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Listen to this three–minute audio clip of Bubba Frey talking about the guinea hens that he raises, in part for making gumbo.  [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

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NOTE: What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

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Subject: Bubba Frey
Date: August 20, 2007
Location: Mowata/Eunice, LA
Interviewer & Photographer: Sara Roahen

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Sara Roahen:  This is Sara Roahen for the Southern Foodways Alliance. It’s Monday, August 20, 2007. I’m in Mowata, Louisiana at Bubba Frey’s Restaurant, which is next to the Mowata Store. And if I could get you to say your name and your birth date, we’ll go from there.

Bubba Frey:  Okay, my name is Bubba Frey, and I was born on September 22, 1956.

Can we begin by your telling me again about the origin of the name of your town here, Mowata?

Okay, well there—there were several, but the true name behind name Mowata—there was a Mr. Atterbury from around New York came down before the Depression, and they bought up, you know, pretty much all the land around here in Mowata. And they had the corn farm, they had the cotton farm, and right around here where Mowata is at, it was called the rice farm. And there was a severe drought at the time, and then the community of Mowata didn’t have a name yet, so they were going to call it More Water. So when they had—Southern Pacific Railroad is the one that would map out, you know, the spurs and stuff like that in the little towns, so they were in charge of bringing the sign. So all the dignitaries got together at the train depot, you know, the day that they were supposed to christen Mowata as More Water, and when they pulled the sign out of the boxcar, out of the train, it was a misprint. And it was printed M-o-w-a-t-a, like broken English, Mowata, and—and that’s how it got its name.

When you say it, it almost—it does sort of sound like you’re saying More Water.

Yeah, but it—really it sounds more like broken English than anything else, you know. Some people come and hear Mowata and they say, What is this, an Indian town? I say, No; it’s just, you know, it’s more or less broken English for More Water.

Is this where you grew up—this town?

Yeah, about a mile down the road. We left [for] about three years, but I’ll be 51 my next birthday and I haven’t ventured very far from Mowata.

Well a mile down the road, is that technically Mowata?

Pretty much. Yeah, it’s—you know, a mile and a half in either direction, it’s still considered Mowata. So I was born and raised here. In—in fact the store that I have now, it’s not the original store, but you know when we were little the only treat we got on Sundays when we went to Mass right here next to the church—the church is next to the store, is St. Lawrence Catholic Church—and after Mass we’d come in, and that was the only time of the week or whatever that we could get a—a treat. And we used to buy chocolate pop. We’d come here and that was our favorite, and that was the only pop we got for the whole week, and it was after Mass here at the store. I never once thought that I was going to be in here running the store. At the time I was running down the old aisles where you could probably see the ground through the cracks of the floor at the time, you know.

Do you sell chocolate pop now?

We have it, but it’s not the same pop that we—we bought back then. It was Mr. Sam Uzo that had the 7-Up bottling company in Eunice that manufactured and put out, you know, the Uzo line of pop. And he had chocolate, he had cream soda, and he had the strawberry. And from what I understand he went to his grave with the recipe for all three of them, so—.

Tell me a little bit about how you did come to own the store.

Well you know I used to be a rice and crawfish farmer, and then around the ‘90s, the early ‘90s, all my equipment was stuff that I had got from my grandfather and my daddy—the equipment that I was using, it was obsolete. And I had a very small farm, and it—for me to stay into farming, I would have had to pick up probably 1,000 more acres and spend a bunch of money on equipment. And at the time the store came up for sale over here. I pretty much knew, you know at the time when I bought it, it wasn’t—the store wasn’t what it turned out to be now. Back then you know it was still a little grocery store and people still shopped instead of going to the big Wal-Marts or Winn-Dixies and stuff like that, you know. And you still had canned items; we still had bread and milk—you know some of the basic staples that people want. But I bought the store, you know, and it was pretty much snacks and everything and they—they were making a little bit of sausage here before, and boudin. In fact they were making something like 400 pounds of-—of boudin a week, and it turned into sometimes I will make 400 pounds of boudin in one given day. And then through the years, you know, things were changing, and—and canned items, you know. I’d go through them and sometimes they were a year old; I had to take them home and use them myself, canned vegetables, and—or throw them away because they got too old.

