On a recent food adventure around Acadiana I brought home an ice chest full of Cajun meats, as usual, and also a new appreciation for the inexhaustible appetite we have in Louisiana for our own food traditions, the ways they unite people, the differences on which intensity deepens, and what that cultivates between us.
We were going after ponce, an oddity in the pantheon on pork offered at many Cajun butcher shops. It’s a pig’s stomach, stuffed with sausage and smoked, and is our closest local corollary to Scottish haggis. If this gives you a ‘eew’ factor, well, you might not get very far along Louisiana foodways.
A Cajun ponce is essentially an alternate expression of a butcher shop’s house sausage blend, packaged in pig stomach to be prepared and enjoyed differently, more like a slow roast than the quick grill-and-gobble fate of many sausages.
We had gathered a small group of like-minded meat obsessives and hit the road with a common interest. We dubbed it Tour de Ponce, after the somewhat better-known French bicycle race.
Traversing ponce country meant touring the Cajun prairie in all its late spring splendor. The broad horizon was a two-tone of blue sky cut by a distant tree line, green fields and crawfish ponds. Yellow flowers wreathed the roadside ditches, silver rice silos gleamed around the bend.
Getting from one shop to the next was just part of the fun, as was sampling the hot boudin and other meaty bites from one counter to the next.
After we’d loaded an ice chest with examples, it was time to taste a ponce, so a long, slow home cooking session commenced, and that’s when the stories really starting coming out.
People sang the praises of ponce as late-night food, as leftovers and sandwich fixings. Mostly though, the meal stirred memories of family dinners, of special occasions where one of these bad boys always seemed to have a place at the table. When the food is good, and distinctive, and tied to place and forms that bond between people like this, cooking some specialty meat can be a special occasion all on its own.
