Earl’s

Earl’s is a small grocery store with a significant butcher shop in back. The butcher shop makes some of the best boudin in Cajun Louisiana, and it is available by the link from a hot box near the cash register.

Cajun country boudin is not all that easy to eat. Some are so messy that you want a drop cloth as soon as you sever the casing. But Earl’s is made for off-the-dashboard dining, each link so dense that once the casing is breached (knife recommended), you can fork out pieces in tidy clumps. It is so greaseless you’d be tempted to call it lean if it didn’t taste so succulent, the pork and rice and spice combined into a package that needs only beer (or Barq’s root beer) on the side to be a complete meal.

Earl’s also serves plate lunch, including fine fried chicken, po boys, red beans and rice, and catfish on Friday. We enjoyed our boudin along with fried chicken, red beans, and rice plus a bag of Zapp’s Cajun-Voodoo flavored potato chips. As we dined off the dashboard in Earl’s parking lot, we listened to music on a disc we had picked up from a car-trunk vendor outside of Fremin’s, a New Iberia furniture store that also happens to make hefty boudin links. The CD was recorded by a rollicking Zydeco band that included accordion, washboard, and clicking spoons, as well as Cajun vocals that no outsider could possibly comprehend. Altogether, it was an entirely local meal, and memorably delicious.