So it just come to the— come to the conclusion that home staples—you know groceries and stuff like that—just wasn’t going to cut it in here because I wasn’t—you’d have to sell in such volume to make money. So through those years I started making sausage and the tasso, de-boned stuffed chickens, bacon, you know. And since then I’ve started raising guineas and chickens and stuff like that. And I’ll sell my—my chickens, basically I sell them all year long but the guineas and stuff like that are pretty much a winter item because in this part of the country everybody has got to have guinea gumbo. You know they were raised on guinea gumbo, and I sell anywheres from 700 to 800, 900 guineas in the winter. And I serve—I also serve guinea gumbo in my restaurant here only during the wintertime, because I want them to get just a certain taste of it, because if you give somebody something for too long they get tired of it and they expect it there every time you go. So I give it to them, you know on a limited basis to where when I have it they gobble it up, and—and when it’s over, it’s over.

Can we pause there for a minute and can you tell me for the record what a guinea is, and then describe the gumbo?

Okay, a guinea is a—it’s very closely related to the pheasant and the partridge. It—it’s considered a game bird, but it originated from Africa. It came over during the slave trade, you know, and they brought it here and it got stuck here. And then the Cajuns, you know they keep them, and they keep them mostly because they were—they call them their watchdogs because, you know, they’re a very noisy bird—very noisy. If they see something that’s not in place, well they start raising seven kinds of hell, you know, and it’s—it’s not a sound like a chicken, but it’s a high-pitched cackling noise. And if you hear that, you can be sure and go in whatever direction, and they—and they kind of like form a big old pile. They gang up on whatever it is that they see. And you can go look and—and sure enough you’re going to find something. You know I went to my chicken yard one day and they were all piled up around a little clump of grass. And I kept looking and I said, Well it’s got to be a snake or something, and I couldn’t find it. And when I moved the grass with my foot, sure enough there was a snake curled up in there trying to get away from the guineas. Another time they was at—in another corner, hollering, and they kept looking. So I chased them away from that part of the fence, and about two or three minutes when I walked away they were back at it again. I went and I looked and I said, Well there’s something there. And what I noticed, there was a little baby cottontail eating grass in a briar bush and they had spotted him. So, and you know they just investigate.

And they got different varieties now than they had back then. Back then it was the little Creole guineas, and a full-grown guinea only weighed a pound and a half at the most. And—and the ones that I have now are the jumbos, and they’ll dress as much as five pounds. They’re very, very fat. You know, they look almost like a hen when you butcher them. And people that, you know that were raised on these little guineas can't believe that these guineas are the same guineas. But today everything is bred for meat purposes, and—and I guess they just did the same thing with the guineas. Now the color of the guinea I got, they’re gray with little white—perfectly little white polka-dots—you know, it looks like in rows through the whole bird. They have a blue head; they’re very—the head is very, very colorful. I mean it would look like something that would come from back in Africa, you know the color of the skin and stuff like that. Now they have white varieties now; they have lavenders; they have pearl; they have several different colors. But I use the gray ones—the pearl—because that’s mostly what everybody raised back then. And—and when they see it, you know, it’s not so much that they got to have it, but they say, Grandma used to have these in her yard. You know it brings back memories. And then they buy them and then they go home and eat them, and they put it in a gumbo.

