Crescent City to Cajun
This story appeared in the Kingston Times, Woodstock Times, etc., from Ulster Publishing.
New Orleans, post-Katrina, still kicks. Although city residents I spoke to last week seemed still beaten down and scarred from that devastating hurricane, they were sociable, grateful for visitors and looking to their future with great optimism. I and my fellow conventioneers of the annual gathering of the International Association of Culinary Professionals were happy to be their guests, tasting their unique and varied cuisine at every turn, enjoying their sweet hospitality while serenaded by music (old jazz, new jazz, zydeco, country, classic rock) on every corner.
A couple months ago I wrote in this space about gumbo and jambalaya, two savory dishes well known outside Louisiana, and yes, this time there were a couple of fine gumbos, but much more, too. Long before my first trip to New Orleans in ’97, I yearned for the food, layered with the flavors of rich roux followed with the “holy trinity” of onion, celery and green pepper, its complex legacy--the ultimate fusion food--with roots in French, Spanish, Italian, Native American, African cuisines, and more. This place of explorers and immigrants who had brought their seasonings and adapted them to the flora and fauna that thrived in the state’s bayous, rivers and swamps, called to me. Before I ever went I tried to cook the food, practiced a lot and taught myself to make a belly-warming gumbo and an irresistible bananas foster. I even had the gall to man a booth at Red Hook’s annual Hardscrabble Day where I served big batches of gumbo and muffuletta sandwiches.
I thought my gumbo was good, my jambalaya excellent, but when I finally got to New Orleans and ate the food, and although some of the French Quarter gumbos were lackluster, most of it blew me away. There was much to discover, and my husband and I savored every specialty we could find: daily dozens of oysters on the half shell with lemon, horseradish and cocktail sauce, oyster po-boys (fried oysters on a roll), muffuletta: cold cuts and green olive relish on a big round loaf, turtle soup, red beans and rice enriched with sausage perfected after centuries of getting it right, funky boiled crawfish, crawfish etouffee (“smothered” in a dark, savory stew), shrimp creole and cold shrimp remoulade. We splurged at a couple of famous must-go restaurants; at Galatoire's we loved the cool crabmeat maison with mayo and capers, red snapper meunière with crabmeat and trout marguery with shrimp and mushrooms in cream sauce. At Commander's Palace, which launched Emeril Lagasse and many other notable chefs, we had crab cakes in corn sauce, roasted oysters with artichokes, and smooth, smooth service.
Cajun and creole food aren’t the same thing. Although they have some of the same roots and ingredients, to simplify: creole is city food, cajun is country. Creole has been around longer than cajun and is more elegant and refined. It originated with the Creole people, a group whose definition even Louisiana Creoles themselves can’t quite agree on, but often means a people of mixed French and Spanish descent who populated New Orleans in the 17th century and their descendants.
Cajun food, on the other hand, is zesty, highly seasoned and not for the faint of heart or belly, “created by people who work hard, play hard, and love food,” according to Terry Thompson in The New Cajun-Creole Cooking (HP Books, 1994). Cajun food is the food of the Louisiana Acadiens, a people of French origin who had settled in Nova Scotia, Canada, for a couple hundred years before moving to the Louisiana bayous. In their food the French roots are still discernible, but it’s based on robust one-pot dishes made with whatever critters the settlers could find, possum, squirrel, 'gator and the fresh fishy denizens of the Gulf. Cajun food is a mix of French cooking, Native American herbs and spices, fiery Latin chilies and southern soul food. Although it was in the mid 1700s that the Acadiens/Cajuns settled the bayous, their cuisine didn’t become well known outside the area until local boy Chef Paul Prudhomme made it famous in the 1980s with his blackened redfish, which was his own invention, not a traditional Cajun dish. Its extreme popularity contributed to the near extinction of the fish.
Generally Cajun gumbos and jambalayas are brown rather than red; tomatoes make more citified, creole versions. Etouffes are dark-roux-based “smothered” stews served over rice, and there are other delectable cajun specialties like sauce piquant and courtbouillon, which unlike other Cajun dishes, is not served over rice. These dishes can be made with whole small perch (sac-a-lait) or other fish, sweet crawfish or shrimp.
My last night in town after a half dozen raw oysters at the French Market Café on Decatur Street in the French Quarter, I devoured a huge bowlful of fat heads-on "barbecue" shrimp swimming in a lake of butter and spice. The five-inch-long fresh gulf shrimp were sweet and delicate, the head innards lusciously funky with some full of tomalley or coral. There was crusty bread for dunking in the spiced butter and the side dishes were a pile of spicy and highly spiced fried potato dices and a zesty maque-choux of limas, tomato and andouille sausage.
