Let me tell you about white women from the Midwest.
That got your attention, didn’t it?
There are a few things you should know. Such as all white women born between the Appalachians and the Rockies in the years from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty four know all the words to Sir Mix-A-Lot’s “Baby Got Back”. Don’t believe me? Do you have a white woman in your life? Go over to her right now and say, “Oh, my god, Becky, look at her butt,” and then stand back because shit’s about to pop off. Trust me. I know lots of white women born between the Appalachians and the Rockies in the years from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty four and I have been trapped in the car with two sometimes three of them for hours at a time. Sometimes, they break into it totally unprovoked.
The women I know born in, say, California? No idea what I’m talking about.
Women born in London? No idea what I’m talking about.
But you pull some forty year old HR senior coordinator aside, find out she was born in Chillicothe? And I’m talking Chillicothe, Illinois; Chillicothe, Iowa; Chillicothe, Missouri; Chillicothe, Ohio (represent); or even Chillicothe, Texas. You tell her you like big butts and you cannot lie and she’ll finish the fucking song for you.
AAAnnnddd another thing about white women that is absolutely one hundred percent true and not at all a stereotype - As though I would ever dream about casting stereotypes! - is that they all, at some point, make a pilgrimage to Jerusalem New Orleans, Louisiana to visit the Wailing Wall French Quarter. And then all these white women come back home and something is different about them, something you can’t quite put your finger on, something that’s first exhibited when you ask said white woman, “How was New Orleans?”
And she answers with, “Uh, no, it’s pronounced ‘Nawlins’.”
And she’ll go on and on about the architecture there and how cool it was to drink in the streets and yeah yeah yeah, the whatever of the depth of humanity and warmness or whatever but (here it comes), oh, my god, the po’ boys.
This is where life and conversation as you know it have each officially twisted into something altogether different from their original forms because now everything is tied to chiding you for having never had a po’ boy.
“Oh, my gawd, how have you never had a po’ boy!?” exclaims the white woman who had one for only the first time last week.
“I can’t believe you’ve never had a po’ boy!”
“You have got to try a po’ boy!”
“Oh, my god, I would literally kill for a shrimp po’ boy!”
“The best shrimp po’ boy I ever had was in Nawlins!”
“It’s not a real po’ boy unless you get it in Nawlins, you know. I mean, that’s just my opinion but still. Just saying.”
A white woman goes to New Orleans one time and comes back changed forever. That forty year old from one of five possible Chillicothes? She went to New Orleans when she was nineteen and she will, to this day, insist that you are an amoral dilettante brute because you’ve not had a po’ boy specifically from a place pronounced Nawlins.
And if you’re one of my white woman friends and you think I’m singling you out, I’m singling you out with at least five other white women. You are indeed not the only white woman I know who has this thing about po’ boys from Nawlins.*
Well, today, I wasn’t in Nawli- shit, now they got me doing it. I wasn’t in New Orleans but I figured I would give Cajun Boiling a try because it’s almost forty degrees out, still warm enough to ride two blocks to grab - wait for it - a catfish po’ boy. Which isn’t a real po’ boy, keep in mind, because it’s not from Nawlins.
Whatever, I just needed lunch.
So with 60mL of CBD oil in me, I headed down to Cajun Boiling, in the space that used to be home to the Reverie and, before that, the Acadia.** I walked in and the place was dead. Two servers both on their phones, one kid working the counter, one guy in the kitchen, and I was literally the only customer. OK, I know it’s chilly out today but it’s Saturday. It’s going to get to almost forty (4.4°C), guaranteed over thirty five (1.7°C), this isn’t cold at all except you won’t find me biking recreationally in this.***
And I look over the joint and, yep, we got our misogyny out of the way, make wwwaaayyy for the racism: It’s staffed completely by... Asian... people. At a Cajun restaurant. Which, yeah, sounds racist but, no, no, it just, no, yeah, it, it just sounds racist. That’s my bad.
Nothing says Asian folks can’t make Cajun food but... Well, if you were to walk into an Indian joint and you saw it was staffed by me and all my white women friends, wouldn’t you be like, “Huh.” Nothing says our little alabaster coalition can’t make tandoori chicken and palak paneer but aren’t you going to be a little more critical of it? I mean, face it, you’re racist, too.
[I have just been informed that New Orleans has a large Vietnamese community, thus it proves I am ignorant.]
The nice kid at the counter took my order - catfish† po’ boy to go - and I take a seat and blow through all my lives in Toon Blast and then I kind of wait and wonder what’s taking so long. I am, after all, the literal only customer.
Anyway, I get my sandwich after another couple minutes and bring it home. I am in the middle of doing laundry during this.
Well, serving size? I guess it seemed a little skimpy for ten dollars but then not every po’ boy can be the Google Images Po’ Boy Model, which, now that I’m looking at it, I can see, no, this was the right size.
Cajun Boiling’s po’ boy comes fixed with lettuce, mayo, mustard, pickle, and tomato. None of those things were particularly stand-out-ish save for that the pickle was sweet rather than dill but that was noticeable, not stand-out-ish.
The catfish could have been cod for all I know. I liked the crispiness of the breading but the fish could have used some seasoning. This probably falls on me, though. See, I grew up on smoked catfish and that’s still what I have a taste for to this day. I like the taste of smoked catfish, that’s the draw for me and, unfortunately, my expectation. I can’t knock Cajun Boiling for their breaded and deep fried catfish not tasting like smoked catfish. However, some seasoning might have been nice.
Trust me, aside from the one time I used Dave and Laura’s Lemon Pepper Mrs. Dash, this is the only seasoning I used until I was like twenty nine.
But the real...
Wait, we might have used the best one yesterday when we thought that was the last one for the year.
Hm...
OK, let’s try...
But the real time travelling member of the Hashtag Resistance attempting to go back in time to “woke” baby Hitler instead of murdering him because “when they go low, we go high” was the bread.
I know I don’t often praise the bread which is funny because this is a sandwich blog. If it weren’t for bread, there would be no sandwich, I get that. But I think I take it for granted, even bitch about it sometimes, or I just give it fleeting praise. In this case, however, this was the component that gave me pause as I was eating the sandwich. It had a hint of fermented sour to it but not enough to be sourdough and had a similar gluten elasticity and a rich brown crust... I mean, this bread outshone all the other elements of this sandwich.
On the whole, rating this sandwich fairly, I liked this sandwich but it wasn’t a $9.99 sandwich. Like $6.99. And you can’t argue to me that it’s because catfish comes at a premium because the sandwich costs the same whether you get it with catfish, chicken strips (chicken strips), crab, or shrimp. (It’s an extra dollar if you want oysters, though.) The veggies were unremarkable and the catfish could have used some seasoning but, yeah, I know, it’s not from Nawlins so it doesn’t count anyway.
I’m looking at their takeout menu and I’m not seeing fish & chips, which I know is an entirely different animal that I shouldn’t expect to see on a Cajun menu but that’s my primary expectation for a seafood joint: To get some fish & chips. So that’s on me. This menu, however, does offer among its sides some of the fixings you’d find at a New England clambake.
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