I grew up in and around Houma — and though I’m dating myself, I’m old enough to remember when the town didn’t have a proper supermarket. Until I was nine years old, my family lived in a tidy, slate-side house on Palm Avenue near the banks of the Intracoastal Waterway. My parents — and my grandparents who lived near us — shopped at a little neighborhood market called Songe’s.
It was a friendly place run by a middle-aged couple of that name. The store mostly carried the basics, and the prices weren’t particularly cheap. But my grandparents liked it because they could buy groceries on credit, then pay their bill at the end of the month when their Social Security checks arrived.
In September of 1957, we moved to the Bayou Black area west of Houma when my father went to work as the payroll clerk for Southdown Sugars. The job came with a tidy rent-free farmhouse on about five acres near the wayside of Mandalay National Wildlife Reguge near Houma — a good place, my parents felt, to raise their six rambunctious sons. About five miles of sugarcane fields stood between us and town. Even better, to the north and south lay plentiful woods and marshes that were owned by Southdown and that we were free to roam and explore.
Though my parents would eventually move us back to town, ask any of the Wells brothers and they will tell you this is where we grew up — living the bayou life, fishing, hunting, swamp stomping to catch our own crawfish; raising chickens and rabbits and even a pig or two; helping my parents with the ambitious vegetable gardens we grew each year in what had previously been a cow pasture.
My mother, Bonnie Toups, a Thibodaux native who spoke Cajun French, was a terrific cook. She would routinely turn the fruits of our agrarian labors into tasty dishes at her kitchen stove: chicken and sausage gumbo; okra stew; smothered potatoes and green beans; corn soup; hot peppers and tomatoes for her rabbit and turtle sauce picante; spicy yellow squash casserole; stuffed bell peppers. You get the picture.
In our first two years there, 1957 through 1959, there was no supermarket nearby and, honestly, there were days we wished there were. More than once, Bonnie’s chicken gumbo began with a hen chased down in the farmyard. Yes, okay, that may sound appealing to certain back-to-the-land types, but anyone who’s plucked and dressed a chicken or slaughtered a pig or killed and skinned a rabbit knows this is unpleasant business for everyone involved (especially for the chicken, pig and rabbit.)
By 1960, Ciro’s, the collaboration of Anthony Rouse, Sr. and his cousin Ciro, had opened in Houma, and that was certainly an improvement in our food-shopping fortunes. The first Rouses Market then opened in Thibodaux in 1975; since then, Rouses has grown into one of the largest and most successful independent supermarket chains in America.
The Rouse family has leveraged their deep knowledge and love of our regional foodways into stores whose offerings, through variety and innovation, have transformed food prep while still keeping a firm grasp on tradition. For me, this is epitomized by that state-of-the-art Rouses Market I frequent on St. Charles Street during my visits to Houma. Had that particular Rouses existed back in our early Bayou Black years, my mom’s labors at the gumbo pot would’ve been so much simpler and easier.
I should explain that I have not always been a supermarket groupie. I moved from Houma in 1975 to attend graduate school at the University of Missouri School of Journalism and have never returned as a full-time resident. My calling as a writer and editor compelled me to live in cities that supported large-market newspapers and magazines. I’ve had an adventurous career that landed me in beautiful and interesting places: Miami, San Francisco, London, Manhattan and, these days, Chicago.
Yet, truth be told, you can take the boy out of the bayou but not the bayou out of the boy. As I began to venture out from journalism to write novels and narrative nonfiction books, what poured forth were works that, no matter where I was living at the time, were 100% steeped in my South Louisiana upbringing.
Indeed, the further I got from the bayous and the people and places that had clearly imprinted themselves on me, the more interesting my upbringing became to me. It took a while for me to understand what a singular place our family-centered, food-centric culture occupied in the all-too-homogenized American landscape. As a writer, I felt I should be able to make something of that.