Andouille is one of many savory Cajun pork products and often studs gumbo or jambalaya with its heady intensity. The pork is coarsely ground, flavored with garlic, salt and red and black peppers and smoked for a long time.
Boudin is another local sausage that locals usually squeeze out of its casing to eat. Studded with rice, scallions and various pig parts, it’s complex and unique. At Cochon, an opened-since-Katrina restaurant of high acclaim, I had some killer fried boudin balls with a sweet and spicy creole mustard for dipping, pickled pepper slices on the side.
In cajun country you can also find chaudin, with a pigs stomach for a casing (hello haggis!), and tasty tasso, a lean cured smoked ham-like product usually used to flavor stews and such.
At Cochon I also had a sumptuous chunk of cochon de lait--milk-fed roast pig--with turnips, cabbage and cracklin's, all swimming in pig jus, which would have been perfect in fall weather but on this unseasonably cool spring night was just plain awesome.
And I didn’t hurt for sweets, thanks to the Creole side of the city, with the best bananas foster I’ve ever had, at Creole Delicacies, and some fluffy sugary beignet doughnuts washed down with chicory café au lait at Café du Monde. Other delightful beverages included a good bit of lovely local Abita Amber on tap and a really strong rum-infused mango drink out of a whirling tub on the wall that enhanced an evening walk down crazy-wild Bourbon Street with Katrina, a new friend from the conference.
And the feast continues, thanks to an order I placed today from cajungrocer.com. Coming my way are a bag of crawfish tails, some links of boudin, andouille and smoked chaurice, some boudin balls to try to recreate that Cochon experience, Natchitoches meat pies, tasso and Camellia red kidney beans for the traditional Monday red beans and rice.
Thanks to some great books on the food of the area, my cajun eating adventures won’t have to wait until the next trip, when I hope to get out of the Big Easy and into the heart of cajun country. My classic favorite is Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz: a New Orleans Seafood Cookbook (Pelican, 1997) by the late Howard Mitcham, and my newest favorite is Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table (Norton, 2008) by Sara Roahen, a collection of beautifully written odes to the food of New Orleans. The author has kindly offered to e-mail me some recipes, as lagniappe.
Note: I have it on authority that when writing of Creole or Cajun people, you use a capital “C.” For food or other non-human things, you use the lower case, hence creole or cajun. If you disagree I will be very happy to receive your opinion, since I’m still figuring this out...
New Orleans, post-Katrina, still kicks. Although city residents I spoke to last week seemed still beaten down and scarred from that devastating hurricane, they were sociable, grateful for visitors and looking to their future with great optimism. I and my fellow conventioneers of the annual gathering of the International Association of Culinary Professionals were happy to be their guests, tasting their unique and varied cuisine at every turn, enjoying their sweet hospitality while serenaded by music (old jazz, new jazz, zydeco, country, classic rock) on every corner.
A couple months ago I wrote in this space about gumbo and jambalaya, two savory dishes well known outside Louisiana, and yes, this time there were a couple of fine gumbos, but much more, too. Long before my first trip to New Orleans in ’97, I yearned for the food, layered with the flavors of rich roux followed with the “holy trinity” of onion, celery and green pepper, its complex legacy--the ultimate fusion food--with roots in French, Spanish, Italian, Native American, African cuisines, and more. This place of explorers and immigrants who had brought their seasonings and adapted them to the flora and fauna that thrived in the state’s bayous, rivers and swamps, called to me. Before I ever went I tried to cook the food, practiced a lot and taught myself to make a belly-warming gumbo and an irresistible bananas foster. I even had the gall to man a booth at Red Hook’s annual Hardscrabble Day where I served big batches of gumbo and muffuletta sandwiches.
I thought my gumbo was good, my jambalaya excellent, but when I finally got to New Orleans and ate the food, and although some of the French Quarter gumbos were lackluster, most of it blew me away. There was much to discover, and my husband and I savored every specialty we could find: daily dozens of oysters on the half shell with lemon, horseradish and cocktail sauce, oyster po-boys (fried oysters on a roll), muffuletta: cold cuts and green olive relish on a big round loaf, turtle soup, red beans and rice enriched with sausage perfected after centuries of getting it right, funky boiled crawfish, crawfish etouffee (“smothered” in a dark, savory stew), shrimp creole and cold shrimp remoulade. We splurged at a couple of famous must-go restaurants; at Galatoire's we loved the cool crabmeat maison with mayo and capers, red snapper meunière with crabmeat and trout marguery with shrimp and mushrooms in cream sauce. At Commander's Palace, which launched Emeril Lagasse and many other notable chefs, we had crab cakes in corn sauce, roasted oysters with artichokes, and smooth, smooth service.
