A Pilgrimage to the Blackpot Festival + Gumbo Cookoff

Between endless lines, crammed schedules, phone-wielding influencers, and brand activations, any festival can feel like a battlefield these days. But at Lafayette, Louisiana’s Blackpot Festival & Cookoff, the only “activation” going on is the ignition of propane burners under cast iron cauldrons of cracklins, gumbo, and gravy. 

Part roots music festival, part Cajun cooking competition, the gathering started when fiddle player Jay Unger told the Cajun-and-Western band The Red Stick Ramblers that the easiest way to headline a festival would be to start their own, and dared them to try it. Turns out, Unger was right: this year will mark Blackpot’s 20th anniversary. 

Today, Blackpot plays out not on a featureless tract or in a massive park, but amongst a smattering of 1800s structures: a barn, a one-room schoolhouse, a church. Vermillionville, the reconstructed village veiled by oaks swagged in Spanish moss, sits just southeast of downtown Lafayette, the cultural seat of Acadiana, a region where Creole, Cajun, and Indigenous people have stirred their traditions together for centuries. Come Halloween weekend, it turns into a petit portal where roux and ritual are practiced, not performed, and where the past two-steps with the present.

In 24 hours, it would not be strange to make four new friends square dancing; witness a multi-generational jam circle with heirloom fiddles and accordions; taste a menagerie of squirrel, wild hog, duck and alligator; catch a folk art/Surf rock act masked by giant paper machè faces; hear Congolese rumba from a church pew; twirl around with a handsome stranger to Zydeco; eat too many cracklins; watch some guys strip tall stalks of sugar cane; dance until midnight to a psychedelic Cumbia group; and happen upon some Samaritans handing out free bowls of absurdly good étouffée at 1 a.m. outside their camp on the baseball diamond across the street.

Blackpot has two sides in regards to food. At the aforementioned, adjacent campground, the vibe is laissez faire; campers (in varying degrees of sobriety) set up aluminum Magnalite pots over hot plates and butane stoves while alternating jams heat up and cool down. Inside the festival grounds, competition simmers around the cast iron kettles. 

The cookoff has five categories: gumbo, gravy (made by deglazing the bottom of a pot), jambalaya, Cook’s Choice (often rice dressing or cracklins), and dessert. Some participants are purists honoring family recipes, others twist tradition with potstickers in their gumbo. Despite the bragging rights at stake, most everyone is having fun with it. One team embroidered matching jumpsuits with “Team Coonassty,” a reference to the Cajun identifier, coonass. A retired paraglider and first-time contender boldly cooked his gumbo barefoot on an embroidered rug, his labrador sitting faithfully beside him. Perhaps overly ambitious, Chef Hank Billiot “ordered 12 turkeys off the internet,” then raised and slaughtered them on a friend’s farm for his entry. He and his teammates laughed while he stirred what he started calling his “$10,000 turkey gravy.”               

“Most people out there, they're just people who really like to cook. It's not what they do for a living; they’re not professional chefs, ” says Billiot, who won People’s Choice for his water buffalo gravy in 2024. “They don’t cook an encyclopedia of dishes, but the dude competing next to you, who works 21 days offshore and seven days on? He can cook the best beef gravy you've ever had. Not by my metric, but by the entire Gulf South metric.”

Billiot’s team, King Cobra Cafe, won best dessert this past year amidst rumors other competitors baked their bread pudding at home and brought it straight to the judges. (Participants aren’t required to make enough for festival goers but most do.) Another ambitious choice, the team decided to not only fry mini sweet potato hand pies in their pot, they also rolled out the pastry on site in the rain with a pasta machine. “A horrible idea, but it was kind of fun, too,” Billiot says.

While the cookoff is only part of the last day, music runs nearly nonstop from 5 p.m. on Friday evening until Sunday morning, accounting for the wee-hour campground jams. New Orleans-based musician Joy Patterson has played Blackpot with her partner Matt Bell for more than a decade, and for the past few years they’ve programmed the Chapel, a replica built in the style of two 1700s Catholic churches in Louisiana. Patterson and Bell’s band Bad Penny Pleasuremakers close out the altar stage with a whimsical review of Tin Pan Alley, traditional jazz, and ragtime classics from the ’20s and ’30s.

“Everybody feels like they're a part of creating this thing together, whether they're listening, dancing, or playing,” says Patterson who sings and plays everything from the washboard to the kazoo. “I have this very sacred feeling about getting ready to play at Blackpot. We normally play bars and clubs on Frenchmen Street, and I want to bring my very best self to the festival because it's such a beautiful opportunity to share where people are genuinely listening.”

For every dizzying partner dance or outbreak of old-time jigging, the festival sees just as many performances surrounded by silent, enraptured listeners, like banjo virtuoso Hubby Jenkins, formerly of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, who played in the glow of the Chapel at nightfall. In the schoolhouse, “I will not speak French” was written 45 times on the chalkboard—reminder of when children were punished for not speaking English. This backdrop made the band Beau Cheval’s original songs sung in Cajun French all the more haunting.   

“The talent you're going to see here is just incredible,” Patterson says. “If you’re going to dip your toe into Louisiana music, this is the place to do it. All the flavors are represented.”

Although Blackpot has outlived The Red Stick Ramblers (its members now play in different iterations, including The Revelers), notably little has changed in twenty years— enough time that couples who met at the festival now bring their kids along. Like cast iron, Blackpot gets better year after year.    

The South Louisiana Blackpot Festival & Cookoff takes place Oct. 30 & 31 in Lafayette, LA.