Cochon de Lait, Mansura Louisiana
I’ve made no secret of my love of pork, but there’s really more to the
story than a simple taste for bacon and cracklins. It’s really about
pork consumption as a social ritual—the simple act of sharing the
experience of preparing, cooking and feasting on this divine animal
with friends and family. The heritage sausage-making party,
for example. We spent 7+ hours drinking beer, sharing recipes and
carrying on family traditions that, no doubt, our parents and
grandparents thought would die out with their generation. The 50 pounds
of sausage was just a tasty bonus to the occasion.
The Cochon de Lait Festival in Mansura, Louisiana, is another example of a fine tradition in swine
cookery that runs deep in my family. Every year, this sleepy backwater
with French roots (it was named by early settlers, ex-soldiers of
Napoleon, for its resemblance to the prairies of al-Mansurah, Egypt)
hosts a three-day throw-down whose guest of honor is the succulent,
slow-roasted pig. The festival is held every year on Mother’s Day
weekend, and for as long as I’ve been going back for the festival and
family gatherings, we have our own cochon de lait at my aunt and
uncle’s house, a mere two blocks away from the festival (mostly because
Uncle Ed insisted that his recipe was better, but also, at least
partly, because it was the one way to get all umpteen of us in one
place at one time, to hold hands and say grace before dinner). This
year, we didn’t have Uncle Ed around to bark orders and run the show,
but the next generation did an admirable job of carrying on the
tradition. Here’s a look at how it went….
It starts with a big metal box, a fire and, naturally, an old swing-set rigged with a motorized rotisserie.
All of the prep for this feast took place in the cold room, a small
outbuilding with a walk-in refrigerator. Back in the day, this is where
my grandfather and his family did a lot of food prepping, particularly
for a boucherie.
The cold room was mostly off-limits to us as kids, and it sat unused
for years, but it was recently brought back to life—with new sinks, a
hot water heater and other amenities.
A true cochon de lait is 25-30 lbs., although as the crowds have
gotten bigger at the festival, so have the pigs. The 50-ish pigs cooked
at the festival are 200+lb. Chester Whites from the LSU Agricultural
Center, but we decided to stick with the more traditional size. The pig
is dressed, the skin is scored…
…and seasoned (that’s Tony’s Chachere’s Creole Seasoning—a staple in any Southern kitchen)…
…and the pig is pinned between two large sections of fencing wire.
Once secured, the “rack” is attached to the rotisserie. The
motorized rotisserie is a technological improvement from the old school
“poke it with a stick to turn it” method.
The beauty of the motorized rotisserie is not only in the saved
labor, but also in the amount of time it frees up to do things
like…make beignets.
Since we were cooking outside already, it seemed only natural to fire
up the propane and eat a few batches of deep-fried dough dressed in
powdered sugar.
But something is wrong. The beignets are delicious, but there’s a
flavor that seems to be missing. What’s that, you say? Pork? Yes! Pork!
A little nugget of homemade sausage, enveloped in beignet dough…
…deep-fried to deliciousness. (You can barely see the sausage, but believe me, it’s in there, and it was good.)
It’s time to check the pig. See the perfect circle of fat drippins
on the ground below the pig? Momentary consideration was given to how
the fat-soaked ashes and dirt would taste on a cracker.
We believe in eating a pig from the root-y to the toot-y. Hog’s
headcheese is not my favorite, but the old school likes it, so we
attempted to make it. First, one must pay proper respects to honor the
head.
Then, one must remove the extraneous bits and pieces—eyeballs, tongue, brains, ears and the tip of the snout.
It seems a shame to waste such vital organs on an animal, so in
addition to our contribution to the culinary arts, we attempted some
sculptural art with the leftovers.
Headcheese bits rolling around in a pot of boiling water isn’t as
photogenic as you would think. I’m not posting the few photos I have
for simple lack of quality, and all-around grossness. Really. It isn’t
pretty. But it tasted alright on a saltine cracker.
It’s time to check the pig again, anyway.
