Pod Insights The Sporkful The Secret Society With A Giant Omelet Tradition About this episode What makes the taste of a Meyer lemon so special? And why is there a secret society in Louisiana that holds a giant omelet festival every year? This week our friends at the The Atlas Obscura Podcast — which celebrates the world’s strange and wondrous places — bring us stories that answer each of those questions.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:34 Speaker 01 The most important part of tasting is smelling. So, before you know you put anything in your mouth, you wanted to see how close each citrus has to get to your nose before you can smell it.
1:43 Dan Pashman? This is Mandy Neglisch. Mandy's a professional taster and author of the book How to Taste. She's also a passport for guests. You may remember her from an episode we did about her quest to become a Cicerone, kinda like a sommelier, but for beer. Anyway, these days, Mandy is all-in on tasting. And she recently did a tasting with Dylan Thurras, host of the Atlas Obscura podcast.
2:01 Speaker 02 I never, I never smell my citrus before I eat it.
2:05 Speaker 01 You gotta smell everything first, it's so important. That's why I'm like the anti lid club. If you're ever having coffee, you gotta take the lid off so you can smell it before you taste it. So important.
2:16 Dan Pashman? Mandy and Dylan met up on Zoom. They each came prepared with some slices of lemons and slices of clementines.
2:22 Speaker 02 Yeah, what should we eat first?
2:24 Speaker 01 I feel like clementine might be a little more subtle, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna go for that one first. You can see like the thinner, the thinner peel going on. There's less protection of the acid inside.
2:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:37 Speaker 02 Always delicious.
2:39 Speaker 01 Definitely. You get a little of that pucker in the back? Do you have that at all? It's like a little tart, but nothing. Yeah.
2:45 Speaker 02 Yeah, but it's so nice. I eat these by the like millions. I eat them, I eat so many of them. All right, now let's, let's do the lemon.
2:55 Speaker 01 Let's hit the lemon. So I'm, yeah, this is probably a Lisbon lemon. You can tell the thick, thick peel going on.
3:02 Speaker 02 I didn't know that that was the name of it. I just think of it as like the standard lemon.
3:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, a grocery store lemon is always gonna be a eureka lemon or a Lisbon lemon, pretty much.
3:10 Speaker 02 Okay.
3:12 Speaker 01 It's not too bad, though.
3:13 Speaker 02 I like the lemon.
3:14 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. I thought it was gonna be like, you know, when you get that really harsh, like
3:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:18 Speaker 01 almost painful pucker, but it's really, it's pretty, pretty nice.
3:21 Speaker 02 Well, as you can tell, we're gonna be talking about citrus. And we're gonna be talking about one particular citrus that is in a weird way, kind of a combination of these two.
3:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, we're, we're talking about a fruit today that kind of falls right between these two fruits. And it's the Meyer lemon, which is a little bit hard to find when it's off season in grocery stores, as we've discovered. So we're, we're doing the next best thing. I guess we could try to put a little bit of each fruit into our mouth at the same time and see, see if we're creating that Meyer lemon experience. I think it would be like two thirds lemon, one third mandarin to get the, the actual taste, or try to recreate the taste.
4:01 Speaker 02 I'm gonna stack a clementine slice on my lemon and then like bite the whole thing.
4:06 Speaker 01 There you go.
4:06 Speaker 02 This may or may not work.
4:10 Speaker 02 It's pretty good, actually.
4:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, you get a little of that balancing, right? The, the mandarin or the clementine kind of balances some of the tartness, but it's actually a pretty good approximation of the
4:21 Speaker 02 That's nice.
4:22 Speaker 01 What would go on, yeah.
4:24 Speaker 02 I gotta get my hands on some Meyer lemons. This is delicious.
