Rivers of booyah all flow toward one man

• Bob Baye, former glove maker, city alderman, softball coach, was the undisputed king of booyah

Robert Baye.

The Green Bay man, whose name is inseparable from the history of booyah, didn’t invent the popular Belgian-American chicken soup that has become an iconic church picnic fundraiser in Northeastern Wisconsin.

Former Green Bay resident Monette Benbow-Reinhardt is fond of claiming her great-grandfather, Alex Hannon, invented the stuff, back in 1893. “If you find anyone who made it earlier, I’d like to hear about it,” she says. And Lester Rentmeester of Howard is fond of claiming his dad, Andrew, invented the soup’s odd name in a failed attempt to reproduce the word “bouillon” and was the first to use the soup as a fundraiser.

Serious historians might dispute those claims, but you won’t hear them argue whether Bob Baye set the gold standard for how to make the delicacy that is so popular that legislators are trying to get it named the official state soup.

Baye, who died in 1982, was the “undisputed Booyah King of Green Bay,” according to a 1979 article in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

“When churches would advertise they were having a fundraiser, they’d put right in there that Bob Baye would be making the booyah,” says Mary Jane Herber of the Brown County Library’s Local History and Genealogy Department.

What? Bob Baye is making the booyah? Guaranteed turnout!

Press-Gazette Media recently put the word out to have booyah fans send in their favorite booyah recipe. Well over half the responders submitted recipes they said were variations of Baye’s booyah.

One of the responders was Baye’s son, Bill Baye of Green Bay.

“I can remember many a sizzling summer Saturday when Bob and his crew (including his young son) would sit and sweat in Zimonick's barn cutting vegetables for Sunday's rendition,” Bill Baye writes. “This was before the arrival of frozen, pre-cut vegetables.  Bob and crew would be up at 3:00 Sunday morning to get the fires going under the fifty-gallon cast iron booyah kettles.

“In those days, SS. Peter & Paul was the biggest parish around, and we would prepare ten kettles for their picnic each summer. Bob would cook booyah for most of the Catholic parishes in the area, and he had quite a following; I can remember many a booyah fan coming up to my dad and saying, ‘Well, Bob, where are you going to be next Sunday?’ My father got his original recipe from his parents who used to travel to northern Wisconsin to cook booyah for the lumberjacks in their camps.”

Bob Baye didn’t just cook booyah, he presided over it, former Press-Gazette reporter Harry Maier wrote back in 1982, two days after the great chef died.

Many booyah chefs claim a secret ingredient, but not Baye.

“He never tried to keep it secret,” his son writes. “In fact, he kept copies in his pocket to hand out to people who might ask for it.”

With so many people cooking variations of Baye’s recipe, what made his so special?

Even Baye himself didn’t seem to know. He worked off a modification of his own father’s recipe.

“I don’t use wax beans and corn any more, unless the people ask for it,” he told the Press-Gazette back in 1979. “I never cook with ‘flat’ water … I always add the seasoning early.”

Maybe it wasn’t the ingredients that set Baye’s booyah apart. He also put in five hours of prep time and burned a half a garbage can of wood under each kettle. Also mandatory: Hard-wood paddles to stir the stuff. Afterward, washing the kettles twice with soap and water and then greasing them with cooking oil might also have made the difference.

What he never said was “practice makes perfect,” but he did claim to cook an estimated 15,000 pounds of chicken per year, for 1,500 kettles of booyah. He traveled to Oshkosh, Sheboygan, Appleton, Kaukauna and even Chicago to cook booyah.

psrubas@pressgazettemedia.com and follow him on Twitter@PGpaulsrubas

Booyah recipes

Here’s a sampling of variations to standard booyah recipes that readers submitted:

» Bob Delwiche, a former Green Bay resident now living in Horse Shoe, N.C., remembers the booyah of his youth differing from Bob Baye’s in that it had corn and no tomatoes. It also apparently contained butter, because during preparation, he remembers as a boy being sent off to the local dairy to fetch a “Shamrock” of real butter, a “Shamrock” being an old canvas predecessor of a Coleman cooler.

» John Schlice of Stevens Point grew up on booyah made with ground chuck and beef base — no chicken!

» Terese Allen, a food historian and author from Madison, who helped Press-Gazette Media with a recent story about the history of booyah, submitted a recipe from her sister, Judy Ullmer, that differs from Baye’s in that it calls for stew meat rather than oxtail and includes green beans.

» Paul Nesberg of Peshtigo submitted a recipe that has Ullmer’s variations and also includes sweet basil leaves and garlic.

» A recipe from Darlene Andre of De Pere, credited to her late mother-in-law, includes barley. Like Delwiche, Andre likes butter in her booyah and flavors the butter with paprika.

Bob Stahl, owner of Zozo’s Kitchen, a Green Bay-based caterer, doesn’t use oxtail or stew meat. He’ll use a smoked ham hock, pork chop or turkey leg in his two-gallon batch.

Nobody submitted a recipe calling for 100 pounds of chicken, as Baye’s did. Several people submitted recipes that were scaled down versions of Baye’s 50-gallon batch. Kaye Dexter, for example, divides Baye’s ingredients by 10, she wrote in an email. And she uses Veg-All instead of chopping her own.