Everything but the squeal

Along every bayou in the Evangeline and St. Landry Parish areas are little hamlets with strange names to most of the outside world. In these communities, the French culture which waas handed down from the first Cajun and Creole settlers is being preserved, protected, and handed down to the next generation while it dies a slow death in other parts of the region known as Acadiana.
One such example is the little community of Patasa where a group of guys are putting a new spin on the old art form called a boucherie. This group takes its art on the road at different cookoffs and other events and showed off its techniques at this year’s Le Grand Hoorah held at Chicot Park.
Two of the group members, Jeffery Burge and Tyler “Bulldog” Vidrine, sat down in a joint interview with KVPI radio and The Ville Platte Gazette before the boucherie and explained their way of interpreting the art form.
As Burge explained, the notion of doing boucheries began when he graduated from pharmacy school in May 2017. “When I graduated, I wanted to do some kind of party,” he said. “I didn’t want to eat finger foods and mingle. I wanted to do something a little different, so we did a boucherie at the pig barn in Basile.”
“I didn’t know what it was going to come to,” he continued. “But, now, I have a pretty stout group of guys who are fired up every single time we do it. It’s something we really love and really enjoy.”
Vidrine, who works at a chemical company in Broussard, said, “Whenever (Jeffery) did this for his graduation party, we were all tickled pink to be part of it and to learn something. That was the first one, and we just got hooked from there.”
Besides Burge and Vidrine, the group consists of members of a Thursday night supper club. “We would always cook, have suppers, and have cookoffs,” Burge said. “Every time we would do a cookoff, people would ask what’s the name of our group. We didn’t have a name. We were just cooking. My buddy lives in Patasa, and we always cook at his house. So, we said we’re the Pa-ta-sa Cooking Krewe, and the name stuck.”
“We all grew up hunting and fishing, so it’s not a stretch to clean a pig,” Vidrine said. “The only difference is you scrape the pig and do it the more legit way of preserving every aspect of that animal. We pretty much go from snout to tail with it.”
Even before Burge’s graduation party, the group began learning how to do a proper boucherie from older men in the Basile and Eunice area. “It was a challenge, and it was a learning curve at first,” Burge said. “It was definitely an adjustment. It just grew from a Thursday night supper and a Bourée game to black coffee and shooting a pig in the morning.”
For Vidrine, the learning curve was more of “how to actually take out the stomach and make the pounce, clean it, and stuff it.”
What ensued for the Pa-ta-sa Cooking Krewe was the discovery of an art form. “You can call it art because every artist has a different style,” Burge commented. “There’s more than one way to skin a pig. We do it for people to see and do it to teach people something.”
He continued, “At the last boucherie, somebody came while we were smoking sausage, and we talked about my smoker for about an hour. Then he was telling me about what he does to brine or to season his tasso. I said, ‘Mais, I never tried that.’ Then I told him how I make my sausage. It’s definitely a give-and-take. If somebody wants to come who has been doing boucheries their whole life, I’d love for them to give me some pointers.”
For the krewe, their brand of the art form lasts typically four to five hours and begins with killing a pig. “The actual killing of the hog requires a .22 bullet and getting up close to it,” Burge explained. “The placement of the shot is important. You don’t want the hog chasing you, and you want it to just be quick.”
“There’s not necessarily an art in killing it,” he continued. “There’s a necessity for efficiency. You really need to do it quick, do it right and humanely, and move on to the next step.”
As Vidrine put it, “They can say it takes a village to raise a kid, but it takes a village to kill a pig and do a boucherie the right way.”
After it is killed, the 180 to 200 pound hog is then scolded. “The reason for our selection of the size is we scold it in a bathtub, and that’s how big my bathtub is. It’ll hold a 200-pound pig. Any bigger than that, and I’ll need a bigger bathtub.”
Once the hog is scolded, the skin, or the coin, is left on the animal. “From there, we take the fresseurs out,” Burge explained. “The fresseurs is the kidney, the heart, the liver, and the spleen. Then we make a gravy with that and clean the stomach to stuff it for the pounce.”
“After we get those out the way,” he continued, “we take the ribs off. We barbeque the ribs low and slow at about 200 or 225 degrees. It takes a while, but it’s really worth it. Then we take the hind quarters off to get the roast with the coin on it, which four out of five doctors would recommend you eat.”
Other parts of the pig used in the boucherie are the backbone, the front shoulders, and the head. This leads to one of the event’s most surprising aspects.
“From the butchering standpoint,” Burge said, “the biggest surprise is what we have left over. When we grew up hunting deer or hogs, we had a gut bucket. In the gut bucket, we would have the head and the hide. The first boucherie we ever did, I was astounded because we threw away a grocery bag with just the feet and the tail.”
For Burge, also surprising about the boucherie is the “idea you could take a group of 25 to 30-year-olds and just absolutely have them wake up like Christmas morning.” He added, “I didn’t know a pig could make so many men so happy.”
Besides bringing happiness, a pig can also bring about the continued legacy of the Cajun and Creole culture in the area.
“We wanted to learn ourselves, so, as we’re doing it now, other people are seeing it,” Vidrine said. “We hope it will grow as well. We younger guys don’t want it to die off with us. The more people who see it and the more people who want to do it, then it passes down and continues on.”
Burge concluded, “I really hope people embrace it, and I would like to see them spread it to someone else. Don’t let yourself be the last person who does it.”