(Chris Preovolos/Baton Rouge Advocate, via AP)
ABOVE: Convict poker at the Angola Prison Rodeo, the self-proclaimed “Wildest Show in the South.”
12/13/2009
I stumbled on an interesting Hidden Kitchens radio story about food at the Angola Prison Rodeo while exploring the NPR app on my new iPhone.
If you’ve never been to the popular event at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, which more than lives up to its billing as the “Wildest Show in the South,” I’m not sure how to explain the bizarreness that is the prison rodeo. The prison is a working farm on the site of a former massive cotton plantation tucked into a bend in the Mississippi River. Driving into the penitentiary, you see the unsettling sight of inmates picking cotton while corrections officers on horseback keep a watchful eye on the fields.
But when you enter the 10,000-seat rodeo arena, it gets downright surreal. I can’t even adequately describe it, so just use your imagination. It’s brutal.
But the food is killer.
“You got things here that you can’t find in society,” says one inmate regarding the prison’s boudin balls (cajun fried hush puppies with sausage or crawfish inside). I don’t know what that means, but they are damn good.
And so is the etouffee.
LISTEN HERE: Broncos and Boudin.
–CP
