are those? We spoke differently; we thought differently; and my friends didn’t eat the foods that we ate. We ate gumbo and we ate boudin, you know, jambalaya. My friends had never heard of these and they loved it. They loved it. [Laughs] So when you were growing up in Texas you said that you ate boudin. Was that boudin that was transported from here that someone sold there or that someone made at home? I remember the very first time I ate boudin, and we had a boucherie at a family—their name was Guidry, and it was cold. It was in December and it was one of the rare times that it snowed in the Houston area, and there might have been an inch of snow on the ground. And they brought this huge hog in there, you know, and killed the hog and started—they had a big table out there, and I was like five years old. My job was to clean the intestines. Talk about a crappy job. [Laughs] It was pretty bad. So we cleaned—that was—mostly children would do that at a boucherie—clean the intestines—because it was—it was a filthy job, but it was simple. And then they began grinding up the meat and, at that time, boudin was really made from the trash of the hog that you didn’t eat, like the sides of the head, anything, you know, the ankles, the feet. They would shred that meat off. And, as you’re probably aware today, it’s not trash meat, you know. This is made from pork bellies. This is the meat just above the ribs, so this is a choice cut of meat now that goes into boudin. But back then it wasn’t, it was just trash. And they’d grind it up and I’d saw them, you know, with the bell peppers and, excuse me, the green top onions, the white onions, parsley, the—salt, black pepper, red pepper, mixed all of this in and they had a machine for stuffing. It was a sausage that you would turn with your hand, turn by hand, and as they did it, they told me that years ago when they were young people, this is the people that was at the boucherie, would use a cow horn, and they’d put the intestine on the end of the—of course they cut the pointed end of the cow horn and they’d slide the intestine and the casing over it and then start packing meat into the horn and push it out. And at that time they said, “Oh, look how easy it is,” you know, “to turn rather than pack.” And today the method that they use, you know, with water pressure and the bladder and, you know, that sausage just shoots out of there, you know, a mile a minute. [Laughs] But when we made it, it was very slow and it was not an easy job. --- The Guidry’s boucherie, was that in Texas? Yeah, it was in a little town called Highlands, Texas, just outside of Houston on the way to Baytown. Did they make blood boudin? No, not at that time. I’ve eaten blood boudin, and from what I understand there’s only one commercial outlet that still makes it, and that’s the Best Stop in Scott, Louisiana; and I was talking to the owner about it and also Bubba Frey, who is going to be here. He’s our local celebrity in making boudin, and they both told me the same thing. The reason the commercial outlets don’t make red boudin or boudin rouge with blood is because, if you do make it, you must have an FDA inspector onsite right there with you. You must supply him with his own office, his own parking spot, and his own bathroom. So it’s very, very expensive if you want to make red boudin. And the reason the FDA inspector is there, from what they told me, is you cannot allow the blood to coagulate. You know, you have to be very, very careful when you’re dealing with blood. --- If somebody comes in here and asks you about the origins of boudin, what is your understanding about that and what would you tell them? Am I glad you asked that question. We do a lot of boudin food demonstrations on Saturday, and over the years I’ve learned it’s not just boudin sausage. We’ve discovered boudin balls, there’s also a boudin dip I just discovered this week with the boudin meat and Velveeta cheese. I haven't tried it yet. And what else is in that Charlene that dip that Miss Bercie was telling us about? Oh, I’ve forgotten—cream of celery, I believe. Cream of mushroom? She’s going to bring us the recipe. And then you get a Frito corn chip dip, and she said it is delicious. Yeah; the other one that I’ve discovered is a boudin in a puff pastry and you lay the meat out in a pan, and you cover it up with the pastry rolls, you know, that you buy in the grocery store that you know how you unroll them and lay them out and you cover the boudin with this pastry topping. You put it in the oven; you bake it—I’ll have to look because I don’t know the exact time—until it’s brown, and then you take it out and you take Steen’s Cane Syrup and drip it on top of that, and then you take Creole mustard and spread on top of that and it’s—. So it’s not just boudin, you know, there’s other recipes and other uses, but we’ve just got a brand new book in called Stir the Pot [Stir the Pot: The History of Cajun Cuisine by Marcelle Bienvenu], and we learned a lot from them. And, for one thing, people would ask us, “Where does the word boudin— where does that come from?” Everybody will go, “I don’t know. We just, you know, my daddy called it boudin and his daddy and his daddy.” Well we found out the—it comes from an archaic French word called bedaine—b-e-d-a-i-n-e—meaning the guts or the entrails. And then we also thought that boudin was, you know, relatively new, say 200 or 300 years old, maybe. You know, we weren't sure. Well the first appearance in documentary records is in 1268 A.D. So this practice has been going on for, let’s see, what is that—almost 800 years they’ve been making boudin. And it’s not just from the French. The French colonialism, you know, when they started colonizing, they spread this method to Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, the Antilles, French North Africa, and, of course, here in Louisiana. So we’re not the only ones that make boudin. But the method that they used, again, it was trash meat and the sausage casing was, you know, a very simple method—a vessel that you could keep the product in. And the purpose of red boudin, you know, why did you put blood in there? Well the salt was controlled by the royalty, and it was very expensive, so instead of having to buy salt, you put blood as a substitute for salt. And I didn’t know that until this book came out. And also until the 1920s when rice became a cash crop, that’s when they started putting rice in boudin—in the ‘20s. Before that they used corn and meat to make boudin. I didn’t know that either. This is a very eye-opening book that we’ve recently got. And so that’s what I start telling people about boudin. Do you have any idea from that book or otherwise when boudin might have started being made here? Do you think it was right away when the Cajuns came from Nova Scotia or the Germans, do you know? The Germans had a big influence on sausage making, but boudin, its origins are France. So it must have gone from France to Acadia, which is now Nova Scotia, and Nova Scotia to Louisiana. I’m sure the process, you know, the whole thing followed with the Acadians when they arrived here, so I’m sure they’ve been making boudin here since the first Acadians arrived around 1765 here in America. I wonder if there was any kind of sausage making in the Native American culture here, do you know? No, that I can't answer you because the Germans are the biggest influence on sausage making, and if you notice around here we eat a lot of smoked sausage, and you get below I-10 [Interstate-10] into the wetlands or what we call the Bayou Cajun culture, you won't find smoked sausage. We have a ranger here that’s from Houma down in South Louisiana. She wasn’t raised with smoked sausage, so when we’d make gumbo for her, you know, chicken and sausage gumbo, it was just alien. She just—“Oh,” you know, “I don’t like that. It’s got that smoked taste in the chicken.” Well that’s purpose. That’s the point of putting sausage in the gumbo, to get that smoked flavor. But it’s the Germans that introduced sausage making here. --- Tell me a little bit about the Saturday demos that you do, if you could. Yeah, well every Saturday here, every Saturday afternoon, first of all, at three o'clock we have a live music program, and it’s an interpretive music program where we have volunteer musicians and volunteer dancers. We talk about the songs, the instruments, the waltz, the two-step. And then at four o'clock we have our foodways demonstration. What we found is it’s faster and cheaper to cook it ahead of time than it is to actually cook it while the people are here. It just takes too long, and people get bored looking at a pot of gumbo boiling and steaming until it’s ready. And so the majority of the demonstrations are either by Bubba Frey or by me. And we do different things with—of course with boudin but other things. We do a lot of rice cooker recipes where you just throw everything in the rice pot, rice cooker and just turn it on and let it cook. And, again, and that’s a perfect example of one-pot cooking that the Cajuns are known for, unlike Creole cooking, where, you know, you have a lot of sausage. You might have several courses in a meal, and we just throw everything in a pot and cook it real slow for a long time. And if it flies, swims, or crawls, we can make it taste good. [Laughs] Can you talk a little bit about what you think boudin means to the people in this area to the culture? Well, boudin here is a very, very important part because we eat it for breakfast. We eat it for lunch. We eat it for supper. It doesn’t matter, you can eat it any time of the day. And if you notice, we eat a lot of pork in this area, and, from what I’ve read, the reason is that many years ago your wealth was based on how many head of cattle you had. So you didn’t want to eat your wealth, so you had hogs; and they grew very quickly, and you could smoke the meat and preserve it and eat it year-round. You’d smoke it and put it in these crocks with lard, and if you wanted sausage in the middle of the winter, you just opened that crock and pulled a piece of sausage out and eat it. Another problem with eating beef