4:34 Dan Pashman? This is the Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people and Happy New Year. I hope you had a wonderful holiday season. I hope you saw family and/or friends. I hope you ate and drank whatever you wanted and I hope you are getting back into the swing of things here in January. Before we get into it, I want to remind you that I'm doing a live Sporkful taping in Memphis next week, Thursday, January 16th. I'll be talking with local Memphis restaurateur and artist Karen Blockman Carrier. She owns a place called The Beauty Shop that is in fact a converted salon. She's got a bunch of other places. She's a local legend. It's gonna be a great time in Memphis next Thursday, January 16th. I'll hang out afterwards
5:16 Dan Pashman? and sign copies of my cookbook. Anything's possible, which will also be for sale there. It's gonna be a ton of fun. Tickets are going fast. Get yours at sporkful.com/events. See you soon, Memphis. Okay, on to the show. And this week, we're bringing you two episodes from our friends at Atlas Obscura. Their podcast is a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And often, the places they cover are incredible or wondrous because of food. Later in the show, host Dylan Thuris will take us to Abbeville, Louisiana, to eat a giant omelet. But first, we're diving into the story of the Meyer lemon. All right, here's Dylan talking with Mandy Neglitch.
5:56 Speaker 02 Mandy's not just a professional taster, but also an expert on the history of the Meyer lemon. Mandy wrote this incredible story for Atlas Obscura about the Meyer lemon. And so we are gonna do a deep dive into the lemon, the eccentric plant explorer who discovered it, and accidentally released this seemingly unstoppable virus, causing this very real mid-century citrus panic.
6:23 Speaker 02 Maybe we should talk about the reputation of the Meyer lemon. It sort of has this aura of like specialness about it. You see it very clearly called out on menus. Like if you're using a Meyer lemon, no one ever just says lemon. They're like, oh, it's this, we're going Meyer lemons. Why does it have that kind of like specialness to it?
6:43 Speaker 01 Two things make it really special. One is the very, very thin peel. So as a grocery store lemon, you might see that big white pith around the citrus, separating it from the rind, kind of the zest of the lemon.
6:54 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:54 Speaker 01 Meyer lemon doesn't really have that separation. So you don't have all that bitterness in there. You have that really fresh, beautiful zest that has this special kind of rose floral notes that typical grocery store lemons don't have. And then you get right into the flesh of the lemon. So if you really wanted to, you could just bite into a Meyer lemon, um, right through the peel and especially if it's not waxed.
7:14 Speaker 02 Is this a thing you've done? Are you just like walking around eating Meyer lemons like apples? Just like?
7:19 Speaker 01 I have done it, yes. And it's great. That's why you can do it on a tart, too, if you want to like, um, preserve it. You just don't have all that bitterness of the pith. And then the flesh is also just a little bit sweeter, a little bit less, um, less tart.
7:33 Speaker 02 Listener, you may have noted that we were not taste testing a Meyer lemon because despite our producer Amanda's most rigorous efforts to find and source Meyer lemons near us on the East Coast, it was effectively impossible. Why are they so hard to find?
7:51 Speaker 01 So during very narrow seasons, you can sometimes find them here in New York. But because of that really thin peel, they're very easy to damage and bruise. And yeah, they'll get those big ugly bruises. And we know, there's one thing we know about grocery stores, it's that they're not going to be selling a bruised fruit. So it's not always worth it for them to bring them out here. And, um, they can be a lot more expensive, too.
8:14 Speaker 02 But there's something else unusual about the Meyer lemon. Unlike the other fruits and vegetables in the grocery store, it's named after a guy, Frank Meyer. I went through a period where I was like, pretty obsessed with Frank Meyer. He's like this classic adventurer type. He's always wearing this gigantic fur hat, big boots. And in the early 1900s, Frank worked for the US Department of Agriculture, the USDA, and he had a very unusual gig there.
8:45 Speaker 01 I mean, Frank Meyer, I think, has the coolest job title I've come across in research in a long time, which they just called him Plant Explorer Frank Meyer. But basically, he was sent out to bring new fruits, vegetables, citrus plants from Asia to America. He would go on these long trips where he'd be collecting samples, collecting seeds. He cataloged, I think it was over 2,500 different new species that we weren't aware of in the US. Brought back things like different kinds of pears, all different kinds of citrus. He traveled the world cataloging plants, sending back. His notebooks are amazing to read.
