Food can be a destination with local markets 

You never know what or who you’ll discover at the Delcambre Seafood Market the first Saturday of the month. Everyone in New Iberia knows the name Bouligny, but descendants of our downtown plaza and settler Don Francisco Bouligny actually still live in the area.

“We’re the only Boulignys still living in New Iberia and there are only approximately 125 in the world left,” Wayne Bouligny said. “My sister, Susanne Moceri, knows the history. It’s documented all the way back.”

You may have seen his Tamale Trolley at special events around the Teche Area. It’s new, but the origin of the tamales isn’t quite as old as the family name.

“We’ve been using the recipe for 35 years, it’s a family recipe,” said Wayne Bouligny whose Tamale Trolley can be found every month at the Delcambre Market. “We just started using this (trolley) the last two years. The recipe came from New Orleans, a New Orleans style tamale.”

Ground beef and pork are the main ingredients and they are not very spicy, which for this writer is a good thing. As I walked around the market I told everyone they were the best I’ve ever eaten. Most tamales have a lot of cornmeal, these were more meat than meal. They really were the best I’ve tasted.

“There’s a lot of flavor and they’re not dry like a traditional tamale,” Bouligny said. “We have frozen and hot, (ready to eat).”

Christine Leblanc, Bouligny’s partner in the business said they freeze them in six-packs that are ready to be put into boiling water to cook about 45 minutes to an hour. They’re just like you made them from scratch, she said.

Of course, I might have to sample my friend Alex Patout’s tamales to discover if “the best” holds true. I’ve heard he is making them every week by quantities to order. His mother, Ann Patout, told me she has been making them for 50 years and naturally, hers are “the best.” Do I hear a tamale showdown coming up?

Vendors Offer Variety

The crowd is really growing at the once a month Delcambre Seafood and Farmers Market. The booths are predominately homemade goodies and crafts, but it is still early in the growing season. Vickie Matirne and Sharon Crochett were shopping at the only fresh vegetable stand this week, Brent and Patsy Borel. Cucumbers, bell peppers and lots of tomatoes were available for purchase with a few other odds and ends like spaghetti squash.

Naturally, I’m reminded of the aromas coming from mom’s kitchen every summer when she made chili sauce. I’m not sure why we grew up calling it that, add a little jalapeno and you’ve made salsa. But being from south Arkansas and central Mississippi, my parents and grandparents called it chili sauce and it was the perfect addition to butter beans, black eyed peas and in later years mom ate it on steak or other dishes, too.

“The spicy fragrances escaping from the kitchen kettles were often distinctively tomato-scented,” said the narrative in Preserving Summer Bounty by Marilyn Kluger. The chapter on A Remembrance of Canning Season definitely took me back. “Three long rows of tomatoes planted down the middle of the garden were the prolific source of the main ingredients.”

Dad was a farmer at heart. His profession was in the oil field, but his heart was home on the farm. One year when I was about 8-years-old dad fertilized his tomato plans — in the backyard garden of our new West Bank home — so much they grew to about 8-9 feet high. We had GREAT tomatoes that year. I took it upon myself to sell the surplus to neighbors and those going by. They were really the best tomatoes.

One day when I wasn’t outside, at my stand that looked similar to a lemonade stand which most kids had, one regular drive-by customer stopped and rang the doorbell. He wanted to know if that little girl would be out with her tomatoes. We always had a patch for tomatoes even after we moved from the heart of New Orleans. They usually were the biggest, if not the ONLY tomatoes in our Lafayette subdivision. They were for eating tomato sandwiches and salads, but never lasted for chili sauce. We had to buy tomatoes for that.

Pros and Amateurs

Nadine Guidry from Kaplan was also at the market with canned vegetables and sauces called Nadine’s Nom-noms. She had pickled beets that caught my fancy, grown locally.

“I can all year long, depending on what I have,” said Guidry. “I use locally grown produce and process them locally, you can’t get any more local than that.”

Her secret to success for anyone wanting to start canning but never had the experience of learning in the kitchen with mom or grandmother, is to plan ahead.

Have everything you need before you start the pot, that way you don’t run into a bind, have to turn everything off to go to the store to get what you needed, It’s a process, but worth it. It is a lost art and those who still do it should pass it on to those who want to do it.”

Along with spicy pickled green bean, salsa, some very interesting looking sauces including marinara, and Awesome Sauce, a creamy seafood sauce that takes the place of Alfredo. Guidry had one sauce that was a combination of an Oklahoma Okie recipe and her Cajun recipe called Coonokie sauce. She even had small jars of preserved bread pudding, a perfect gift for travelers wanting to take back a little Southern cooking to their home area.

“It’s already cooked, while it’s still hot I put it in a jar, put the lid on and drop it into a hot water bath 15 to 20 minutes,” Guidry said. “It gets all the air out and has a shelf life of about three months. It’s all as fresh as it can be, I slice and dice it all myself. I try to make it easy and different, so people can go home and cook a meal in 15 to 20 minutes.”

Also selling her frozen homemade meals was Barbara McKenna from Delcambre who feeds half of Cajun Country when the Shrimp Festival blesses the Delcambre ships, or other area events. There were several familiar faces as well.

“I grow okra,” Thomas Hymel donning a large brim sun hat said. “I have a bunch of rows of okra. I grow ‘em, I pick ‘em, I cut ‘em, I chop ‘em, I cook ‘em, I freeze them and then vacuum pack them. I sell them here at the Delcambre Seafood Market once a month. It doesn’t take much to grow them, we’ve got about 15 rows, 100 feet long. The thing about packing and freezing it, we’ve always got it in inventory. I put nothing in it but okra, so folks can add anything they want with it or throw it into their gumbo.”

Hymel uses a pressure cooker to stew down the okra, it removes the slime before putting it up for later use. He said it can also be cooked down in the oven or pot depending on a person’s preference. Some like to pickle the okra rather than stew it down.

Family Business and Outing

The cottage business of baking pastries was also in high demand Saturday. Three or four booths featured fried pies and other desserts or breads. The display and ability to taste the round pastries at Nourrissons stopped this shopper. Larue Kennedy, son of Robert and Francine Kennedy said the family business is described jokingly by his father as R&D and R&B. Dad is the pastry chef for Social in Youngsville and supplies Charlie G’s desserts, so he is the research and development partner. Lareu is the rolling and baking asset.

“I pretty much took over the baking of them,” Lareu Kennedy said as he explained the reason for naming one pastry apple-apple and the process used. “He cooks down the juices of the apples down for a long time with brown sugar and drizzles caramel on top. Then we have the organic fig with reduced balsamic vinegar in there that really brings out the flavor of the fig. It’s not a lot of sugar. We also have the apple-blackberry. My dad likes to forage so he picks blackberries. He’s not a fan of the seeds so he cooks it down and strains out the seeds to a good sauce and mixes it with apples.”

I didn’t try the fresh pineapple, roasted in a pan then flambéed before being wrapped in the delicate pastry. That one went home to my sister — a sacrificial gift.

The book I started reading that inspired a trip to the farmer’s market for pictures, was really in-depth and used methods far more sophisticated than the one my mother used to put up her annual chili sauce and fig preserves. Grandmother Gayle Baker Mann probably used them “in the day” to make the delicious pickle crisps. I know that was a process that took a week rather than a few hours in the kitchen. Perhaps I’ll revisit the book and share more from the processing as summer produce become plentiful and we’re ready for a canning adventure.