is that there was no refrigeration, so if you killed a cow, you better eat it because you don’t have much time. The meat is going to spoil, and that was another reason for having boucheries: to help, you know, to slaughter not only pigs but cows, and then you would divide the meat. Somebody would bring a calf or a cow one Saturday—one weekend—and everybody would get a piece, and then you could go home and you could eat it before it spoiled. Then the next boucherie would be at somebody else’s house, and they would bring the cow or calf and so forth and so on. So it really helped to not only distribute the food, but it was a social gathering also. And you got to eat beef whenever, but the pork meat was so important because you could smoke it and keep it and eat it year-round. Beef you couldn’t. --- You know, I’ve found a real pride in general in the culture of the people I talk to around here. Do you think that that’s changed? You know, you were saying before that people when you were growing up were sort of ashamed because Cajuns were, you know, thought of as being unintelligent or all the other things you said. Do you think that that’s changed in general? Oh, absolutely. There was a renaissance, and I attribute it to Dewey Balfa, a great Cajun musician, who in I think it was in 1964 went to the Newport Folklife Festival and he and three was two other Cajun musicians that went up there, and it’s a huge, huge festival. It’s still going on. And in the local paper, to give you an idea, in the Opelousas Daily World—and we have a copy of this—they talked about these Cajun musicians going up and going to make a fool of themselves with their, you know, their squeaky music, you know, and their backward ways and people are going to laugh at them. Well these Cajun musicians got up there, you know, and here was Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. They came out and did their music onstage, and like Dewey Balfa said the most people he had ever played for was maybe 200 or 300; there was probably 10,000 people. He had never seen or played before a crowd that big. They got a standing ovation. They had to come back and play two or three times. They fell in love with this music, and Dewey Balfa says, “Whoa, wait a minute. We’re not,” you know, “we’re not stupid. We’re not—these people love our music.” So he came back, and he dedicated his life and—and I think he’s the one that really started this renaissance to appreciate our culture. And one thing he told me one day was, you know, your culture is like an old rock in the backyard, you know, and every day you walk by, and you just kick that old rock. Yeah. Yeah, there’s an old rock, and one day somebody walks up and says, “Hey,” you know, “that’s twenty-four-carat gold you’ve got in your backyard.” He went, “Huh, you’re right, it sure is.” And he just started this whole pride in being a—being different. You know, the rest of the world wants to make it McDonald’s from sea to shining sea, and this Americanization of Cajuns that’s taken place because of the influence of the media—TV and radio and railroad and highways of course—changed it. But the Cajuns are very tenacious people. They changed with the Americanization, but still they retain their pride in their culture and hopefully their language. --- In your time here have you seen Cajun cultures in general and boudin cultures specifically change at all, possibly due to outside influences or tourism or sort of, I don’t know, outside world demands or perceptions? Well the influence from the outside is ever-changing, just like Cajun cuisine in general, you know. Cajun food doesn’t taste like food up in Nova Scotia where, you know, they’re still Acadians. Up there it’s very bland, so there was a big outside influence from all of these cultures from the Native Americans, from the Afro-Americans, who—the Spanish, all of these people contributed to the development of what we call Cajun cuisine today. But still, it’s an ongoing thing. Okay, for example, we have crawfish pizza, we have crawfish egg rolls, so it continues this outside influence and again the Americanization. It’s Cajun cuisine. It’s—well, I should say, it’s American cuisine but with a Cajun flavor. So it sounds like you’re pretty optimistic about the—I don’t know, the stamina of the culture here. Well, I am. I’m very optimistic about it because of the music. And as Marc Savoy says, the music is the glue that holds our culture together. Without the music there’s no glue, and it will fall apart. The music being the glue in that first of all, it’s sung in French, so you’ve got the language. And when you play music, you’re going to eat, and you’re going to cook, whether it’s at home or you go to some of the restaurants, the Cajun restaurants that have live Cajun music, so there’s that glue everywhere(s) you go. And as long as we keep the music, keep the glue, it will survive. So I like that, but, you know, it’s not true of all kinds of music that food would automatically follow. Why do you think that’s true in Cajun culture? I think it’s family—very, very