We were so wound up after the zydeco dancing breakfast that we needed to walk around and cool off, literally and metaphorically. It’s a good thing that Breaux Bridge is such a fun place – we had a good choice of nice quiet air-conditioned stores to wander around. Our favorites were the antique stores. They weren’t like the antique stores in the French Quarter in New Orleans, where everything is deathly quiet and the tab on most items will run you in the high 3 to 4 figures range. These places were more like museums, with an amazing variety of goods on the shelves. Even the shelves were antiques. The displays were wonderful, and it was more like getting an interactive history lesson than being in a store. We spent quite a bit of time examining things and learning about the eras.
One of the shops we went into was a store that sells Cajun Microwaves. When I first heard the words “Cajun Microwaves”, I thought it was a local joke, as much is made of the ingenuity of the Cajuns, and some of it can be off-the-usual-wall, although always clever. Seems that there’s a local tradition of filling a can with beer, sticking the chicken on it, and setting the whole thing on the barbecue. The chicken then cooks, marinating with the beer. It’s known as ‘drunken chicken’. Then some enterprising soul decided to improve on the original idea and created the Cajun Microwave.
A Cajun microwave is a cypress box built to cook meat – it’s a roasting oven. Inside the box is a tray that holds the meat, veggies, and other things that may be cooking at the same time. On top is a steel box/tray that holds the wood or charcoal that serves as a heating source, so the meat inside is cooked from the heat above. We were told that cooking it this way results in very crispy skins on the outside and very juicy meat on the inside; it’s like cooking in a Dutch oven. There are also trays that can be put on top of the wood/charcoal, and these have steel tubes that function like the original beer cans. These tubes can be filled with beer, wine, coke, 7-Up, crab boil – whatever the cook desires. Then the chicken is put on the tubes, and it cooks while ‘marinating’ in the sauce (like the ‘drunken chicken’). These ‘microwaves’ can be big enough to hold one or two chickens, or large enough to hold an entire pig. It’s also common to be cooking vegetables, rice dressing, chili, or macaroni and cheese with the meat, so it’s a true time-saver. I gotta say – if I were staying in one spot, I would definitely get one of these! Check out their website at www.cajunmicrowaves.com.
Another wonderful place we went into was a store that sold amazing clocks and gramophones. We’d never seen a gramophone in real life. The owner took some time with us – it was a slow rainy Saturday – and showed us an old wooden Victrola (which later became RCA) gramophone. He hand cranked the gramophone, and played the Ink Spots “If I Didn’t Care”. We looked at gramophones from the Victor Talking Machine Company, listening to Custer’s Last Stand, and the Sousa Band. We saw machines from 1908 ($17.50 back then); 1903, and one from 1913 that was $25 – these became mass-produced in the 1920s. It was like time travel to a former era. Check out our photo gallery for the gramophones.