Mandy Naglich: The most important part of tasting is smelling. So before you put anything in your mouth you want to see how close each citrus has to get to your nose before you can smell it.

Dan Pashman: This is Mandy Naglich. Mandy is a professional taster and author of the book How to Taste. She’s also a past Sporkful guest – you may remember her from an episode we did about her quest to become a cicerone, kind of like a sommelier but for beer. 

Dan Pashman: Anyway, these days, Mandy is all in on tasting and she recently did a tasting with Dylan Thuras, host of the Atlas Obscura Podcast.

Dylan Thuras: I never smell my citrus before I eat it!

Mandy Naglich: You got to 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.

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Dan Pashman: Mandy and Dylan met up on Zoom. They each came prepared with some slices of lemons, and slices of clementines.

Dylan Thuras: Yeah, what should we eat first?

Mandy Naglich: I feel like clementine might be a little more subtle, so I'm gonna I'm going to go for that one first. You can see, like, the thinner, the thinner peel going on, there's less protection of the acid inside.

Dylan Thuras: Yeah. Mmm. Always delicious.

Mandy Naglich: 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...

Dylan Thuras: Yeah, but it’s so nice. I eat these by the like, millions. I eat so many of them. All right, now let's, let's do the lemon. 

Mandy Naglich: Let's hit the lemon. So I'm. Yeah, this is probably a Lisbon lemon. You can tell the thick, thick peel going on.

Dylan Thuras: I didn't know that that was the name of it. I just think of it as, like, the standard lemon. 

Mandy Naglich: Yeah a grocery store lemon’s always going to be a Eureka lemon or a Lisbon lemon pretty much.

Dylan Thuras: [00:06:15] Oh, it's not too bad, though.

Mandy Naglich: Yeah, yeah, I thought it was going to be like, you know, when you get that really harsh, like… 

Dylan Thuras: Yeah, 

Mandy Naglich: …almost painful pucker. But it's really it's pretty. Pretty nice.

Dylan Thuras: Well, as you can tell, we're going to be talking about citrus and, we're going to be talking about one particular citrus that is, in a weird way, kind of a combination of these two. 

Mandy Naglich: Yeah, 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 off season in grocery stores, as we’ve discovered. So we're doing the next best thing. I guess we can 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.

Dylan Thuras: I'm going to stack a clementine slice on my lemon and then like, bite the whole thing. 

Mandy Naglich: There you go.

Dylan Thuras: This may or may not work. That's pretty good actually. It’s pretty nice.

Mandy Naglich: Yeah you get a little bit of that balancing, right? The Mandarin or the Clementine kind of balances some of the tartness, but it's actually a pretty good approximation of what would go on. 

Dylan Thuras: That’s nice! I gotta get my hands on some Meyer lemons. This is delicious.

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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.

Dan Pashman: Before we get into it, I want to remind you that I’m doing a live Sporkful taping in Memphis next week! Thursday, January 16, 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 16. I’ll hang out afterwards and sign copies of my cookbook Anything's Pastable, 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! 

Dan Pashman: Okay, onto 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 Thuras will take us to Abbeville, Louisiana, to eat a giant omelet.

Dan Pashman: But first we’re diving into the story of the Meyer lemon. Alright, here’s Dylan – talking with Mandy Naglich.

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Dylan Thuras: Mandy is 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 going to 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. 

Dylan Thuras: 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 lemon. Why does it have that kind of “specialness” to it?

Mandy Naglich: 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. 

Dylan Thuras: Yeah. 

Mandy Naglich: 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 note 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, right through the peel. And especially if it's not waxed.

Dylan Thuras: Is this a thing you've done? Are you just like walking around eating Meyer lemons like apples? Just like…

Mandy Naglich: 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, 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, less tart.

Dylan Thuras: 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? 

Mandy Naglich: 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, if there's one thing we know about grocery stores, it's that they're not going to be selling bruised fruits. So it's not always worth it for them to bring them out here. And they can be a lot more expensive too.

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Dylan Thuras: But there’s something else unusual about the Meyer lemon. Unlike the other fruits or 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 and 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.

