My old homemade, heavy duty outdoor burner finally died of rust and wear and tear a while back, and it made me think of northerners frying turkeys.
Dub Jones made the cooker for me 40 years or so ago, and it was put to good use thousands of times for jambalaya, crawfish boils, gumbos, fried catfish and other such things.
I don’t remember if Dub welded for a living or just for fun, but the burner he constructed for me outlasted countless store-bought cookers some friends and I used over the years.
Outdoor cooking has been a long-time passion for a lot of us in this community where good food is as deeply ingrained in the culture as historic sites and Christmas lights.
Some of us picked up tips from old masters like Gene Knecht, who fried fish fresh out of Sibley Lake and made mounds of his New Orleans-style red jambalaya for sports teams, civic clubs and other fortunate folks.
Gene was a little stingy with the meat sometimes at big cookouts because he held some of it back for family get togethers.
A group of us went on a hunt in Mexico one year and pooled some of our doves for Gene to do a gumbo for some dignitaries who were visiting the university. We gave him 75 doves, but not all of them made it to the pot.
After folks filled their bowls, there was an announcement that anyone who found a dove in their gumbo would get a door prize.
When fried turkeys became popular in these parts, Gene and the rest of us learned the formula of so many minutes a pound and then a little extra time for the birds to float in boiling peanut oil.
I don’t recall the exact recipe, because I never cared much for turkey fried or any other way and have not cooked one in a long time.
But a bunch of us were frying turkeys for various groups and gatherings back in the 1980s after that cooking craze took off here.
During that time, some guys from the National Collegiate Athletic Association were in town pretty often and looked forward to local and Louisiana foods like gumbo, jambalaya and meat pies.
They had Knecht’s fried white perch and bacon wrapped duck breasts and wanted to go to the Sea and Sirloin Restaurant every time they came after being introduced there to fried pickles.
It seemed to be the variety of good foods here that impressed them. When I visited them several times a year, we always had barbeque. Their offices were in Kansas City, and there were good barbecue places on every corner.
But the menus were pretty much the same in all of them. Ribs, brisket, sausage, chicken, Cole slaw and baked beans. The sauces and cooking methods varied some, but they admitted that even savory barbecue got boring when you had it all the time.
So they embraced the diversity of Louisiana cuisine on trips here and were especially fascinated the first time they saw turkeys fried whole on outdoor burners hooked to propane tanks.
They showed some interest in learning to make things like etouffee, gumbo and boiled crawfish but decided the best way to impress people back home where turkeys were always roasted or smoked would be to fry them some whole Butterballs.
None of them had ever seen any of those outdoor cookers like we used in stores where they lived, so they bought burners and big pots at Kaffie-Fredericks Hardware and had them shipped home.
Over the years, the fellows who enjoyed visiting Natchitoches so much to feast on the good food drifted away from the NCAA jobs to universities, law offices and other places mostly across the north and Midwest.
One of them would call once in a while to say they had taught a friend, neighbor or colleague how to fry turkeys. They wanted the name of the famous hardware store where they bought their burners and pots. That was before they could get things like that overnight from Amazon.
When I was taking my ancient outdoor cooker to the curb after it finally rusted out during the holidays, I wondered if any of those guys were still frying turkeys up north on the burners they got from Kaffie-Fredericks.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES