ROUSES_MayJun2019_Magazine-Print

The Swamp Floor Pantry Folse (the original German surname may have been Voltz, Volz, or Folz) is a gleeful encyclopedia of the culinary serendipity of this mixing, the Germans bringing charcuterie and the smoked sausage into the food; the Cajuns bringing the roux, country French cooking influences, and knowledge of seafood soups. “The Germans loved to cook with pork and root vegetables,” he says, “but the Cajuns had their own ideas about this.” In the exchange of ideas, “that’s how sauerkraut became smothered cabbage with andouille sausage” (in Folse’s mind and mine, a great leap forward for cabbage). by Ken Wells Excerpt from Gumbo Life: Tales from the Roux Bayou . On sale now.

Folse was one of eight kids. His mother, Therese Zeringue, died when he was seven years old. His father, Royley, was a fur trapper, moss picker, and logger who never remarried. After his mother’s death, Folse’s paternal grandparents moved in to help out. His ma- ternal grandparents, the Zeringues, were a constant presence. Cajun French was the everyday language. Food, with gumbo at the center, was enormously important to his family and their tightly knit circle of Cajun and Cajunized-German friends. “You began with the roux,” recalls Folse. “Every mother taught her daughter how to cook roux at home, and the sons learned how to make a roux at the hunting camp.” His mentor was his maternal uncle, Paul Zeringue, who would round up the boys in the family from the time they could manage a kitchen knife and say, “C’mon, we’re gon- na make a gumbo.” That was his favorite dish. In Uncle Paul’s world, “if you were old enough to chop an onion, you chopped the onions,” says Folse. “Maybe you later got to do the green onions. Maybe next year you prepared the rabbit. The point is that every year you got a better station and you woke up one day realizing that, having watched and listened and helped, you not only could make a good roux, you were a pretty good chef.” If you spend much time with Folse, an upbeat, energetic, loquacious man, you can’t help but understand that he’s running a mission as much as a company. For him, the breakout of gumbo and South Louisiana cuisine onto a na- tional and world stage is, pure and simple, a credit to the place and culture that produced it. Back then, it was a matter of great pride to both parents and kids when these lessons had been both taught and absorbed. “Children were praised by the qualities of their fricassees and courtbouillons and gumbos,” recalls Folse. In the heavily Catholic community, “It was nice to have the priest praise your Latin, but the ultimate affirma- tion was when Uncle Paul put his arm around you and said, ‘What a good gumbo.’” Folse feels Uncle Paul’s calling. “The greatest challenge today,” he says, “is walking into my culinary classes and making my students dis- ciples of the traditional — to make them aware we’re stepping back three hundred years.” Though he knew cooking was his “life’s DNA” he started out in ho- tel operations, not thinking he could actually earn a living as a chef. But a German chef, on Folse’s training rotation in a hotel kitchen, saw his expansive home-hewed technique and the tasty concoctions he could whip up, and urged him to rethink his career. The rest is history. Folse and his wife, Laulie Bouchereau, started their first restaurant in Baton Rouge in 1974 and opened Lafitte’s Landing four years later. His production company and plant, officially known as Chef John Folse & Company, opened in 1991 and in 2008 moved into its cur- rent facility.

“Here comes the sausage,” says Chef John Folse. Chef has a pen- chant for understatement. A 15-foot-high stainless steel robotic arm has just lifted and poured, into what Folse modestly calls a “kettle,” the first batch of what will be 400 pounds of lightly smoked sausage. Yes, pounds. The sliced meat avalanches down the kettle’s silvery sides, sliding into a light film of melted butter that prevents it from sticking. An in- genious system of mechanical paddles and blades keeps it moving. A second, third, and fourth bin shortly follow. Soon, the cavernous spaces of Folse’s sprawling USDA-sanctioned factory fill with the deli- cious aroma of browning sausage. If you spend much time with Folse, an upbeat, energetic, loqua- cious man, you can’t help but understand that he’s running a mission as much as a company. For him, the breakout of gumbo and South Louisiana cuisine onto a national and world stage is, pure and simple, a credit to the place and culture that produced it. Paramount in this is the preservation of what the chef frames as “the glory of the black-iron pot” and the ingenuity and authenticity of the generations of home cooks who have kept the traditions alive. Every- thing that comes out of his factory is measured against this standard. “You don’t want to put the culture or the cuisine into a museum,” he says. “You want it to evolve but not in a way that is unrecognizable. We have been very proud and protective of our culture and the tradi- tions that were handed down in full form in families for generations. That authenticity is what we need to make sure doesn’t get lost.” That sentiment was the chief motivation in the founding of the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute at Nicholls State University in 1995. Folse recalls hatching the idea a year or two earlier over bowls of gumbo at his Donaldsonville restaurant, Lafitte’s Landing, with then Nicholls president Donald Ayo. (Ayo retired in 2002 after two decades at the Nicholls helm.) The overarching goal wasn’t just to teach students to master the art of Cajun and Creole cooking, but to steep them in its lore and traditions while also encouraging them to do independent research into the region’s deep and old foodways. The institute, where Folse still teaches and serves as board chair- man, has grown from a handful of students to an enrollment of three hundred. It recently moved into a state-of-the-art, 33,000-square- foot building with teaching kitchens and a restaurant. Students can earn a four-year bachelor’s degree in culinary arts at a cost of about $30,000. Two-year private cooking academies often cost twice that much. Folse was clearly inspired by his roots. He was born in 1946 in the Mississippi River farming town of Vacherie and grew up nearby, ab- sorbing the cadence of speech, pace of life, and cooking traditions of St. James Parish. Back then, Cajun French speakers were the majority. Vacherie was settled by Folse’s Swiss-German pioneer forebears in the 1720s. The Germans readily accepted into their communities and lives the Cajuns who came four decades later. Intermarriage between the Germans and Cajun women was so common that sometime in the mid-1800s most of the Germans had given up their native tongue to speak Cajun French.

48 MAY•JUNE 2019