Boudin is cooked pork and rice seasoned with onions, peppers, and Cajun spice, stuffed into a sausage casing, steamed or smoked, and sold at gas stations, meat markets, and butcher shops across the Cajun prairie. It is not a restaurant food. It is a road food, a morning food, a stop-on-the-way food. You eat it standing in a parking lot, squeezing the filling from the casing directly into your mouth. The casing is discarded. This is not considered unusual. Boudin grew out of the boucherie — the communal pig slaughter where Cajun families gathered to process a hog for winter and found uses for every part of the animal. Rice extended the meat; seasoning made it something to look forward to. The Johnson family in Eunice was among the first to sell it commercially in the 1930s and 1940s. Today the town of Scott, five miles west of Lafayette on I-10, has been designated the Boudin Capital of the World by the Louisiana State Legislature. The debate over who makes the best link is perpetual, local, and sincere.