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Sunrise From A Step Outside The Pilgrim
Lapeyrouse Seafood Bar, Grocery & Campground – Chauvin LAThe drive from Loyd Park at Joe Pool Lake in Grand Prairie TX to Lapeyrouse Seafood Bar, Grocery & Campground in Chauvin LA was more than this camper was willing to tackle in a single day (about 10 ½ hours and 539 miles), so I made a stopover at the Kisatchie National Forest in Boyce LA at the Kincaid Lake Campground. I chose this facility for future reference and, definitely, not because of its convenient location. The entire trip went without any notable stories to convey. Apparently, there is a large construction project or some other such extravaganza going on in the Houma LA area, where my friends reside, that has the closer campgrounds filled to capacity with long-term campers. Construction workers, et. al., frequently travel as do I and take their home with them from job to job so the phenomenon is not unusual but the volume (enough to fill all the campgrounds) is rare.
I had only one attraction on my list for the six days I was in South Louisiana – the
McIlhenny Company facility on Avery Island LA. For most of my readers, that probably won’t register; however, if one pulls out the bottle of TABASCO® Sauce
and reads the label, it surely will register. According to family tradition, TABASCO® brand Original Red Sauce was created in the mid to late 1860s by Edmund McIlhenny – a food lover and avid gardener. McIlhenny, a banker before the Civil War, was given seeds of Capsicum frutescens peppers that had come from Mexico or Central America. He sowed the seeds on Avery Island and nurtured the plants. They thrived in the South Louisiana climate. Interestingly, Avery Island is one of five salt dome islands rising above the flat Louisiana Gulf Coast and, unlike New Orleans, stands at 163 feet above mean sea level. Avery Island actually is a compound where the McIlhenny and Avery families have lived for decades; where the peppers are grown and the salt is mined; and where the product is produced, aged and bottled. In fact, about half of the company’s 200 employees actually live on Avery Island.
The southern diet during reconstruction was bland and monotonous, so McIlhenny decided to create a pepper sauce to give the food some zip. He selected the reddest peppers from his plants, crushed them, mixed them with Avery Island salt and aged this “mash” for 30 days
Inside The Aging Barn, A Cooper Display Greets The Visitor
McIlhenny Company Self-Guided Factory Tour – Avery Island LA in crockery jars and barrels. Then he blended the mash with French white wine vinegar and aged the mixture for at least another 30 days. “That Famous Sauce Mr. McIlhenny Makes” proved so popular with family and friends that McIlhenny decided to embark on a new business venture by marketing his pepper sauce. He grew his first commercial pepper crop in 1868, labeled it “Tabasco,” a word of Mexican Indian origin believed to mean “place where the soil is humid” or “place of the coral or oyster shell” and secured a patent in 1870. By the late 1870s, he sold his sauce throughout the U.S. and even in England.
Over 140 years later, TABASCO® Sauce is still made on Avery Island in made much the same way except now the aging process for the mash is longer – up to three years in white oak barrels – and the vinegar is high-quality distilled vinegar. TABASCO® Sauce is labeled in 22 languages and dialects, sold in over 180 countries and territories, added to soldiers’ field rations and put on restaurant tables around the globe. The company claims it is the most famous, most preferred pepper sauce in the world. I
Working Here Would Become Agitating!
McIlhenny Company Self-Guided Factory Tour – Avery Island LA suppose one would be hard pressed to argue the point. It seemed like somebody was always packing a bottle when I was in Vietnam.
My first stop was the visitor center where a short film on TABASCO® history is shown and short bios of the seven generations of McIlhenny descendants are highlighted along with a handful of artifacts. I next embarked on the self-guided factory and warehouse tour. Touring the visitor center and the pepper sauce factory, both of which are very interesting, is just one part of the attraction. There is Restaurant 1868 where a sample of local cuisine is available that has been “seasoned perfectly with our classic TABASCO® Original Red and other Pepper Sauce flavors.” I chose to skip the restaurant as I was saving my appetite and, generally, those types of establishments are way overpriced anyway. Of course, there is the TABASCO® Country Store where a wide array of TABASCO® products and souvenirs are available. I finished my visit with a drive through the Jungle Gardens – the final attraction on the Avery Island compound.
E. A. McIlhenny, or “Mr. Ned” as he was affectionately known, founded a bird colony in the 1890s —
later called Bird City — after plume hunters slaughtered egrets by the thousands for feathers to make fashionable ladies’ hats. Mr. Ned gathered up eight young egrets, raised them in captivity on the Island, and released them in the fall to migrate across the Gulf of Mexico. The following spring, the birds returned to the Island with others of their species — a migration that continues to this day, as thousands of snowy white egrets and other water birds return to Bird City. Today, the 170-acre Jungle Gardens is a drive through experience although, after parking in a “wherever-one-deems-suitable” area, one can walk the garden’s “not-so-well-marked” paths shrouded by numerous really cool and gnarly old oak trees laden with Spanish moss. I saw 67,890 alligators and 2 snowy egrets. I wonder….
The museum and the factory tour are worth a short drive, but I honestly cannot say the Jungle Gardens was worth the time or the additional expense. On the return trip to Chauvin, I made a slight detour to
Landry's Seafood Restaurant in Pierre Part LA. I didn’t see Troy but got a great shrimp stew as the lunch special of the day.
On one day I made a
Chicken Leg Quarters Lure The Crabs
Crab Fishing With Julius – Theriot LA stop at Rudy’s grave in the Saint Eloi Cemetery in Theriot LA and on another at
Veterans Memorial Park in Houma where he is remembered as one of the 19 Terrebonne Parish men killed in the Vietnam War. The rest of the week was spent shooting the bull with Rudy’s family – primarily his sister, Rosetta (Rose) and her husband, Julius. One day I had the pleasure of accompanying Julius when he re-baited his crab traps. He didn’t harvest the crabs as there were not enough to make a meal for him and Rose. He told me they would be fine as long as they have something to eat. Their son-in-law, who was back on shore after his two-week stint on an off-shore rig as a fluid engineer, boiled up a batch of crabs one day and crawfish another day. Everyone tells him that he’ll make somebody a great wife someday. I was the benefactor of the leftover crawfish boil – sausage, potatoes, corn, mushrooms, onions and about 5-6 pounds of crawfish. I experimented with 3 or 4 dishes – my best result being an egg, crawfish and bacon scramble blended with some store-bought alfredo sauce.
Rudy’s brother, Roy, has retired
from his career as an oyster fisherman and has relocated to Mississippi so oysters aren’t as readily available as they were in days gone by which prompted Rose, Julius and me to visit
Big Al’s Seafood Restaurant in Houma one evening to satisfy a hunger for fried oysters. I plan to see Roy in June when I stop in Meridian MS for a week. As always seems the case, I had a nice, relaxing week in the Houma area with some folks that have adopted me as an “Honorary Coonass.” They are like a second family for me; but, albeit, a shrinking family as some of the youngsters move away and some of the oldsters move on.
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