family oriented. And I think the rest of the nation has lost that. The respect for elderly here is so different. You go to New York City, you know, and you get old, stick them in a nursing home and forget about them. Not here. It’s not that way and they hate to put their senior citizens—[Laughs] because I’m getting there. I love to call myself that. They do everything they can not to put them in nursing homes. They have them move in with the family. They build a little house next to, you know, to have Mama or Papa live close and finally, the most drastic thing is when they can no longer take care of them, and they have to have 24-hour care, and therefore they have to put them in some sort of nursing facility. That—that’s what I think. Yeah, that’s different. And, again, the other cultures just seem to have lost that. The music—okay, fine, you know, we have this music, but that’s all they’ve got and they’ve—they’ve forgotten where they came from. And if you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know where you’re going. --- So you said something that’s interesting is that you don’t only study Cajun culture—or don’t only introduce the children to Cajun culture but of the other cultural influences in this area. So I think that there’s a perception that Cajun is the culture of this area. Can you, for the record, tell what Cajun culture is and where it came from? Okay, well it is the dominant culture in this area, and where it came from, which is an area off of Canada, which is now called Nova Scotia. At that time, when the Acadians were there it was called Acadia—and the Acadians are this group of people who left France and the first colony was—well they first started moving in 1604, but the first colony was established in 1605. And this was a group of people that left France because of religious persecution and it was—they were serfs. You never owned land, but here you could come to the New World and own land. So they arrived here and established themselves as—established the colony and it flourished for 150 years. After 150 years, England was at war with French Canada, which was Quebec and so forth—the interior—and here were these Acadians sitting on Nova Scotia off the coast in a very strategic location, plus they outnumbered the British soldiers. So the British wanted them to swear allegiance to the King of England and become subjects to the King of England and become members of the Church of England. And the Acadians kept refusing. They kept saying, “Look, we’re neutral,” you know, “we’ve been 150 years. We are our own self-governing people, and we’re not going to fight for France, and we’re not going to fight for you. We’re just going to stay here.” Well they were adamant they would not swear allegiance. So the English, you know, in a very, very sneaky manner in cooperation with the Governor of Massachusetts brought forces in—the militia in and told them that—well, the first thing they did was take their weapons away, and if you notice in any government overthrow, as in Germany in Hitler’s era, take the guns away. They took the guns away, and they said, “Okay, now everybody—all the men seventeen years or older meet at the church, and we’re going to return your weapons. Well they met in the churches, and they locked them up, locked the doors. They told the women, “Go home. Whatever you can carry on your back, you’re out of here.” So the women went home, rushed home, got whatever they could carry. The British had ships sail in, loaded them, didn’t care if the husband went on one ship, the mother went on one, a child went—they didn’t care. Just throw them on the ship and get them out of here. So they expelled them, and they placed them in the British Colonies. Some went back to England as prisoners of war because they, you know—some of them fought. Some went to France; some went to Haiti, Santo Domingo. Some went as far as the Falkland Islands. Then through word of mouth they found out that there was a French colony here in Louisiana, so slowly they started making their way over here. The first group arrived here after 1755 when they were expelled. The first group arrived here in 1765. The last large group to arrive was 1785, so this was a thirty-year exile. Some of the Acadians that arrived here were not even born in Acadia. They were either in France or England or somewhere(s) else, and they arrived here thinking it was a French colony. Well guess what? It was a Spanish colony, but the Spanish loved them. They said, “Hey, here’s a great group of people. They hate the British, you know. They’re Catholic like us. We’ll just give them some land. We’ll set up this barrier against the British intrusion.” So the first group went down to south Louisiana in what is now Lafource Parish, Terrebonne [Parish]. And then the other groups headed out this way to the Opelousas Territory and established themselves here on the prairie. And that’s basically how the Acadians came to Louisiana. --- To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.
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