F4 THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2019 LATIMES.COM/FOOD
chicken sausage purveyor but it’s far from
the only one. For decades, a small but
tenacious group of black-owned busi-
nesses have proudly supplied South L.A.
with spicy, snappy, poultry-based links, a
centerpiece to countless backyard bar-
becues and a mainstay at multitudes of
neighborhood restaurants and diners.
Wafts of hickory smoke coming from
Phillips Bar-B-Que perfume several
blocks of Crenshaw Boulevard, where
chicken links come smothered in a thick,
molasses-kissed sauce. At Stevie’s Creole
Cafe in Mid-City, chicken hot links come
tucked inside a po’ boy, split and seared
and dressed with lettuce, tomatoes, pick-
les, tomatoes and a lush smear of Blue
Plate mayonnaise. There’s chicken sau-
sage with eggs and waffles on the menu at
Roscoe’s, chicken sausage with hash
browns at Watts Coffee House, and
chicken sausage with grits at Inglewood’s
Serving Spoon. M & M Soul Food in Car-
son gilds its heaping hot link dinners with
sides of cornbread, collard greens and
candied yams.
Unsung as it may be, chicken sausage
plays an indispensable role in the city’s
African American food culture, quietly
popping up in soul food, barbecue and
Cajun-Creole cuisine. Among a genera-
tion of black Angelenos, chicken sausage
isn’t just a mild-mannered substitute for
pork, it’s a nostalgic comfort food that
smacks distinctly of home.
“The relationship that Los Angeles
has with chicken sausage is very interest-ing, because in most other cities what
you find is turkey,” says Adrian Miller, the
author of “Soul Food: The Surprising
Story of an American Cuisine, One Plate
at a Time.” In his forthcoming book on
barbecue culture, Miller is devoting a
chapter to the rise of what he calls “pork
alternatives,” a shift toward lower-fat,
lower-cholesterol proteins like chicken
and turkey in barbecue and soul food
kitchens and a trend in which L.A. has
had an outsize role.First, some history
As with many cities outside the Ameri-
can South, the three-decade-long Second
Great Migration, which began in the
1940s, had a transformative effect on L.A.
Attracted by jobs in the booming aero-
space and defense industries, hundreds
of thousands of black Southerners took
part in a grand migration toward Los An-
geles; a majority hailed from the South’s
western fringe, in particular East Texas,
Arkansas and Louisiana.
One such transplant was George
White, born in the town of Benton, La., in- At 16, White boarded a Southern Pa-
cific train bound for L.A. After years of
working as a pipe threader and welder
(and later selling insurance alongside
Shreveport expat Johnnie Cochran Sr.),
White opened Miracle Market along
Compton’s main drag in 1961. As one of the
city’s few full-service groceries, it quickly
became a destination for traditionally
Southern ingredients — sweet cane syr-
up, black-eyed peas and Louisiana hot
links.
Turner’s Market & Poultry, a South-
ern-style butcher shop founded by Loui-
siana native George Turner in 1953, sits a
few miles north in Watts. Billed in a 1988
Los Angeles Times article as “a Watts in-
stitution,” the store’s wide glass butcher
case brimmed back then: smoked turkey
tails, pig’s feet, slabs of spicy head cheese.
Most prominent were freshly ground hot
links stacked into glistening pyramids; in
later years, customers who had departed
Watts for wealthier suburbs still made
regular pilgrimages.
Yet if there’s one operation that neatly
outlines the hot link’s local history, it’s the
family-run Pete’s Louisiana Foods,
housed in a squat cinderblock building
along Jefferson Boulevard. Founder
Leon Oliver, a German-Creole who
moved to L.A. in the 1940s, began selling
spicy andouille-esque sausages seasoned
with garlic and cayenne around 1949;
back then, a majority of Oliver’s custom-
ers belonged to an expat Cajun-Creole
community that had sprung up in Jeffer-
son Park. A bar and pool hall there would
later become Harold & Belle’s, a destina-
tion for étouffée and fried catfish that re-
mains the city’s oldest operating Creole
restaurant.
“Our family has used Pete’s since be-
fore I was born, before the restaurant was
even open, I believe,” says third-genera-
tion owner Ryan Legaux. Sliced into the
bubbling vats of gumbo and jam-
balaya, the peppery links have long been
a headliner among the restaurant’s time-capsule repertoire.
“We used them because, first, [Oliver]
was family and, second, they were the
best in town,” recalls Denise Legaux,
daughter of founder Harold Legaux. The
restaurant uses only beef links, however,
not the chicken links that Pete’s intro-
duced in the late 1980s, a purist’s choice
that Denise Legaux insists upon. “I’ve
never been a fan of the chicken one,”
she says. “But plenty of people ask about
it.”
Similar to the fiery pork-based links
endemic to Chicago’s South Side, L.A.
links tend to draw from two lineages: Lou-
isiana and East Texas. Louisiana-style
links are often spiced with cayenne, pa-
prika, cumin and thyme; the Texas vari-
ety favors dried sage, black pepper and
red pepper flakes. Yet distinctions aren’t
hard and fast. Most shops tend to offer a
range of flavors: mild, garlic, no pepper,
extra hot, extra extra hot. Sausages can
be sold as links — stuffed into natural cas-
ings and tied — or sold loose as ground
meat. (“All links are sausages but not all
sausages are links,” one butcher put it to
me.)The link to chicken is made
By most accounts, chicken sausage
appeared in South L.A. during the early
’80s, arguably around the same time fu-
ture sausage kingpin Bruce Aidells was
hawking Provençal-inspired chicken-ap-
ple sausages door-to-door in Berkeley.
The origin story traces back to Holmes
Homemade Chicken Sausage, a stripJanay Haynes and
Daitreon Browder, top,
are big fans of Mama’s
Chicken. Walter Hart Jr.,
right, runs Best Buy
Meat with his father.
How chicken sausage
rose to rule the roost in L.A.
“Throw
them on the
grill and,
boom, they
plump up
like crazy”
CHRISMCCORD
owner-operator
of Urseila’s Meats[Sausage,from F1]