Mandy Naglich: 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 would be collecting samples, collecting seeds. He cataloged, I think it was over 2500 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.

Dylan Thuras: Of course, Frank wasn’t 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.

Mandy Naglich: 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 if he knew how long its legacy would be. 

Dylan Thuras: He also seemed like this, just like, personally, like this kind of complex, romantic, sometimes kind of dark character.

Mandy Naglich: 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 them out of their area. Some people are fascinated by him, some people are a little afraid of him. And he takes all of that feedback emotionally, very personally and definitely writes about plants the same way he writes about his emotions. And toward the end of his travels you start to see some, yeah, some loneliness some — I'm not going to diagnose anyone but kind of depressive thoughts crawling in about what his work’s doing, does anyone care about what he’s doing? Things like that.

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Mandy Naglich: 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 feeling like he has a fulfilling life projection anymore.

Dylan Thuras: 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 18, 1918. And he mentions passing through villages that had been burned down and how they were having difficulties getting food. And then he writes this somewhat mysterious, 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.”

Dylan Thuras:  In fact, that letter turns out to be his last.

Mandy Naglich: 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, along a river. It's very mysterious, sad, loose end hanging out there. Something happened. No one really knows exactly what.

Dylan Thuras: 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 kind of the right timeline of this?

Mandy Naglich: 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 l 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.

Dylan Thuras: 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?

Mandy Naglich: 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.

Dylan Thuras: Right! They end up being the 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 aphids or something?

Mandy Naglich: 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.

Dylan Thuras: How big a deal was this? Like, how how worried were people?

Mandy Naglich: 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 Virologists 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 things had gone and how they could prevent it. 

Dylan Thuras: It got quite intense. Like 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 it, like get rid of this Meyer lemon that they had now spread all over the place?

Mandy Naglich: They were literally sending people to knock on doors, and if they saw Meyer lemon trees they'd say, we're coming back next week, and if that tree is still here, like we're going to forcibly take it and things like that. So there was a lot of… On one hand the scientists were working like crazy to try to breed this gene out of Meyer lemons. Then 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 their counties. And then, 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 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. [LAUGHING]

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Dylan Thuras: It wasn’t until 1976 that scientists at the University of California, Riverside came up with an answer, an alternative. 

Mandy Naglich: 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 purchase the original genetics of a Meyer lemon anywhere in the US.

Dylan Thuras: 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?

Mandy Naglich: Yeah. So I traveled through the many layers of the cicerone certification program, which is basically a 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 there are 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, 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.

MUSIC

Dylan Thuras: So it sounds like there’s no quick chemical shortcut to getting that 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 try growing them on your own! That is how they got popular initially. 

Mandy Naglich: 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. Because that's the big problem, is not that the 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.

Dylan Thuras: Mandy Naglich 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 and it was fine but nobody’s writing to anybody about the things that I brewed.

Mandy Naglich: [LAUGHING] Thank you for having me. It's always fun to talk about Frank and his many adventures.

Dan Pashman:  Coming up after the break, a giant omelet in Louisiana – and the secret society behind it. Stick around.

+++ BREAK +++

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Dan Pashman: Welcome back to The Sporkful, I’m Dan Pashman. And I know this is a 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 to look back. Because we 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 Madhur Jaffrey. We also talk about non-alcoholic drinks with sober mixologist LP O’Brien, and we talk with Kristina Cho and Bryan 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 do it right now while you’re listening. Thank you.

Dan Pashman: Okay, back to Dylan Thuras of the Atlas Obscura Podcast.

Dylan Thuras: I have something to tell you all. A little bit of a confession. 

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Dylan Thuras: Last year, I joined a secret society. 

Bonnie Broussard: The word “confrérie” means brothers, or members, or good friends. And so the Confrérie is a friendship, an organization based on friendships. 

Roslyn White: In that sense, I guess it is a little bit of a, of a underground cult. 

Dylan Thuras: Bonnie Broussard and Roslyn White are my fellow cult members. They belong to the “Confrérie d’Abbeville,” based in Abbeville, Louisiana.

Roslyn: 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. 

