The real melting pot was black

The two things that most set the Cajun culture apart from others and that are the drawing cards that bring visitors here are our music and our cuisine.

The conventional wisdom is that both of these came whole, or almost so, with the Acadians from Louisiana, and that they can be traced back to old Acadie.

If that were so, “Cajun cooking” would resemble a New England boiled dinner – not the flavorful stuff that we serve today. We also think of rice and gravy, dirty rice, and other rice dishes as staples of the diet of the early Louisiana exiles. But the Cajuns had been here a century before rice became widespread in south Louisiana kitchens, and most of that was grown by Germans.

Corn was the first staple in the Louisiana Cajun diet. Acadians had grown wheat and barley in the old homeland, but when they were sent out into the hinterlands of Louisiana, the government gave them seed corn—not the wheat that they knew how to grow.

But they learned to cultivate it and to make cornbread and couche-couche and other dishes with it and it remained the basic food in the home until gradually replaced by rice in the 1920s.

Before the exile, Acadians grew “every kind of legumes and pot herbs, especially headed cabbages,” according to one history. Likewise,

Louisiana Cajuns planted large vegetable gardens.

On New Year’s Day of 1786, Louis Judice, commandant of the Lafourche District, wrote that corn was the settlers’ principal crop, but also lima beans and English peas.” He also noted that they planted orchards including several varieties of peaches, a type of apricot, three types of plums, pears, three types of figs, pecans, pomegranates, and several varieties of grapes, including the native muscadine.

They also kept chickens and other poultry for meat and for eggs which were important not only for their food value but because they could be bartered for flour, coffee, and other things that could not be home grown.

Then as now, the Louisiana settlers relied heavily on wild game and fish to keep their families fed. They also kept hogs – the boucherie each fall was an early institution – and cattle, that were grown for sale in New Orleans as often as for consumption at home.

If the ingredients for the meal changed, the way Cajuns cooked them did not change that much, at least at first. Two things the Cajuns did bring with them from exile were a big black cauldron that could be hung over a fire, and a black iron skillet that could be used covered or uncovered. Whatever they cooked, they cooked slow in one or both of these pots.

George Washington Cable, who made his name portraying Louisiana life in the late 1800s, wrote that Cajun cuisine in 1880 was “very plain” in its ingredients but that “they are good cooks, especially in the boiling and roasting of game, and altogether far excel the average poor American farmers.”

And most importantly, the Cajuns in Louisiana were exposed to Native Americans, Africans, Frenchmen of many ilks, Spaniards, Germans, people from the Caribbean, and from practically the entire world. All of these brought their own influences and added a pinch of this or a dash of that to the recipes that now make up the “traditional” food we serve.

The Cajuns brought the black pots, the whole of Louisiana helped season what goes into them.

You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jhbradshaw@bellsouth.net or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.