9:19 Speaker 02 Frank was, of course, not really discovering these plants. They were very well-known all over Asia. But what he was doing was finding them and introducing them to the United States. And the lemon that would later be named after him, that he first came across in the summer of 1908.
9:37 Speaker 01 It was just outside of Beijing. He said that it was an incredible lemon, that it was sweeter, it was something better. It was in a lot of homes there in China. And those were the letters that he wrote back to the USDA before he was able to send seeds and samples. So definitely knew that it was something special, but he was discovering a lot of special things at the time. So I don't know that he knew how long its legacy would be.
9:59 Speaker 02 He also seemed like this, just like personally, like this kind of complex, romantic, sometimes kind of dark character.
10:09 Speaker 01 A lot of his notebooks are public, public knowledge. You know, they're all published on the USDA website. And you can really track his moods through these letters. You know, he's talking about things like pears and berries and things like that, but he's also talking about- His loneliness, or that he thinks the locals in certain towns don't like him and other towns they do. Some people are very helpful to him, helping him collect things, helping him ship things. Other people are kind of trying to push him out of their area. Some people are fascinated by him, some people are a little afraid of him. And he, he takes all of that feedback emotionally, very, uh, very personally and definitely writes about plants the same way he writes about his emotions. And toward the end of his travels, you can start to see, yeah, some, some loneliness,
10:52 Speaker 01 some, I'm not going to diagnose anyone, but like kind of depressive thoughts crawling in, uh, about what, what his work's doing. Does anyone care what he's doing? Things like that. He kind of is writing letters home at the time that he's feeling there's tensions in China, he's feeling unwelcome, he's going to these small towns. What we see in the notes are, yeah, these things leading up to him being very lonely, not, not feeling like he's, has a fulfilling, um, life projection anymore.
11:23 Speaker 02 To give you an idea of his mindset, I want to read you just a portion of one letter that he sent to his boss at the USDA. It's dated May 18th, 1918. And he mentions passing through these villages that have burned down, how they were having difficulties getting food. And then he writes this somewhat mysterious, kind of quasi nihilistic passage. He writes, "It often seems that we do not live ourselves any longer, but that we are being lived. Uncontrollable forces seem to be at work among humanity and final results, or possibly purposes, are not being revealed as yet. That is, for so far as I can look into this whole Titanic cataclysm." In fact, that letter turns out to be his last.
12:09 Speaker 01 There's reports of him falling off a boat. Officially in the USDA, like the government reports are that it was like a boating accident. And then, yeah, he kind of washes up somewhere, uh, along a river. It's very mysterious, sad, kind of loose end hanging out there that, yeah, he, something happened, no one really knows exactly what.
12:37 Speaker 02 Meyer himself dies in 1918, but the lemon lives on. And then by the 1930s, it seems like it's sort of starting to really spread, you know, especially across California. Is that, is that kind of the right timeline of this?
12:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, if you look up the like newspaper ads and things like that, it's pretty fun. There's giveaways of like, get a free Meyer lemon tree when you buy something in the spring. California starts planting Meyer lemon trees on their medians and in between like streets and things like that, because they're beautiful, they grow pretty well. Yeah, they're trying to make it this California citrus thing. So it's really, it's fun to look through some of those old newspapers and just see lemon recipes, free lemon trees, how to take care of your lemon trees, there's a lot of columns like that. And then, yeah, California actively planting their own Meyer lemon trees in public spaces.
13:26 Speaker 02 But there is a real problem about that. There is a kind of ticking time bomb inside of these lemons. So what is this, what is this citrus plant hiding?
13:36 Speaker 01 It's a non-symptomatic carrier of quick decline citrus disease. It can act in days and just absolutely decimates other citrus plants. So there was huge blight happening in California citrus and they couldn't figure out what was going wrong. You know, just orange groves just absolutely declining to quick decline disease in days, weeks. Where is this disease coming from? And it's in every Californian's backyard or living room in these non-symptomatic Meyer lemon trees.
