Day Trips: Kennedy’s Sausage Hometown Market, Santo

The famous Crawfish Monica sauce, one of the most popular foods at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, is made in a small North Texas town (photos by Gerald E. McLeod)

Kennedy's Sausage Hometown Market in Santo is not your usual grocery store. Almost everything in the shop is frozen. The sausage comes in patties, and the freezers are full of steaks, vegetables, soups, chili, and sauces – including genuine Cajun Sauce Monica.

If you've ever been to the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, then you're probably familiar with crawfish Monica. It's one of the most popular dishes at the spring fair where food and music compete as the raison d'être.

Chef Pierre Hilzim of New Orleans developed his signature dish around 1980 and named it for his wife, Monica Davidson. Made with heavy cream and lots of butter, the pink sauce with crawfish tails served over rotini pasta is not a diet food, but it is oh so good.

The success of crawfish Monica led Hilzim to open Kajun Kettle Foods to distribute his sauces and Cajun dishes. In 2017, Hilzim and Davidson sold their recipes to Farm to Market Foods of Santo.

Farm to Market Foods began as Kennedy's Sausage in Weatherford in the 1960s, according to Pat Nicholson, one of the owners. When the smokehouse burned, the business reopened in Santo as a "kettle cook" operation. Using pots holding 4,000 to 5,000 pounds, they produce gravies, pie filling, and other heat-and-serve foods mainly for wholesale customers.

The company opened the retail Hometown Market to survive when restaurants were struggling during the pandemic, Nicholson said.

Nicholson eats crawfish Monica about once a month, whenever they make a fresh batch, as a "quality test," he says.

Kennedy's Sausage Hometown Market in Santo is about 14 miles south of Mineral Wells at the junction of I-20 and U.S. Highway 281. Unfortunately, shipping frozen food is prohibitively expensive. The store opens Monday through Saturday from 8am to 5:30pm. For information, call 940/329-2796 or go to kennedyssausagehtm.com.

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