It’s looking good, and our pig consultant told us at this point that it
was time to turn off the rotisserie and move the rack closer to the
fire to crackle the skin. After six or eight hours of slow turning, the
meat surrenders and the browned, oil-slicked skin is crispy, cracklin’
good.
************************
A little bit of history on Mansura’s Cochon de Lait
Beginning with Mansura’s Centennial celebration in 1960, the Cochon de
Lait Festival became an annual event that drew tens of thousands to
town to celebrate the pig. My dear mom, who probably never dreamed how
the honor would haunt her, was Miss Mansura High 1959, which put her in
the very first parade associated with the Cochon de Lait (that’s her in
the middle).
In the weeks prior to the first festival, the ladies and gents of
Mansura donned 1860s-era clothing—long, high-neck dresses and bonnets
for the women and beards, bowler hats (or red berets) and string ties
for the men—and traversed the state in a caravan of busses to promote
the Centennial and attract visitors to the festivities.
I’ve seen
amazing footage of the bus tour (compliments of a guy named Mike
Hildenbrand, who discovered a cache of old film reels from the
Centennial when he moved back to his childhood home after Katrina
washed him out of New Orleans in 2005). The footage is classic, twitchy
16MM of Mansura’s finest, tumbling into and out of busses at the
different stops along the tour. The men are giddy, slapping each other
on the back, nearly every one cupping a cigarette, cigar or pipe to
light, or pulling a drag off the one dangling from his lips. They pass
through Opelousas, Lafayette and Franklin, Louisiana. They cruise down
Canal Boulevard and spill out of the old Falstaff Brewery in New
Orleans. They pose and preen on the steps of the Capitol building in
Baton Rouge. I get a frisson when the few frames of Papa, my
grandfather Lysso, flash across the screen. He’s sporting the requisite
beard, beret and vest, and he’s got his arms around two women. He gives
each a peck on the cheek. Neither of these ladies are my grandmother,
Daisy.
Pressed for details about exactly what went on on the gender-segregated
busses, old-timers blush and chuckle, and say things like, ‘It was
something.’ A sense of fraternal decorum seems to prevent them from
saying more. What happened on the Centennial bus tour stayed on the bus
tour.
Reading local newspaper clippings about the Centennial, it’s pretty
clear that, although the organizers hoped to draw a big crowd, they
were genuinely shocked at just how big a crowd actually showed up. More
than 10,000 made the pilgrimage to Mansura’s Centennial cochon de lait.
The town officials and Centennial organizers, including my great uncle
Merlin Coco, instantly realized the crowd- and revenue-gathering
potential of an annual festival. So on May 24, 1960, a mere month after
the first celebration, Mayor Kirby Roy petitioned to have Mansura
legally declared the state’s official Capitale de la Cochon de Lait, a
decree that was signed by the notorious Governor Earl K. Long. From
1960 to 1972, Mansura turned into a hotbed of dancing, carousing and,
of course, feasting on a menu of roast pig, dirty rice, candied yams
and other French, Cajun and Creole heritage eats.
If it’s possible for a town to be too good at something, Mansura was
too good at throwing a party. As the organizers anticipated, the
festival crowd grew—and grew. In 1966, just six years after the
Centennial, an estimated 45,000 people showed up. (This is a town that,
in the 2000 census, registered a population of 1,573.) At the height of
the festival’s popularity in1972—the year Edwin Edwards, another of the
state’s colorfully corrupt politicians, was parade marshal—a reported
100,000 revelers poured into Mansura. It was also the year Boone’s Farm
came to town. Bottles of Strawberry Hill and Apple Blossom flavored
wine made its way into the bloodstream of the festival, and things got
real ugly from there.
By 1972, the party had reached critical mass. Undercover State police
camped out in the side pasture across from another aunt and uncle’s
house to covertly observe the cottage industry in drug trafficking.
“Harley riders and campers parked wherever they stopped—in yards, in
the middle of the street. There was nudity and making out in public,”
my aunt, Laurie Ranheim, recalls, still wide-eyed at the memory. “The
wahwees were sleeping in ditches right in the front of the house.”
