Creole and Cajun Cuisine

South Louisiana has two unique cuisines: the Creole cuisine with its rich array of courses indicating its close tie to European aristocracy, and Cajun cuisine with its one potmeals, pungent with the flavor of seafood and game.

In Louisiana, one can feast on crabs, crawfish pies, crawfish etouffees and crawfish bisques, gumbos, jambalayas, sauce piquantes, grillades and grits, preserved figs, salt pork, and ouille, boudin, black-eyed peas, red beans and rice, merlitons, smothered chicken, oysters, shrimp, redfish, speckled trout, bread pudding, pain- perdu, and much more.

Most people eat to live, Creoles and Cajuns live to eat! Their very existence is food, more food and still more food! They are not greedy and certainly not selfish. They will gladly share a meal with you, offering the choicest morsels for your pleasure. They have adopted the Spanish "my house is your house" philosophy and are happy to make sure your stomach is full.

What is the difference between Creole and Cajun cooking? Most Louisianians claim the answer is simple. Many of the early Creoles were rich planters and their kitchens aspired to the grande cuisines. Their recipes came from France or Spain as did their chefs. By using classic French techniques with local foodstuffs, they created a whole new cuisine, Creole cooking. The Cajuns, on the other hand, were refugees who relied on their Acadian cuisine tradition and made the best of what south Louisiana offered merely to survive!

The Cajun and Creole cultures are quite distinct and so are their cuisines. The Creoles were the European born aristocrats, wooed by the Spanish to establish New Orleans in the 1690's. Second born sons, who could not own land or titles in their native countries, were offered the opportunity to live and prosper in their family traditions here in the New World. They brought with them not only their wealth and education, but their chefs and cooks. With these chefs came the knowledge of the grand cuisines of Europe. The influences of classical and regional French, Spanish, German and Italian cooking are readily apparent in Creole cuisine. The terminologies, precepts, sauces, and major dishes carried over, some with more evolution than others, and provided a solid base or foundation for Creole cooking.

Bouillabaisse, a soup that came from the Provence region of France in and around Marseilles, played a part in the creation of gumbo.

The Spanish gave Creole food its spices, and the paella, which was the forefather of Louisiana's jambalaya. On the coastline, seafoods were often substituted for meats in the jambalaya creating many variations, according to the local ingredients available at different times of the year.

The Germans who arrived in Louisiana in 1690 were knowledgeable in all forms of charcuterie and from them came the andouille and other sausages.

Mirlitons, sauce piquantes from south and central America and the use of tomato rounded out the emerging Creole cuisine.

Native Indians, the Choctaws, Chetimaches and Houmas, befriended the new settlers and introduced them to local produce, wildlife and cooking methods. New ingredients, such as corn, ground sassafras leaves (or file powder), and bay leaves from the laurel tree, all contributed to the culinary melting pot.

The African slave brought with them the "gumbo" or okra plant from their native soil, which not only gave name to our premier soup, but introduced a new vegetable to South Louisiana.

Creole cuisine, then, is that melange of artistry and talent of cooking, developed and made possible by the people of various nations and cultures who settled in and around New Orleans, and is kept alive by Louisiana sharing it with the rest of the world.

On the other hand, the Acadians, who were a tough people used to living under strenuous conditions, tended to serve nutritious country food prepared from locally available ingredients, mainly cooked in one pot. Like the cooking of the Acadians, the cuisine of the Cajuns is a mirror image of their unique history. It is a cooking style which reflects their ingenuity, creativity, adaptability and survival.

Cajun cuisine is characterized by the use of wild game, seafoods, wild vegetation and herbs. From their association with the Indians, the Cajuns learned techniques to best utilize the local products from the swamps, bayous, lakes, rivers and woods. Truly remarkable are the variations that have resulted from similar ingredients carefully combined in the black iron pots of the Cajuns.

The Cajuns cooked with joy and love as their most precious ingredients, a joy brought about by reunion, in spite of the tragedy that befell them. To cook Cajun is to discover the love and experience the joy of the most unique American cuisine ever developed.

There are hundreds of different recipes for gumbo, jambalaya, turtle soup and they are all right because no one is wrong. Privately, they know that everything they cook is original, because their kitchens are kitchens of "ad lib". They are experimenting, creating, changing, always trying to make it taste better!

The Acadian refugees who found their way to south Louisiana ate a lot of potatoes, fresh pork, salt pork, bacon, poultry, milk, cheese and butter, potatoes, cabbages, turnips, beans, peas, and other vegetables. They seasoned their dishes with salt, some pepper, thyme, summer savory, onions and garlic. The Acadians subsidized their diet with game and seafood. The Cajun cooks were blessed with an abundance of crab, river shrimp, lake shrimp, oysters, crawfish, freshwater and saltwater fish, plus squirrels, wild turkeys, ducks, frogs, turtles, pork, homemade sausages, beans of all kinds, tomatoes, okra, yams, pecans, oranges, etc.

The Acadians ate a lot of bread, for wheat was plentiful, as was corn, and other grains. They ate maple syrup and molasses for sweets. They grew apples, peaches, pears, etc and gathered wild blueberries, raspberries, strawberries and cranberries.

Just as the Acadian had become such close friends with the Mic-Mac Indians when they were isolated in the woodlands of Canada, the Acadian when arriving in Louisiana, befriended the native Indians in South Louisiana. And it was from the Indians that they got "file powder", the main ingredient for "Gumbo File". File powder is made from grinding the leaves of the sassafras tree into a powder.

Another dish acquired from the Indians was "Maque Choux", which is a simple dish made from fresh corn, onion, bell pepper oil, some sugar (optional) and tomato (also optional). According to legend, the name Maque Choux comes from the expression "like cabbage". It is told that when the Europeans were first served the dish by the Indians, one of them asked the more adventurous ones "what does it taste like" to which, they replied "like cabbage".

In Louisiana, wheat was scarce and expensive so corn flour and cornmeal were substituted, and rice was the main staple at the Cajun table.

The Acadians made friends with the Spanish and Germans that preceded them as well. From the Spanish they were introduced to paella (the predecessor of jambalaya), grillades, stews, fricassees, soups, gumbos, sauce piquantes and a host of stuffed vegetable dishes, such as Mirlitons, are all characteristic of these new Cajun "one pot meals". And from the Germans, the Cajuns were reintroduced to charcuterie and today make andouille, smoked sausage, boudin, chaudin, tasso and chaurice, unparalleled in the world of sausage making. Their dishes were often pungent, peppery and very practical since it was also all cooked in a single pot.

A meal could consist of a "fricot" which is a hearty soup made from potatoes, carrots and flavored with meat, poultry or seafood and to which are added a sort of dumpling referred to as "grand-peres". Accompanying the fricot could be a poutine rappee, covered with molassas or maple syrup and lots of bread and butter. For dessert, maybe a molassas pie.

In the Maritimes, chowder is an important item on the menu both for its nourishment and for its flavor. The word chowder comes from the French word "chaudiere" which means iron pot. This suggests that the word originated in eastern Canada. There are as many recipes for chowder in the maritimes as there are for gumbo in Louisiana. Each different and each one delicious!

All chowders share one thing in common. They all contain, with varying degrees, diced potatoes, chopped or sliced onions, chopped celery, stock, milk, or cream, bay leaf, thyme, salt and pepper. In addition to this, some salt pork, contain corn, parsley sage rosemary, carrots, leeks, bell pepper, Fish, shrimp, clams, lobster, cod, clams, shallots, garlic, bacon.

Cajun cuisine was called by someone as the "table in the wilderness", a creative adaptation of indigenous Louisiana foods by the Acadians.
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