Dylan Thuras:Like other fraternal-organizations-turned-community-groups — think you know, the Elks Club, the Eagles Club, the Masons — the Confrérie d’Abbeville is steeped in tradition. Their members have celebratory outfits, and there’s a formal induction ceremony to welcome new members.

Dylan Thuras: Maybe we should learn what I need to learn to get knighted for this…

Bonnie: Okay. 

Dylan Thuras: …this ceremony. 

Bonnie: For the ceremony. All right, let's do it. 

Dylan Thuras: But there’s something else that sets the Confrérie d’Abbeville apart from other secret societies. Because this group is dedicated to upholding a very specific tradition.

Bonnie:  I'll say it in English and then say it in French. “I make the oath to pledge to stay faithful to the tradition of the giant omelet.” Okay, so now you would say, [SPEAKING FRENCH]

Dylan Thuras: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

Dylan Thuras: 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. 

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Dylan Thuras: This episode was produced in partnership with GoUSA 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 an absolutely enormous omelet. We dive into the egg-celence of America’s giant omelet, and find out that it’s even more than it’s cracked up to be. Okay. No more egg jokes.

Bonnie: I've been a member of the Giant Omelet Festival Confrérie since 19, I think 1998. We are the Guinness Book of World Records' Giant Omelette for the United States. 

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Dylan Thuras: Bonnie was my guide to all things omelet in Abbeville. Abbeville is a small town of about 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 Confrérie d’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’s cooked in a 12-foot skillet, with more than 5000 eggs, 50 pounds of onions, and 75 bell peppers. 

Bonnie: 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. 

Dylan Thuras: 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, hard-working people who make this celebration possible. People like Bonnie and her secret society.

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Dylan Thuras: Throughout the history of Abbeville and Louisiana, groups like the Confrérie 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 elsewhere. 

Dylan Thuras: 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-eighteenth 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, where the then-Spanish governor welcomed them in.  In fact, the word “Cajun” is a local version of the French word “Acadiene” — meaning “from Acadia.”

Dylan Thuras: The Cajuns established businesses, they fished, they even started secret societies. And in the early days, these fraternal organizations were responsible doing things like help people pay their bills, or taking care of family members if someone passed away.

Dylan Thuras: But the group was also responsible for making some fun. For putting on events that brought people together in the good times. These days, it is a serious group that doesn’t take themselves too seriously. Where secret societies of old dressed in cloaks and had jewelries for the ceremonies, the Confrérie d’Abbeville wear white chef robes like you’d see at a high-end French restaurant. They wear truly comically tall French chef hats. I was an honorary member for the weekend after repeating my pledge in truly horrible, unbelievably bad French... 

Bonnie: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

Dylan Thuras: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

Dylan Thuras: And when you are inaugurated into the group, a necklace is placed over your head, with an engraved skillet as a kind of medallion of honor.

Bonnie: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

Dylan Thuras: [SPEAKING FRENCH]

Crowd: Bravo!

Dylan Thuras: Maybe you are wondering: Why an omelet? Is that particularly French? What does it have to do with that Cajun history? Well the story goes something like this…

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Dylan Thuras: Napoleon, while traveling through the south of France, had an omelet so delicious he ordered the chefs 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 to connect with other people of French origin throughout the world.

Arlene: Abbeville is a member of a worldwide confrérie. The giant omelette happens in six other places in the world.

Dylan Thuras: That’s Arlene Collee. She’s the grand maitre of the confrérie. 

Arlene: It's really a cultural exchange between people of French language and culture.

Dylan Thuras: Though Abbeville is the only place in the US that whips up this giant omelet, communities with French roots in Canada, in France, in Argentina, in Belgium, in New Caledonia, they come together to do the same thing. And in the off-season, they share recipes and tips with each other. 

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Dylan Thuras: And Abbeville has a lot to share. Take it from Bonnie.

Bonnie: So, once the skillet is brought onto the fire, the butter is added to it…

Dylan Thuras: Bonnie says, after the butter there’s the onions, the bell peppers. And then comes this thing that sets Abbeville’s omelet apart on the global skillet scene.

Bonnie: And then the crawfish is added. That's our staple. We love crawfish in this area.

