Shoe sausage from Frenchy’s Sausage Co. , available at Burns Original BBQ as “home links”
Cory Crawford, of Burns Original BBQ and grandson of founder Roy Burns Sr, with Percy “King” Creuzot, right, and chief executive officer of Frenchy’s Sausage Co.
Percy “King” Creuzot and ceo of Frenchy’s Sausage Co.
Shoe sausage from Frenchy’s Sausage Co. , available at Burns Original BBQ as “home links”
It was 1969 and Percy “Frenchy” Creuzot had a problem. He and his wife Sallie, newly transplanted from New Orleans, had opened the Frenchy Po-Boy post on Scott Street in the third district and were running out of sausages.
But any sausage. One of the most popular po-boy sandwiches featured a highly spicy Creole sausage known as chaurice. Creuzot can only get from the expatriate Creoles of the region, so he had to be creative.
One thing was for sure: there were many chaurices in New Orleans, but he didn’t have enough cash to pay a truck to ship him in a refrigerated truck, so he did the most productive thing: he paid his friends in New Orleans to buy a Greyhound bus ticket, pack the sausages in ice. , put them in suitcases and with them to Houston, where I would pick them up at the bus station and send them back for more.
This moment of entrepreneurial genius allowed Creuzot to earn allegiance in his po-boy position, where he added fried birds, okra and other Creole and Cajun specialties to the menu. chicken.
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Frenchy’s sausage can also be found in major local H-E-B supermarkets.
But I still needed a lot of sausages for the po-boy position. He discovered a warehouse near Heights where an Italian-American businessman had an Italian sausage production business, but the company closed. Creuzot bought the warehouse and all its sausage production. Apparatus and embarked on the manufacture of his own. He discovered Frenchy’s Sausage Company, still located on Pinemont Drive.
Although Creuzot’s son, Percy “King” Creuzot, contributed to the creation of the company, the eldest of the Creuzots sought to have his son go to university. King graduated from Texas Southern University and worked for Ford Motor Company from 1972 to 1977.
Meanwhile, Frenchy’s business continues to grow and the elder Creuzot wants help and called his son, whom King still remembers today.
“I know you love your job,” Creuzot told his son at the time, “but you never own Ford Motor Company. I need you to come and pick for me in the sausage business. “
“He’s right,” King says today, “so I quit that day and started running for the family circle business. “King Creuzot now oversees the affairs of the Frenchys in Houston.
The Creuzot put paints to expand the activity of sausage production. They had remnants of “bond meat” or meat ornaments used to make sausages. They sold this to the lively fish frying restaurants in Third Ward. While visiting places like Lott’s, Murphy’s, and Green’s, Creuzots saw a quick type of sausage made through the neighborhood’s African-American grilling masters, called “homemade ties” or “juicy ties” originating from Beaumont.
Over the years, the term “home link” has had a generic designation for this type of sausage, although technically it was not done on site in many restaurants.
The Creuzots made an edition of this sausage they called the Old Fashioned Barbecue Links and advertised it at small barbecues around Houston.
One such place was Burns BBQ, opened through Roy Burns Sr. at Acres Homes in 1973. In addition to the Old Fashioned link, the Creuzots carried shoe sausages with them on a sales call to Burns. When Roy Burns tested them look by look, he made the decision to serve the spiciest shoe sausage, while retaining the more familiar and classic nickname of “homemade bond”.
With Burns in mind, shoe sausage is a popular item on many fish fry menus starting in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing an unheard-of Creole flavor to Houston’s fish frying.
Burns Original BBQ is the largest of the French shoe sausage restaurants (still called “homemade links” on the menu), touting more than 1,200 pounds of Louisiana’s highly seasoned creation on Memorial Day weekend.
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