Partly because of that and because I still had family in the Houma-Thibodaux area, I visited frequently. But honestly, I’d not paid much attention to the supermarket scene until a few years back when I began to do a deep dive for my book, Gumbo Life: A Journey Down the Roux Bayou, a cultural and social history of our iconic dish. I wandered into that particular Rouses on St. Charles Street in Houma; I was looking for andouille for gumbo I was cooking for out-of-state friends who’d come for a fishing trip.
What I discovered was an epiphany: Someone with deep forethought had assembled an amazing collage of Louisiana-made and Louisiana-grown products that had revolutionized the ease by which home cooks could gather and acquire the ingredients not just for gumbo, but for almost every conceivable dish in any authentic Cajun or Creole cookbook.
There was the pre-cut trinity in a plastic container — which I know my mom, who was not particularly good with a knife, would’ve loved as a time-saver. I counted about two dozen varieties of andouille and other sausages suitable for gumbo. I found boneless pre-cut chicken breasts and thighs (and yes, whole chickens if you wanted them and even pre-cooked rotisserie chickens that I know some people plop into their gumbos).
There were jarred and powdered roux mixes, not to mention an entire long shelf given over to just about every spice and hot sauce a person might desire. And, yes, fresh okra in the produce department and fresh, wild-caught local shrimp sitting on a bed of ice for a price that was about a third of what I pay for frozen shrimp in Chicago.
To be clear, I learned my gumbo craft from my mother, and I still love making my own roux because it honors my mother’s memory. But I know plenty of gumbo chefs these days who swear by these time-saving products — Rouses even has its own jarred and frozen roux, making it easier than ever to start a gumbo or stew from scratch. It’s clear that Rouses in its offerings demonstrates a deep knowledge and commitment to South Louisiana cooking traditions, yet understands that time-saving innovations will be appreciated and embraced by a certain subset of their customers.
Earlier this year, I spent two months in South Louisiana researching a book on boudin for LSU Press as part of its Louisiana True series. These are compact books, about 25,000 to 30,000 words, covering aspects of uniquely Louisiana culture, notably festivals, music and food.
My boudin book, which will come out next spring, isn’t a tasting guide per se, but an examination of the history and passion that elevates this once humble sausage, birthed and perfected in rustic country kitchens, into another iconic dish on par with gumbo and andouille. Boudin, once pretty much a South Louisiana secret, is beginning — thanks to Cajun and Creole ingenuity — to show up on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus all over the country.
One of the first things I did was to head (again!) to my favorite Rouses to check the boudin selection as a way of gauging what discerning locals were eating — trusting that the Rouses folks, who seem to have an unerring eye for what their target market loves and wants, would be stocking brands I needed to pay attention to. And, in fact, the selection was so large and the variety so interesting that it told me boudin makers were not just thriving but innovating in interesting and unexpected ways.
As I traveled what I call the Boudin Belt — the 22 contiguous South Louisiana parishes that form the area known as Acadiana — I came to realize that Rouses’ success is part of a pattern: the proclivity of certain South Louisiana families to begin enterprises based upon a passion and a belief that service and quality are the elixirs for success.
Consider, for example, the Cormier family of the Best Stop boudin enterprise in Scott. From a tiny one-shop operation opened in 1986 and the size of the average 7-Eleven, the Cormiers in 2020 completed a $6 million, 15,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art USDA-certified distribution facility that produces a whole lot of boudin a day and ships retail to scores of wholesalers all over America. They have plans to build a 10,000-square-foot addition, dedicated to sausage making, in 2026.
And the Cormiers are hardly alone. A subtext of the Louisiana boudin origin story is how so many Cajun and Creole families — the Bourgeoises, Bergerons, Comeauxs, Richards and Savoies, among others — have leveraged a single and simple thing, a family boudin recipe, into literal fortunes. And yet I am totally convinced that for them, while the money is no doubt terrific, it’s not just about the money. It’s a sincere effort to spread the joy and share this South Louisiana comfort-food icon with the wider world.
Or in the case of Rouses, to make sure its food-loving customers can hew to their time-honored cooking traditions and yet gather the best possible, Louisiana-sourced ingredients for that quick gumbo, if that’s what their busy schedules call for.
Now, if they would only open a store in Chicago…