14:06 Speaker 02 Right, they end up being the like perfect stealth agent of death because they look healthy and well, and they're being planted all over the place. But then their disease is carried, it's like spread by, by like aphids or something?
14:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, the bugs that carry it and. Asian citrus in China had built up resistance to it and it was fine. But yeah, when it got into our American citrus, especially oranges, was the big issue. The aphids would get on the plants and just immediately they'd be declining and within days, trees would be dead.
14:43 Speaker 02 How big a deal was this? Like, how worried were people?
14:47 Speaker 01 It was a big enough deal that it was the first ever international gathering of citrus scientists and experts to try to fight this. It was the reason the International Organization of Citrus Biologists was created that still exists, trying to come up with a multi-pronged plan, both of how to save American citrus, but also protect other countries because the Meyer lemon was making its way down to South America. There was reports in Africa of the same things happening. So they wanted to get an international group together to figure out how far this had gone and how they could prevent it.
15:19 Speaker 02 It got quite intense. The US government got involved. It's like they start these big programs. What were some of the things they were doing to try and take, like, get rid of this Meyer lemon that they had now spread all over the place?
15:33 Speaker 01 They were literally sending people to knock on doors and if they saw Meyer lemon trees and say, "We're coming back next week and if that tree is still here, like, we're gonna forcibly take it" and things like that. So, yeah, there was, there was a lot of, there was, on one hand, the scientists were working like crazy to try to breed this gene out of Meyer lemons. And then on, on the ground, they were enlisting police forces, people from City Hall, tell on your neighbors if you see a Meyer lemon tree. They were obviously digging up all those public Meyer lemon trees and really, yeah, going out of their way to get them out of, out of their counties. And of course, when anything like that happens and someone's knocking on your door trying to take your lemon tree, all of a sudden, there's another faction that rises up that's
16:17 Speaker 01 like, "My rights, my lemon tree, my backyard" kind of thing. So some of the like little City Hall debates that were published in newspapers are, it's just insane the way that people want to defend their rights to poison local trees, I guess.
16:34 Speaker 02 It wasn't until 1976 that scientists at the University of California Riverside came up with an answer, an alternative.
16:42 Speaker 01 They bred a new Meyer lemon tree called the improved Meyer lemon. Like, if you're looking to buy a citrus tree online, you'll notice that they're all called improved Meyer lemon. You can't, you can't purchase the original genetics of a Meyer lemon anywhere in the US.
17:03 Speaker 02 I'm curious about you. How did you get interested in the story of the Meyer lemon? Why did you want to know more about it?
17:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I traveled through the many layers of the Cicerone certification program, which is basically sommelier, but for beer. And to get to master Cicerone, you have to be able to identify 32 different compounds just by scent and taste. So they're different off flavors in beer. So you have to go through really a whole certification process to learn these flavors, be able to blind identify them. I was a longtime Meyer lemon lover. And I was hoping, when I was doing research for my book, How to Taste, there was like some chemical compound in the Meyer lemon that was what made it so different from a standard lemon. So I was looking through all the scientific papers, and all you can find is like scientific papers about how to eradicate Meyer lemons,
17:53 Speaker 01 how, how they're full of disease, how to get them out of the country. So I never found the compound. It does just seem to be a different balance of compounds.
18:03 Speaker 02 So there is no quick, easy chemical shortcut to get that perfect, not-too-tart, slightly floral, complex Meyer lemon taste. But luckily, if you can't find them at the grocery store near you, Mandy says you can definitely try growing them on your own. That is how they got popular initially.
18:20 Speaker 01 They're pretty resilient. They're much better than something like a lime tree, or a lot of people try to grow yuzu as well at home. Riverside actually has a list that they recommend of places that are not going to sell you an almost dead tree.