Dylan Thuras: 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.

[AMBIENT SOUND]

Dylan Thuras: Crawfish are an absolute staple here. Not just because they’re delicious, and they are. But also because this is one of the only parts of the world where they thrive. The mixture of salt water from the Gulf of Mexico and fresh water coming down from rivers make this the perfect habitat for these shrimp-like creatures. And here in Cajun country, they’re also an essential part of the area’s industry.

Barry Toups: We're gonna go out on the boat, we're going to make the rounds.

Dylan Thuras: This is Barry Toups. He has a crawfish farm near Abbeville.

Barry: You're actually going to pick up the traps. I'm just going to drive the boat. You're going to hand the trap back to me. I'm going to put it back in the water.

Dylan Thuras: And I am here to get absolutely schooled in the process of harvesting crawfish.

Barry: You gotta, you gotta go quicker than that. The next one's coming up.

Dylan Thuras: Should I throw the — alright, I put that back to you.

Barry: Gotta get all the crawfish out!

Barry: That's a rookie mistake.

Dylan Thuras: Leaving the crawfish in. I got it. I got it.

Dylan Thuras: It is hard, fast work. It is also the lifeblood of the area. 

Dylan Thuras: I can't imagine pulling 800 of these in a day.

Barry: He did, he made about a C, C+.

Dylan Thuras: 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. 

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Dylan Thuras: So this is a crawfish boil.

Dylan Thuras: We had ourselves a crawfish boil, complete with bright red crawfish, corn, mushrooms, potatoes, onions, lemon. All of it stews for hours in this rich, Cajun-spiced broth. Crawfish boils are for birthdays, they’re for weddings. They’re also just for relaxing after a long, hard day. 

Dylan Thuras: Wait, so you break the tail off and then you suck this part out?

Barry: Yeah. Squeeze the head, squeeze the head. It's got some juices in there.  It's a Cajun party.

Dylan Thuras: Yeah.

Barry: You're drinking, you're eating.

Dylan Thuras: You're hanging out. I'm the best at eating them. That's the thing I'm good at.

Dylan Thuras: 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 — pridein 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.

Barry Toups: And I'm very proud to be Cajun. Cajuns are known for their hospitality and their food. And you got it both over here.

Dylan Thuras: Finally, after working the crawfish traps, learning about Cajun culture, and my honorary induction into the Confrerie d’Abbeville, it was finally time.

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Dylan Thuras: This is the big day. This is the Omelette Festival.

Dylan Thuras: The day started with the blessing of the eggs.

Priest: In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Dylan Thuras: 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.

Dylan Thuras: So I'm just cutting this in half down here?

Helper: That's what I've been doing.

Dylan Thuras: Alright.

Helper: In half, and then I cut it this way. You got it.

Dylan Thuras: And then my new friends in Abbeville gave me the immense honor of trying my hand at an egg cracking tradition. You back up a tractor — 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.

Host: You are going to be in the tractor. You are going to use the clutch.

Dylan Thuras: Okay.

Host: And you're going to ease back.

Dylan Thuras: In theory, the idea is that you put the smallest possible crack in the egg. But you do not break the whole thing.

Host: Just a crack. If it starts oozing out, you've cracked it too much.

Crowd: Oh!

Host: Oh, you're getting there, you're getting there.

Dylan Thuras: 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.

Crowd: Oh, oh! Heyyyy!

Dylan Thuras: 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 Confrerie d’Abbeville. The time had come.

Mayor: Alright, everyone. It's that time, they are adding those 5,038 eggs!

Dylan Thuras: Five thousand thirty-eight eggs. That is 5,000 eggs, plus one for every year since the festival started. Volunteers cracked all of them, one by one. And have to say, when it was all over, and I tasted the omelet, it was… 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.

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Dylan Thuras: So much goes into 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 confrerie — 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 of 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.

Bonnie: I can say I've got friends worldwide because of the giant omelette. It's a wonderful thing.

Dylan Thuras: I’m gonna try it, hang on. That is an excellent omelet. That is delicious.

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Dylan Thuras: If you want to see the full video, the full glory of 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.

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