A legacy of sauce

What makes Jack Miller’s Bar-B-Que Sauce so unique?
If you take a moment to look on the ingredients on the label of the famed sauce, produced and bottled in Ville Platte, it appears like any other Bar-B-Que sauce.
There is tomato sauce, mustard, salt, spices, cooking oil, margarine and hot sauce are one of the 16 ingredients poured into a bottle of Jack Miller’s Sauce.
So why does someone like Ville Platte Mayor Jennifer Vidrine routinely state then “It’s so good you don’t even have to put it on anything.”
That’s because Jack Miller’s Bar-B-Que Sauce has one distinctive and different ingredient than most sauces, one that is rooted in Cajun culture, and that is plenty of onions.
“Cajuns have to have those onions,” second generation owner-operator Kermit Miller said. “We’ve been synonymous with Cajun foods for a long time.”
This past Monday was Kermit’s 70th birthday and it was also the 75th anniversary of the creation of Jack Miller’s Bar-B-Que Sauce at the American Inn.
Jack Miller was originally from Sunset but fell in love with a woman from L’Anse Aux Pailles and relocated to Ville Platte. Miller cut his teeth in the restaurant business by working in Opelousas at such places like the Cedar Lane Club, Dixie Cafe and Acadian Inn.
In 1941, Miller and business partner Thaddeus Winfiele (who Miller bought out five years later) leased a building from Burke Coreil in Ville Platte for $600 and opened up the American Inn. That original location is where the now closed Pig Stand is on East Main Street.
The American Inn sold burgers, hot dogs and plate lunches featuring Miller’s homemade sauce to local residents, as well as servicemen stationed at Fort Polk in nearby Leesville.
According to Kermit, his father’s original vision of being a business owner was setting up a chain of restaurants in the area, not selling thousands of bottles of sauce.
“He wanted to open up several burger joints like that in the area but then World War II happened and he couldn’t buy the meat needed to do that,” Kermit said. “He couldn’t buy beef or pork so he started buying chickens.”
Miller began to realize that his sauce could possibly become more of a profitable business than his restaurant, which had relocated to the edge of town, across the street where Burger King sits today on US Highway 167. When the highway expanded in 1979, the business relocated to its current location on Jack Miller Road.
In 1955, Miller closed off part of the restaurant and created a mini-factory for bottling the sauce which was hand labeled and hand packaged.
“The state allowed him to use his kitchen at the restaurant to make the sauce,” Kermit said. “So dad closed off the dining room and put in a couple of large stoves to cook the sauce in six gallon stainless steel pots.”
Kermit remembers that his father, and his good friend and longtime employee Chester Meche, would make the sauce by feel rather than follow a strict recipe.
“They would just measure the ingredients by feel,” said Kermit, who remembers family members-workers having to peel the onions by hand. “A pinch of this, a spoon or spoons of that. I couldn’t do that. I didn’t trust myself enough to do that so when I cooked I wrote down all the measurements and weighed it.”
Kermit’s approach though came in handy years later when the operation expanded, and recipes actually needed to be followed.
“I remember when we had to go the larger kettles for production and dad came to me and said “where is that book of yours?,’” Kermit said.
Back in those days, there was no such thing as mass marketing, especially for small-town businesses like Jack Miller’s. In addition to catering mass events for companies such as John Deere and Cabot, Miller took the product to the prospective customers across the region and state.
“He would load some of his bottles of sauce in his station wagon and travel around the area to restuarants, bars and grocery stores. Back then you could go directly to all the mom and pop stores in the area like that. He would let them sample it on basic white bread. He would then just leave bottles there and told them ‘if it sells that is fine but it doesn’t then I will come pick it back up.’”
Kermit also fondly remembers that his father never was offended that people would buy his sauce and then make it their own by adding additional ingredients.
“My dad used to say that most of the people that would buy his sauce would never use it like how he had made it,” Kermit said. “They would take it and use it as a base and add their own touches to it.”
Kermit spent a few years away from the family business, first as a business student at University of Southwestern Louisiana (now known as University of Louisiana at Lafayette) before enlisting in the U.S. Navy and serving in the Vietnam War for two years. After returning from the war, Kermit rejoined the family business and took over operations in 1980, with his wife Shelia working right alongside him.
Today, Jack Miller’s Bar-B-Que Sauce includes three other items. A Cajun Dipping & Cocktail Sauce, a Cajun All-Purpose Seasoning and a No Salt version of that same seasoning.
The production includes three massive kettles, heated by steam, with two of them containing 100 gallons and the other holding 150 gallons. The two smaller kettles can produce 600 one-pint bottles per day each, while the larger can produce up to 900 one-pint bottles.
Kermit says that an estimated 450,000 are bottled and shipped out of the factory each year.
“We are getting a lot of orders now in Pennsylvania because of the amount of oil field work going on there,” Kermit said. “We also have a caterer in Germany that buys from us. We are all around the world.”
In addition, Jack Miller’s bottles a Tabasco-based Bar-B-Que Sauce for the McIlhenny Company. The Ville Platte business has already produced 24,000 bottles of that particular sauce this year for McIlhenny.
Jack Miller passed away in 1988 and his wife Helen Chapman Miller followed in 2002 but the family’s legacy is in capable hands as Kermit’s son Christian has been in the fold for the past 15 years.
Christian though came into the family business almost by accident. Christian planned on getting a job in Alaska when he agreed to do a food show with his father. It was there that he found his calling.
“I asked myself that day “why I am not doing this? Something happened that day,” Christian said. “It is just an honor to keep the legacy going. To be able to make this for third or fourth generations of customers that love it so much is special.”
Having his son by his side is even more special to Kermit.
“I don’t think I could put into words what it means to me,” said Kermit, who once served as President of the Chamber of Commerce. “It means the world to me.”
So what is main reason why Jack Miller’s is so loved and poured on ribs, chicken, pork steaks and sausage po-boys due to those onions in the sauce? Or could it be something else?
“I think it brings back memories when they were children and they had it,” Kermit said. “I have had so many people tell me over the years that they can remember smelling the sauce down the street when neighbors were barbequing on Sunday afternoons after church service.”