Boucherie
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Boucherie is about a disappearing rural Cajun tradition: the communal hog slaughter that once supplied a family's meat for the winter, and the butchers who took part in it. Author Chase Cormier's grandfather was one of those butchers.
Cormier's eye is not sentimental. He traces the practice from its earliest roots through the spread of refrigeration to industrial packaging, and follows it into the present, drawing on cookbooks published as recently as the 2020s.
He is equally alert to how "Cajun" cuisine has been shaped, sold, and reinvented, through cookbooks, television chefs, and marketing, and connects that construction to larger questions of race, heritage, and belonging in the modern South. The result is a critical account of tradition, not a nostalgic one, built on fieldwork, oral history, and memoir, and grounded throughout by the people, like his grandfather, who kept the practice alive by hand.
At 101 pages, sized at 5 by 7 inches, this is a book that can be read in a single sitting, though its scope reaches well past its size.
Paperback. Color photographs.
Published on August 18, 2026
