Tonkin, French sausage and a small town in Texas

While looking at photos of Camp Wood, Texas, I came across King’s Texas Smokehouse, which is a few miles south of Camp Wood, on Texas Highway 55.

The picture at King’s Smokehouse shows what the barbecue place has to offer – Beer, Sausage, Boudin, Jerky, Choice Meats and BBQ. Boudin I knew as a Cajun sausage, and I wondered what a South Louisiana sausage was doing all the way over onto the southeast part of the Edwards Plateau.

Well, I did not discover why boudin is popular in Central Texas, but I did learn much more.

Boudin is, of course, a Cajun sausage, and is produced in several European countries under other names. European Union rules state with some determination that certain sausages will be produced only in specific places within the EU, with breakers of the law subject to fines and sentenced to time in France. But we were not discussing the Franco-Deutsch rules of Occupied Europe.

Boudin is also prominently mentioned in the French Foreign Legion marching song. A meal of boudin for the Alsatians, Swiss and Lorraines, the Legionnaires sing, but not for the Belgians, for they are a bunch of shirkers. The king of Belgium in appeasing Prussia pleaded with Napoleon III not to allow Belgians in the Legion to fight against Prussia in the 1870 war. Napoleon III agreed, giving a place of non honor to Belgians in the Legion.

La Boudin mentions two battles of specific honor – Camerone and Tuyen Quang. The first occurred in Mexico when Napoleon III was propping up Emperor Maximillian, an Austrian. The siege of Tuyen Quang was in Tonkin, the northern part of what is now Vietnam, in the Sino-French War, August 1884-April 1885. A French garrison at the Pale River outpost saw 630 Legionnaires and a company of Tonkinese riflemen withstand attacks by an estimated 9,000 Chinese soldiers for four months.

So, there it is – a war in Vietnam, a sausage not served to Belgians, and a small town in Texas. Today’s history lesson.