18:34 Speaker 01 Because that's the big problem, is not that they'll give you, you know, any citrus disease, but just that they're not well taken care of before they end up in your home, and you'll never get a lemon from them.
18:44 Speaker 02 Mandy Naglitch is the author of How to Taste: A Guide to Discovering Flavor and Savoring Life. She is also a certified taster and award-winning home brewer. Thanks, Mandy. As a terrible home brewer, I'm very impressed. I've, like, done it three times. I'm like, it was fine, but no one's, no one's writing to anybody about the things that I brewed.
19:04 Speaker 01 Thank you for having me. It's always fun to talk about Frank and his many adventures.
19:11 Dan Pashman? Coming up after the break, a giant omelet in Louisiana and the secret society behind it. Stick around.
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22:36 Dan Pashman? Welcome back to The Sporkful. I'm Dan Pashman. And I know this is the time of year where maybe you're gonna look ahead. It's the beginning of the year, you're looking ahead. But you know, make sure you take a second and look back, because we've got a lot of great episodes we released in the last few months that you may have missed. There's a medical mystery we look into with my friend Abigail Keel, an interview about the legendary cookbook editor Judith Jones, who worked with Julia Child and Madar Joffrey. We also talk about non-alcoholic drinks with sober mixologist L.P. O'Brien. And we talk with Christina Cho and Brian Ford about their recent cookbooks. Of course, the best way to make sure you don't miss Sporkful episodes is to subscribe to The Sporkful in your podcasting app of choice. Go to The Sporkful page in your podcasting app and hit the plus sign, or the heart, or the favorite button, or the follow button, whatever the thing is in your app. Please take a minute. You can
23:19 Dan Pashman? do it right now, while you're listening. Thank you. Okay, back to Dylan Thuris of the Atlas Obscura podcast.
23:27 Speaker 02 I have something to tell you all. A little bit of a confession.
23:34 Speaker 02 Last year, I joined a secret society.
23:38 Speaker 04 The word Conferé means brothers, our members, our good friends. And so, the Conferé is a friendship, an organization based on friendships.
23:49 Speaker 05 In that sense, I guess it is a little bit of an underground cult.
23:53 Speaker 02 Bonnie Broussard and Rosalyn White are my fellow cult members. They belong to the Conferé de Abbeville, based in Abbeville, Louisiana.
24:04 Speaker 05 It's an honor to be invited. It means that that group thinks that you could really contribute and be a good ambassador of your city.
24:12 Speaker 02 Like other fraternal organizations turned community groups, think, you know, the Elks Club, Eagles Club, the Masons. The Conferé de Abbeville is steeped in tradition. Their members have celebratory outfits, and there is a formal induction ceremony to welcome new members.
24:33 Speaker 04 Maybe we should learn what I need to learn to get knighted for this ceremony. For the ceremony, all right, let's do it.
24:39 Speaker 02 But there's something else that sets the Conferé de Abbeville apart from other secret societies. Because this group is dedicated to upholding a very specific tradition.
24:51 Speaker 04 I'll say it in English and then say it in French. Okay. I make the oath to pledge to stay faithful to the tradition of the giant omelet.
25:02 Speaker 04 Okay, so now you would say, je fais... Je fais. Le serment... Le serment. De rester? De rester.
25:10 Speaker 02 That's right. I pledged an allegiance and have remained faithful to upholding the tradition of the giant omelet. Maybe you think this isn't serious. Maybe you think it sounds silly, this omelet secret society. But this tradition is no joke at all. Here in Louisiana, crawfish, Cajun culture, and centuries of tradition, these are the ingredients in America's biggest breakfast.
25:43 Speaker 02 This episode was produced in partnership with Go USA TV, and it's based on a video series we do with them called Small Town Big Story. Today, we're going to Abbeville, Louisiana. It's 150 miles west of New Orleans, in the absolute heart of Cajun country. And every year, thousands of people come from across the country to march through the streets, play music, celebrate French culture, and eat a absolutely enormous omelet. We dive into the excellence of America's giant omelet and find out it's a lot more than it's cracked up to be. Okay, no more egg jokes.
