Museums, Bakeries & Crawfish--all in a retiree's day

Friday's jaunt took us to the small town of Jeanerette. Our 1st stop was at the “Le Beau Petit Musee” translates to the Pretty Little Museum—which describes this museum perfectly. It is housed in a picturesque Victorian cottage, and its primary focus is Louisiana’s 200-year-old sugar cane industry, although there were also a number of interesting artifacts and exhibits to view throughout the house as well. Our guided tour began with us viewing a video that explaining the growing, harvesting & processing of sugar cane into sugar. We learned there are 450,000 acres are devoted to growing sugar cane and provides 20% of the sugar in the US. it is a huge industry in this part of LA. Basically this museum provides a brief sampling of life along the Bayou Teche for those that worked and lived in or near the town through artifacts, exhibits and pictorial history.

Before leaving Jeanerette we just had to hit the historic bakery we had been told about, and who were we to pass up an opportunity to visit a bakery. We were told LeJeune's bakers have been kneading dough in Jeanerette since 1884 as is stated on the outside of their red brick building. Their bread loaves rise in the oldest bakery in Louisiana and the only one on the National Register of Historic Places. Three generations of the LeJeune family have baked goodies in the original brick ovens that are still in use. Jim & Diane bought one of their popular French breads and we bought one of their ginger cakes—of course neither Frank nor Jim were able to pass up buying one of their sweet fruit pockets which they promptly devoured on the spot.

On our drive along the many flooded ponds near Abbeville we saw Crawfish farmers in flat bottom boats pulling their traps. Growers harvest crawfish in baited traps placed after flooding the ponds. These pyramid-style traps have three openings for crawfish to enter. Baited traps are harvested on a routine schedule and the crawfish collected.
One of the fascinated things we learned from a farmer was that crawfish in this part of Louisiana use what is referred to as double cropping. Rice is planted in April, and six to eight weeks later they flood the pond with about 18 inches of water. Fifty to 75 pounds of crawfish brood stock per acre are added to the pond to grow and reproduce. In August, the pond is drained, the crawfish burrow underground in the mud and the rice is harvested. Crawfish burrow when water temperatures get too warm and when oxygen levels are low. They survive as long as their gills stay moist. The pond is reflooded after rice harvest. Rice that has been harvested still has a lot of stalks remaining which, as they decay, provide material which the crawfish feed on. Producers harvest market-size crawfish from November to April after the rice has been harvested. The pond is then drained, rice is replanted and the process begins again in April. I always assumed crawfish were found only in freshwater creeks and lakes, so this process was fascinating to us.