Before Best Stop came on the scene in 1986, boudin wasn’t necessarily the kind of thing you’d go on a road trip for.
Boudin, the local sausage that has come to define Cajun cuisine alongside gumbo, rice and gravy and jambalaya, is essentially a merging of sausage traditions from French, Acadian, Creole and German sources. The casing is stuffed with the chef’s preferred ratio of meat to rice, generously seasoned with a Cajun blend of spices and aromatics.
It’s a country food, created from south Louisiana’s affinity for rice and hog meat. As such, it was something you’d process at home as part of a boucherie, or grab from the local meat counter for a hearty lunch. And until interstate travel came along, it stayed highly local to southwest Louisiana…