26:28 Speaker 04 I've been a member of the Giant Omelet Festival Conferie since, I think, 1998. We are the Guinness Book of World Records Giant Omelet for the United States.
26:39 Speaker 02 Bonnie was my guide to all things omelet in Abbeville. Abbeville is a small town of around 10,000 people, right in the heart of the bayou. It's got this beautiful, French-inspired architecture. It's got tons of old oak trees. And together with the other members of the Conferie de Abbeville, Bonnie helps put on this delicious, gigantic omelet festival every single year. And when I say that it's gigantic, I don't just mean that the festival is gigantic. I mean, the omelet is genuinely just enormous. It is cooked in a 12-foot skillet with more than 5,000 eggs, 50 pounds of onions, and 75 bell peppers.
27:23 Speaker 04 I think it's like 52 or 53 pounds of butter. Then the onions and the bell pepper and any other vegetables are added to it.
27:37 Speaker 02 The festival is the main event. It's all about food and dance and the Cajun principle of joie de vivre, the joy of life. We'll talk more about that soon, but I feel like first I should take you behind the scenes. I need to tell you the stories of some of the incredible, hardworking people who make this celebration possible. People like Bonnie and her secret society.
28:05 Speaker 02 Throughout the history of Abbeville and Louisiana, groups like the Conferie played an important role, and not just in the joyous times. They served this vital purpose for French Cajuns, this community that was pretty hard-pressed to find support anywhere else. You probably know that Louisiana has a huge French population. But for many French Cajuns, the road there was a hard one. In the mid-18th century, many French people who had settled in the region formerly known as Acadia on the east coast of Canada were expelled from the country by the government that was then in charge, the British. Afterwards, forced from their home, many made their way down to Louisiana,
28:50 Speaker 02 where the then-Spanish governor welcomed them in. In fact, the word Cajun is a local version of the French word "Acadian", meaning "from Acadia". The Cajuns established businesses. They fished. They even started secret societies. And in the early days, these fraternal organizations were responsible for doing things like help people pay their bills or taking care of family members if someone passed away. But the group was also responsible for making some fun, for putting on events that brought people together in good times. These days, it is a serious group that doesn't take themselves too seriously. Where secret societies of old dressed in cloaks
29:34 Speaker 02 and had jewelries for the ceremonies, the Conferie de Abbeville wear white chef robes like you'd see at a high-end French restaurant. They wear truly comically tall French chef hats.
29:47 Speaker 02 I was an honorary member for the weekend after repeating my pledge in truly horrible, unbelievably bad French.
29:56 Speaker 05 Je fais.
29:57 Speaker 06 Je fais.
29:58 Speaker 05 Le sermon.
30:00 Speaker 06 Le sermon.
30:01 Speaker 02 And when you are inaugurated into the group, a necklace is placed over your head with an engraved skillet on it as a kind of medallion of honor.
30:11 Speaker 05 De rester.
30:12 Speaker 06 De rester.
30:13 Speaker 05 Fidèle.
30:14 Speaker 06 Fidèle à la tradition des omelettes tant que je vivrai et de transmettre à mes enfants le usage de cette couture.
30:31 Speaker 02 Maybe you are wondering, why an omelet? Is that particularly French? What does it have to do with this Cajun history? Well, the story goes something like this. Napoleon, while traveling through the south of France, had an omelet so delicious, he ordered his chefs to make one for the entire town, so that the whole town could experience his joy. And from the seed of this story, a legend, the giant omelet community has grown and expanded. And it isn't just a way for locals to come together over food. The giant omelet is also a way for egg fanatics
31:13 Speaker 02 to connect with other people of French origin all throughout the world.
31:19 Speaker 05 Abbeville is a member of a worldwide conférence. The giant omelet happens in six other places in the world.
31:25 Speaker 06 That's Arline Colly. She's the grand matra of the conférence.
31:30 Speaker 05 It's really a cultural exchange between people of French language and culture.
31:35 Speaker 02 Though Abbeville is the only place in the US that whips up this gigantic omelet, communities with French roots in Canada, in France, in Argentina, in Belgium, in New Caledonia, they come together to do this very same thing. And in the off-season, they share recipes and tips with each other. And Abbeville has a lot to share. Take it from Bonnie.
32:00 Speaker 04 Once the skillet is brought onto the fire, the butter is added to it.
32:05 Speaker 02 After the butter, you add the onions, the bell peppers. And then comes this thing that sets Abbeville's omelet apart on the global skillet scene.
32:14 Speaker 04 And then the crawfish is added. That's our staple. We love crawfish in this area.
32:19 Speaker 02 This is the Cajun secret, the crawfish. It is not your normal omelet ingredient, but in Abbeville, it is essential. So essential that when I visited Abbeville, I ended up getting a whole education about this star ingredient. Crawfish are an absolute staple here. Not just because they're delicious, and they are, but because this is also one of the only parts of the world where they really thrive. The mix of saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico and freshwater coming down from rivers, it makes the perfect habitat for these sort of little tiny lobster-like creatures. And here in Cajun country, they are also an essential part of the area's industry. Gonna go out in the boat. We're gonna make the round.
33:05 Speaker 02 This is Barry Tuks. He has a crawfish farm near Abbeville. You actually gonna pick up the traps? Okay. I'm just gonna drive the boat. You're gonna hand the trap back to me and I'm gonna put it back in the water. And I am here to get absolutely schooled in the process of harvesting crawfish.
33:22 Speaker 06 You gotta, you gotta go quicker than that. The next one's coming out.
33:25 Speaker 02 Can I throw the, all right, put that back to you. You gotta get all the crawfish out. That's a rookie mistake. Leaving a crawfish there? Yeah. I got it. I got it.
33:37 Speaker 02 It is hard, fast work. It's also the lifeblood of the area. I can't imagine pulling 800 of these in a day. He did, he made about a C. C+.
33:53 Speaker 02 With relatively small thanks to me, many of these crawfish will soon end up in the giant omelet. In the meantime, we needed to take a break from all that hard work, so we did like the locals do. So this is a, this is a crawfish boil? We had ourselves a crawfish boil, complete with bright red crawfish, corn, mushrooms, potatoes, onions.
34:19 Speaker 02 Lemon, all of it stews for hours in this rich Cajun spice broth. Crawfish boils are for birthdays, they're for weddings, they're also just for relaxing after a long, hard day.
34:31 Speaker 06 Wait, so you break the tail off and then you suck this part out? You squeeze the head, squeeze the head. It's got, it's got some juices in there. It's a Cajun party. Yeah. You're drinking, you're eating. You're hanging out. You're, you know. I'm better than the best at eating. That's the thing I'm good at.
34:45 Speaker 02 Here in Louisiana, just like in the crawfish boil, it is all about balance. This balance between hard work and celebration. And through it all, there is huge amounts of pride. Pride in your history and your roots, in your work. And for Barry, in the fact that his crawfish will be shared with the community in this giant breakfast fueled get together.
35:10 Speaker 06 I'm very proud to be Cajun. Cajuns are known for their hospitality and their food. Yeah. And you got it both over here.
35:20 Speaker 02 Finally, after working the crawfish traps, learning about Cajun culture, and my honorary induction into the Conferie de Abbeville, it was time.
35:31 Speaker 06 This is the big day. This is the omelet festival.
35:34 Speaker 02 The day started with the blessing of the eggs. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
35:43 Speaker 02 There was a small procession where children played fiddles and accordions. I did a stint at the bread cutting station. You cannot have this breakfast without a little bread.
35:53 Speaker 06 So I'm just cutting this in half down here, like. That's what I've been doing. All right.
35:57 Speaker 02 Half, and then I cut it this way.
35:58 Speaker 06 You got it.