Now the gumbo—. You know, this part of the country, anything they going to get their hands on they’ll make a gumbo with. If they go dove hunting, squirrel hunting, whatever—duck hunting, goose hunting—it all, most of the time it all ends up in the gumbo. Gumbo, what it is is just, you know you start with your flour and your oil. And I don’t measure it; I just—it’s pretty much half and half. You mix it to where it makes like a thick or a loose paste in the pan. And I usually cook mine in the oven real, real slow because it takes three or four hours for me to do that to where, if I cook it on top of the stove, you got to babysit it for about an hour or two,  you know, if you cook the batches that I cook, and it burns very, very quickly. So if you have it on a hot fire you got to constantly stir it. If I put I in the oven, I’ll put it on sometimes around 2:30, 3 o’clock in the morning and it’s not ready ‘til 8:30, 9:00 you know the same morning. So it takes a long process to do it in the oven, but you—it’s a sure shot not to burn it. Once you burn it, it’s—it’s an irreversible situation. All you can do is throw it away or eat gumbo, you know, that’s going to have a burnt flavor. Because your roux is your—your basic ingredient(s) other than your chicken or your guinea or whatever in gumbo, you know. And when it’s done—I mean there’s some people that will cook it a little darker ‘cause they like their roux darker. Some of them like it light. I mean you can buy it now whichever shade of darkness you want. And I can remember, at one time—to tell you, you know, the way the store situation changed here, that roux was never, never, never bought in a grocery store. Never. And my mama and my grandmother, when they were going to make a stew or a gumbo, most of the time they made it [the roux] before they actually did their cooking. So you know a lot of times in the—in the summertime when we were out of school, if you were playing in the barnyard or somewheres and you know—and back then there wasn’t no air-conditioning and the windows were up and the roux carried—the smell carried. It was kind of like brewed coffee; you know, for a long distance. And sometimes we were out there in the barnyard playing and we could smell it, and we knew what we were going to have for supper. It was either going to be some type of stew or a gumbo, because you could smell mama cooking the roux, you know, and we knew right then and there what we were going to have.

Now gumbo is mostly a winter dish. They’ll—they’ll cook it, but you know and—they won't eat it because it’s hot. I’ll eat gumbo pretty much all year long for the simple fact that when you eat gumbo in the wintertime, you got the heat on in the house, so you know—. And now all you got—with the convenience of modernization, you just put the air-condition on and cook your gumbo and eat it. So the—the time of the year doesn’t bother me at all. I’ll eat it any time, so—.

But the guinea gumbo you just make for the restaurant in the winter. How dark is it—your roux, I guess?

The roux, it’s—mine is—is more on a darker shade than a lighter shade, you know, because that’s—for the simple fact, you know, imprinting whenever you see somebody do it—you know, that’s the way my mama made it, and that’s the way her mama made it, and so on and so on and so on. I mean a lighter gumbo, it’s—it’s as good as a dark one, but you know when you go and you see a gumbo that’s a little bit too light, and when people see a dark gumbo for all their life, they say, Well there’s something wrong with that gumbo, you know. Which it—you just have to add a little bit more roux to give it a— more of a roux flavor.

And do you use okra or filé in that gumbo?

I don’t use okra. I use—I have filé on the table if they want it, you know. There’s a lot of people that use it, but there’s a lot of them that want it—they just want guinea and sausage gumbo. That’s what they want.

What kind of sausage?

The sausage, I use the pure pork sausage that I make here at the store, and that’s usually at—everybody’s favorite sausage is the pure pork. The mixed sausage, you know you can—it’s a little bit drier than the pure pork; the flavors—you can't hardly distinguish the flavor. People ask me, say, What’s the difference between the pure pork and the mixed sausage? I say, Well the pure pork you’ll have open-heart surgery at 60, and the mixed you’ll only have it at—you know, at 70. [Laughs] So it—that’s, you know, as a joke to them, but really there’s—there’s no difference in the flavor. It’s just people that are health-conscious that, you know, can't have pork or have trouble with cholesterol.

Is the pure pork sausage—is that smoked or is that a fresh [sausage]?

No, it’s—we sell very little fresh sausage in this part of the country. Everything is smoked; it’s all smoked. Now you know we have people that come from down south of here, around Thibodaux and that you know, and they want the green sausage. And—and I was surprised to find out that in that part of the country, around Thibodaux and Houma and that, that they didn’t smoke their sausage. You know it’s—again, it’s the big melting pot around here, is the Germans that showed the Cajuns around here how to smoke—you know to preserve their sausages by smoking it to where they could—a lot of times they’d hang it up in their attic, or they’d—they’d cook it down and they’d seal it with hog lard. Or if it was real, real cold they’d wrap it in corn shucks to suck out the moisture, you know, in the sausage. And it was smoked—back then you could eat it out of the smokehouse because they left it in there two or three days. Today it’s not so. You know I’ll put mine in there around 3 o’clock in the morning, and after about 10:00 or 11:00 it’s done. You don’t want to smoke it to the point to where it’s preserved because it will be too dry when you eat it.

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To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

 

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Introduction | Map | A Short History of Gumbo | Oral Histories | Recipes
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