Wahwees [wah-WEEZ] being, in the family lexicon, shady, unsavory types
with questionable hygiene, illegal habits and little in the way of
moral fortitude. Think: Hippie meets redneck.
Too many people. Too much trash. The streets and side-yards of Mansura
twinkled with shattered glass. The way people describe it, the town
looked like New Orleans the Wednesday after Mardi Gras, only not as
good. It’s hard to point a finger at one particular thing that pushed
the festival’s organizers to call off the Cochon de Lait after 1972,
but the lethal duo of cheap wine in glass bottles features prominently
in the legend. Food writer Calvin Trillin, reporting from the Breaux
Bridge Crawfish Festival in one of his first food dispatches for The
New Yorker, laments the demise of the Cochon de Lait with no qualms
about placing blame:
“I am justified in holding the idea
man who developed soda-pop wines personally responsible for the fact
that the Cochon de Lait Festival in Mansura, Louisiana, ended before I
had a chance to sample the cochon. May the next belt-tightening in the
wine industry (or the advertising industry, if that is where he's
harbored) find him in an expendable position.”
For the next 15 years, the newly dedicated Cochon de Lait Civic Center
in Mansura, a pole barn attached to an open-air pavilion, was a venue
without its marquee act. The people of Mansura “decided to stop and
rest for a while” (a quote from the Chamber of Commerce’s history of
the festival, which is far too polite and dignified to go into the
specifics of why), but Mansurans can’t resist an excuse for a good
time, particularly one that involves the beloved pig roast. The only
thing surprising about the rekindling of the festival in 1987—by a
younger generation of locals, many bearing the same last names of the
festival’s original organizers—is that it didn’t happen sooner. But
it’s been going steady ever since.
A true cochon de lait is the kind of spectacle that can hush and awe
even the rowdy crowds of the hungry and beer-fueled that the festival
attracts. From the piles of pecan wood and hickory stacked inside the
roasting shanty to the primal, visceral draw of fire and cooking pig,
it is a mesmerizing sight to behold the rows of pigs roasting in their
wire rotisserie cages.
At first glance, the Cochon de Lait might look like any of the small
food festivals happening in towns all over the map, like the Pierogi
Festival in Whiting, Indiana, or the Gilroy Garlic Festival in
California. There are the dentally-challenged carnys running the
terrifying rides and luring customers into chance games with promises
of giant stuffed a Tweety Bird or Tazmanian Devil. There are arts and
crafts stalls where you can have your name carved, burned or painted
onto just about any surface you can imagine. But from there, the Cochon
de Lait takes a sharp left from corporate, cookie cutter festivals.
They’ve got meat pies. Hot boiled crawfish. Boudin and (sigh)…boudin
balls, crispy-fied meat-y, spicy, rice-y orbs.
The schedule of events for the festival is a roster of
unintentionally hilarious contests. The beer-drinking contest is
notable for the fact that there are two—one for the men, and one for
the ladies. In theory, my personal favorite should be the boudin-eating
contest, because what’s not to love about speed-eating tubes of spicy
rice and pork sausage? But the fact that this delicacy is hard to come
by (short of a special trip to Ron’s Cajun Connection in Utica, IL)
makes it a shame to see it consumed with such heedless disrespect. But,
in fact, it’s the greasy pig contest that I love the most. The
simultaneous thrill and horror of watching packs of sweat- and
dirt-smeared kids high on cotton candy chasing after squealing,
lubed-up piglets is something everyone should experience at least once
before they die. I am proud to say that a handful of my nieces and
nephews—most of them what my aunts and uncles call “city kids”—have
tackled and won a few greased pigs. More gratifying than the smile on
that kid’s face is the sight of his or her dad walking away from the
fairground, tentatively holding a burlap sack containing the thrashing,
squealing piglet.
For the past few years, every time I go back for the Cochon de Lait,
I’m always afraid it’s going to be the last. It’s the same old story:
the festival is a lot of work for the town. The old-timers are getting
tired and the kids don’t want to take up the tradition. Go while it’s
still going.
*NOTE: This was originally posted on LTHForum.com