Cajun and creole food aren’t the same thing. Although they have some of the same roots and ingredients, to simplify: creole is city food, cajun is country. Creole has been around longer than cajun and is more elegant and refined. It originated with the Creole people, a group whose definition even Louisiana Creoles themselves can’t quite agree on, but often means a people of mixed French and Spanish descent who populated New Orleans in the 17th century and their descendants.
Cajun food, on the other hand, is zesty, highly seasoned and not for the faint of heart or belly, “created by people who work hard, play hard, and love food,” according to Terry Thompson in The New Cajun-Creole Cooking (HP Books, 1994). Cajun food is the food of the Louisiana Acadiens, a people of French origin who had settled in Nova Scotia, Canada, for a couple hundred years before moving to the Louisiana bayous. In their food the French roots are still discernible, but it’s based on robust one-pot dishes made with whatever critters the settlers could find, possum, squirrel, 'gator and the fresh fishy denizens of the Gulf. Cajun food is a mix of French cooking, Native American herbs and spices, fiery Latin chilies and southern soul food. Although it was in the mid 1700s that the Acadiens/Cajuns settled the bayous, their cuisine didn’t become well known outside the area until local boy Chef Paul Prudhomme made it famous in the 1980s with his blackened redfish, which was his own invention, not a traditional Cajun dish. Its extreme popularity contributed to the near extinction of the fish.
Generally Cajun gumbos and jambalayas are brown rather than red; tomatoes make more citified, creole versions. Etouffes are dark-roux-based “smothered” stews served over rice, and there are other delectable cajun specialties like sauce piquant and courtbouillon, which unlike other Cajun dishes, is not served over rice. These dishes can be made with whole small perch (sac-a-lait) or other fish, sweet crawfish or shrimp.
My last night in town after a half dozen raw oysters at the French Market Café on Decatur Street in the French Quarter, I devoured a huge bowlful of fat heads-on "barbecue" shrimp swimming in a lake of butter and spice. The five-inch-long fresh gulf shrimp were sweet and delicate, the head innards lusciously funky with some full of tomalley or coral. There was crusty bread for dunking in the spiced butter and the side dishes were a pile of spicy and highly spiced fried potato dices and a zesty maque-choux of limas, tomato and andouille sausage.
Andouille is one of many savory Cajun pork products and often studs gumbo or jambalaya with its heady intensity. The pork is coarsely ground, flavored with garlic, salt and red and black peppers and smoked for a long time.
Boudin is another local sausage that locals usually squeeze out of its casing to eat. Studded with rice, scallions and various pig parts, it’s complex and unique. At Cochon, an opened-since-Katrina restaurant of high acclaim, I had some killer fried boudin balls with a sweet and spicy creole mustard for dipping, pickled pepper slices on the side.
In cajun country you can also find chaudin, with a pigs stomach for a casing (hello haggis!), and tasty tasso, a lean cured smoked ham-like product usually used to flavor stews and such.
At Cochon I also had a sumptuous chunk of cochon de lait--milk-fed roast pig--with turnips, cabbage and cracklin's, all swimming in pig jus, which would have been perfect in fall weather but on this unseasonably cool spring night was just plain awesome.
And I didn’t hurt for sweets, thanks to the Creole side of the city, with the best bananas foster I’ve ever had, at Creole Delicacies, and some fluffy sugary beignet doughnuts washed down with chicory café au lait at Café du Monde. Other delightful beverages included a good bit of lovely local Abita Amber on tap and a really strong rum-infused mango drink out of a whirling tub on the wall that enhanced an evening walk down crazy-wild Bourbon Street with Katrina, a new friend from the conference.
And the feast continues, thanks to an order I placed today from cajungrocer.com. Coming my way are a bag of crawfish tails, some links of boudin, andouille and smoked chaurice, some boudin balls to try to recreate that Cochon experience, Natchitoches meat pies, tasso and Camellia red kidney beans for the traditional Monday red beans and rice.
Thanks to some great books on the food of the area, my cajun eating adventures won’t have to wait until the next trip, when I hope to get out of the Big Easy and into the heart of cajun country. My classic favorite is Creole Gumbo and All That Jazz: a New Orleans Seafood Cookbook (Pelican, 1997) by the late Howard Mitcham, and my newest favorite is Gumbo Tales: Finding My Place at the New Orleans Table (Norton, 2008) by Sara Roahen, a collection of beautifully written odes to the food of New Orleans. The author has kindly offered to e-mail me some recipes, as lagniappe.
Note: I have it on authority that when writing of Creole or Cajun people, you use a capital “C.” For food or other non-human things, you use the lower case, hence creole or cajun. If you disagree I will be very happy to receive your opinion, since I’m still figuring this out...