35:59 Speaker 02 And then my new friends in Abbeville gave me the immense honor of trying my hand at an old egg cracking tradition. You back up a tractor, like a, like a big green farming tractor, and you back it up into an egg. It is being held in place by a gentle metal clamp on a stand behind me. You're trying to do it very carefully.
36:21 Speaker 04 You are gonna be in the tractor. You are going to use the clutch.
36:26 Speaker 06 Okay.
36:26 Speaker 04 And you're gonna ease back.
36:28 Speaker 02 In theory, the idea is that you put the smallest possible crack in the egg, but you do not break the whole thing.
36:35 Speaker 04 Just a crack. If it starts oozing out, you cracked it too much.
36:41 Speaker 02 You're getting there, you're getting there. I never did get there, but this is Abbeville, home to some of the friendliest people I've ever met. And even when I fully, totally obliterated the egg, everyone still cheered me on. Oh, oh, hey.
36:59 Speaker 02 And then it was time to make the omelet. And in the middle of the street, over an open fire, stood the 12-foot-wide skillet. Surrounded by volunteers and members of the Conferie d'Abbeville, the time had come.
37:15 Speaker 05 All right, everyone, that's time. They are adding those 5,038 eggs.
37:30 Speaker 02 5,038 eggs. That is 5,000 eggs, plus one for every year since the festival started. Volunteers cracked all of them, one by one. And I have to say, when it was all over and I tasted the omelet, it was delicious. It was 50 pounds of butter, 50 pounds of onions, 75 bell peppers, and of course, the crawfish. And it just, it really hit the spot.
38:02 Speaker 02 So much goes into making this giant, delicious omelet. In Abbeville, it is this celebration of food and life and community, but it's also about centuries of tradition. It's about the work in the crawfish swamps and just the joy of camaraderie. It is Conferie. It is friendship, it is fellowship, it is togetherness. And not just there in Abbeville, but connected with the whole world, to all of these places, all these French communities. A way to celebrate what makes us unique, like putting a little crawfish in your omelet. But also, what we all share the world over. Just ask Bonnie Broussard, my guide to the omelet of Abbeville.
38:45 Speaker 04 I can say I've got friends worldwide because of the giant omelet. It's a wonderful thing.
38:51 Speaker 02 I'm gonna try it, hang on.
38:54 Speaker 02 That is an excellent omelet. And that is delicious.
39:08 Dan Pashman? If you want to see the full video, the full glory of the Giant Omelet Festival, you can watch the episode and lots of other episodes from our award-winning series, Small Town, Big Story, on GoUSA TV or the GoUSA TV YouTube channel.
39:30 Dan Pashman? Thanks to our friends at Atlas Obscura for bringing us both of these stories today. The Atlas Obscura Podcast is a co-production of Stitcher Studios and Atlas Obscura, hosted by Dylan Thuris. Amanda McGowan and Julia Russo produced the Meyer Lemon story, and Katie Thornton produced the Giant Omelet story. The rest of the Atlas Obscura team includes Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Camille Stanley, Johanna Mayer, Manolo Morales, Baudelaire, Gabby Gladney, Amanda McGowan, Alexa Lim, Casey Holford, and Luce Fleming. Their theme music is by Sam Tyndall. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era, plus live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's
40:12 Dan Pashman? interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. This episode was produced by me, along with managing producer- Emma Morgenstern. and senior producer- Andres O'Hara. It was edited by- Nora Ritchie. Our engineer is-
40:35 Speaker 02 Jared O'Connell.
40:36 Dan Pashman? Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producers are Nora Ritchie and Colin Anderson. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman. And I'm Eric Stauffer from Indianapolis, Indiana, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.
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42:06 Speaker 02 What kind of day is it? It's a White Claw day. Grab a pack, grab your friends. Everything else in life can wait. Your friends shouldn't. Let's go. White Claw. Grab life by the claw. Please drink responsibly. Heart's also with flavors. White Claw's also works, Chicago, Illinois.
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