Rouses Magazine

Hunting and fishing have always been core to the Rouse family experience. “My earliest hunting memories of squirrel hunting were with my dad,” said Donald Rouse, Anthony’s son. “I was probably seven or eight years old. Squirrel hunting was my dad’s favorite out of everything. He hunted ducks, rabbit and deer, but his favorite was squirrel.”
In those days, they would go hunting in the swamps off the old Morgan City Highway. They would look out for ridges in the swamp where oak trees and palmettos grew. “My dad taught me to listen for acorns to drop and hit the palmettos. It meant that there was a squirrel up there eating. Or we’d listen for their barking. You’re always looking far out in front of you, because the squirrel’s not going to see you far away. But if you’re just looking straight up, the squirrel’s already finding a place to hide,” he said.

Conecuh’s patriarch, 73-year-old John Crum Sessions, gives few interviews; he’s largely content to let his sausage speak for itself. But he was recently willing to talk a little on the phone. He described how and father, Henry Sessions, started the company soon after World War II under the name Quick Freeze. The “Freeze” part referred to the 125 freezers that they rented out to local farmers and other customers in those days before widespread home refrigeration. As a sideline, they ¬¬operated as a slaughterhouse, delivering meat up and down Route 31, as far as Montgomery.

Before he was a chef, Jean-Paul Bourgeois was a hunter and a Louisiana boy; he didn’t know it at the time, but he would spend the rest of his life bringing the South to the rest of the world. “I try the best I can to be an evangelist for where I’m from in other places in the world,” he said. “I’ve brought Louisiana everywhere, from Napa Valley to San Francisco to the Virgin Islands to New York City.”

Today, Bourgeois is perhaps best known as the creator of the wildly popular Duck Camp Dinners, an ongoing, multi-episode documentary series on YouTube in which he and a few lifelong friends share their experiences hunting, cooking, fishing and living in South Louisiana. The series brims with an infectious enthusiasm for life in the South and covers everything from conservationism to cleaning wild game. You’ll learn how to cook — and might get a little better at hunting — but the real takeaway might be what a special place Louisiana is, and how warm and funny its people are.