KRISTY GRAY The Gillette News-Record | Posted: Sunday, July 25, 2004 12:00 am
GILLETTE, Wyo. (AP) - A Louisiana lesson in cooking: "Really, the only way to cook a possum is to bake him. It's all in the preparation, the cleaning. … Possums have a lot of glands. If you don't take those out, it can turn people off.
"Just like alligator. If you don't take off the fat, it will turn you off. Turtle's another one …" explained Dwight LeDoux, cooking coordinator for the Louisiana high school rodeo team.
Rabbit's good in a pot roast, in the oven or in a gumbo.
And when it comes to adding flavor, you don't add salt to taste.
"It's all in the way we season. We don't just go to a store and throw it in a pot," said LeDoux, who brought 20 different spices with him for a week's worth of cooking.
At the National High School Finals Rodeo this past week, the goats, bulls and horses were the stars of the arena.
But behind the scenes in the rodeo campgrounds, it's a whole other array of meats that steal the applause - catfish, shrimp, sausage and yes, even 20 pounds of alligator.
A cowboy's gotta eat, after all.
And while you may spot some barbecue grills or gas stoves outside many of the RVs and horse trailers, it's the Louisianans who'll almost always win the pot for cookin'.
"All right, you ready?" asked Wendell Fontenot, pulling up a silver ladle spilling with crawfish DetouffDee.
"I've been ready since you told me about this," Mike McPherson answered, lifting his bowl of rice to the pot. Fontenot filled it with the thick orange sauce brimming with crawfish, onions, bell peppers, celery, herbs and spices.
It smelled like warm, spicy tomatoes with just the slightest hint of the fish.
McPherson raised his spoon and rolled the bite in his mouth.
"You just don't hardly get it this good," he said, scooping another bite.
What could Fontenot do? Disagree?
Truth is, you really can't hardly get it that good. And Fontenot knew it.
"Only thing better would be to take fried catfish and put this on," he said.
The thing about the national high school finals is that families spend up to a week thousands of miles from home, but just a few feet away from teammates they may or may not know.
But put a pot of DetouffDee on an outdoor stove (in something like a 20-gallon pot) and any ice between strangers melts away with the warm, Cajun aroma.
People flock like pelicans to a Louisiana bayou.
"We go to restaurants a lot of nights, but there's nothing like having a home-cooked meal when you get a meetin' like this," Fontenot said as members of the Mississippi rodeo team answered the dinner bell.
Then a few stock contractors wandered in. Then a few people just walking by decided to stop.
"We come from a tailgatin' culture," Fontenot said.
Though his brood rodeos in Mississippi, he lives in Louisiana and Louisiana's where he learned to cook.
He packed up 30 pounds of crawfish in an ice chest for the meal he was cooking and it did it's work. His campguests piled it in their bowls, praised the cook and then got to the business of visiting with everyone else.
Rodeo was one thing. That was dinnertime.
"The Louisiana folks have a good time eatin"' Fontenot said.
How do you cook a gator?
Well, first you've got to catch it. Buying the meat at the store will cost you up to $8 per pound.
LeDoux catches them for a living. Not only is he a nuisance hunter (hunting and catching nuisance animals and returning them to the wild) but he'll trap and harvest several alligators this fall during the hunting season. He sells the hides and puts the meat in his freezer.
Some hunters choose to stun them. LeDoux likes to shoot them. When you're packing a boat with 15 to 20 alligators, you don't want them waking up.
Then, you've got to prepare it. Ninety percent of Cajun cooking is in the preparation.
"It's in the way we season. We don't just go to the store and throw it in a pot."
LeDoux marinated this gator five full days in vinegar and Worcestershire sauce. He brought 20 different spices with him including seven different types of peppers, salt and garlic.
And, you've got to cook a gator outside, in the open, and let the smell attract any wayward wanderers.
LeDoux and his cooking assistant (and his son-in-law) Malcolm Herbert started at 9 a.m. Saturday. Herbert started the mesquite wood they brought an hour early to get the coals just hot enough.
LeDoux dropped chunks of pink alligator meat into a pot with onions, bell peppers, whole garlic and tomato sauce. When it finished simmering, he threw in some green onions, parsley and roux (ground flour cooked in grease.)
He fried the rest of the gator in batter and Cajun Shaker, a seasoning mix his friend Scott Broussard formulated while sitting around the campfire with two uncles. He also fried squash and eggplant in it after they had marinated a full week in a seasoned milk and egg batter.
Eventually, the people started coming.
"What's on the menu?" Broussard asked as he walked to the camp.
Alligator sauce piquant, fried alligator, fried squash and eggplant, barbecued chicken, barbecued brisket, barbecued pork and barbecued antelope.
"Antelope. Y'all kill that on the way up there?" Broussard asked. No, it came from west Texas.
"And, some goat," Herbert yelled.
"Goat? You get that at the Cam-plex?" Broussard asked.
"No, wild goat. Ram," said Hebert.
So how does alligator taste?
No, not like chicken. It's more like pork. Tender, juicy, Cajun-spiced, deep-fried pork.
AP-WS-07-25-04 1236EDT