"All South Louisiana road trips should begin with boudin. There’s something about taking a steering-wheel grip to a long, curved link of the Cajun delicacy; the promise of hot pork, rice, and spice pulsating in your hands; the snapping of the sausage in two, forcing the link’s thin casing to audibly crack like the starting pistol at a race. And so it went with this day’s planned journey: a half-dozen starter links (and a brown paper bag full of cracklins) from Bourque’s Super Store in Port Barre, a nondescript speed trap of a town on the northeast frontier of Acadiana, the state’s Cajun epicenter. Directly behind Bourque’s flows the reason and route for this road trip. The Bayou Teche proceeds from Port Barre, where it branches from the Bayou Courtableau, in a south by southeasterly direction to Patterson, 125 meandering miles downstream. The Teche (pronounced ‘tesh’) is the aorta of the Cajun heartland, a navigable bayou with a culture and history as rich as its muddy tint."
To read more, please click on Denny Culbert's photograph that accompanied the piece in the March 2017 issue of The Local Palate:
