Cajun Pecan House in Cut-Off, Louisiana

         Our first stop on Main Street was the Cajun Pecan House, a bakery that opened in 1985 to sell pecans and pralines out of a galley kitchen and a storefront. They’ve since expanded, adding an enormous shipping room, kitchen, several storerooms, and piles of different sweets and cakes.  As we were waiting for the Cajun Pecan House’s first original employee to arrive for her interview, we happened to mention to the ladies manning the counter that we were fairly hungry and planned to go down the street to Mommie Jo’s, a seafood joint, after the interview. We discovered that both the Cajun Pecan House and Mommie Jo’s were owned and operated by a pair of sisters and their expansive families. Jennifer Shexnayder, the niece of Mommie Jo’s owner, offered to give us a ride and grab lunch with us and her long- lashed, outspoken six- year old daughter. We gratefully climbed into her car and commenced eating the best shrimp po-boy of our lives.

         When we returned to the bakery, we met Sandra Cheramie, the warm, generous woman behind the Cajun Pecan House’s famous pralines, which she pronounced “par-lines.” She emerged from her cramped, back room office to recount the origin story of the bakery. The original owner was once a schoolteacher who taught all three of Sandra’s daughters. When the Christmas holidays arrived, Sandra would send her girls with pralines for their teachers. They were so delicious that when the schoolteacher decided to open up the Cajun Pecan House and sell pecans with her husband, she asked Sandra to join her as her only employee and baker.

        Thirty one years later, the business has grown and changed hands, but Sandra Cheramie remains an irreplaceable cornerstone of the bakery’s operations. In addition to having intuition about the perfect consistency to portion pralines into individual servings (the secret to pralines, she insists) she also does the bookkeeping completely by hand. She refuses to use a computer and has a box of notebooks under her desk containing all the sales made by the Cajun Pecan House since it opened- one book per year.