Hot Sausage Po' Boy

The hot sausage po' boy is what Louisiana eats when nobody's watching. Not the shrimp po' boy tourists order on Bourbon Street. Not the oyster po' boy food writers photograph. This is the working lunch, the after-shift reward, the sandwich that built this city one spicy bite at a time.

At Lagniappe, we serve more hot sausage po' boys on Fridays than any other sandwich. There's a reason. The sausage does most of the work for you. Good Louisiana hot sausage comes already seasoned, already spiced, already singing with garlic and cayenne. Your job is simple: get a good sear on it, pile it with peppers and onions that have gone soft and sweet in the rendered fat, and slather that bread with enough Creole mustard to make your eyes water.

My grandmother Evangeline kept hot sausage in her icebox the way other folks kept milk. It went into everything: red beans, jambalaya, breakfast scrambles. But the po' boy was her quick supper, the meal she made when my grandfather came home hungry and she had twenty minutes to put food on the table. She'd split those links down the middle, press them flat in her cast iron until the edges crisped, and pile them on yesterday's French bread that somehow still had life in it.