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C A J UN FOODWAYS This page intentionally left blank CAJUN FOODWAYS C. Paige Gutierrez UNIVERSITY PRESS OF MISSISSIPPI JACKSON AND LONDON Photographs by Jay Elledge, Philip Gould, and Ginette Vachon are courtesy of the Center for Acadian and Creole Folklore at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. All other photographs are courtesy of Barry Jean Ancelet. Copyright © 1992 by the University Press of Mississippi All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Designed by Sally Hamlin Print on Demand Edition 95 94 93 92 4 3 21 The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gutierrez, C. Paige. Cajun foodways / C. Paige Gutierrez. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87805-562-2 (cloth : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-87805-563-0 (paper : alk. paper) i. Cajuns — Folklore. 2. Food habits — Louisiana. 3. Cookery, Cajun. 4. Cajuns — Social life and customs. 5. Louisiana — Social life and customs. I. Title. GRni.F73G85 199* 394.i'2'o894i0763—dc2O 92-9963 CIP British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data available Contents Foreword vii Preface xi Introduction: Louisiana's Cajuns 3 1. What Goes into Cajun Food 34 2. Cajun Cooking 51 3. Cooks and Kitchens 69 4. Cajuns and Crawfish 77 5. Catching, Cooking, and Eating Crawfish 83 6. The Meaning of Crawfish 96 7. Boucheries, Mardi Gras, and Community Festivals no 8. Cajun Food and Ethnic Identity 121 Bibliography 13 9 Index 147 V This page intentionally left blank Foreword During the 1980$, bigger-than-life chef Paul Prudhomme brought his native Cajun cooking to the attention of the nation by appearing on national television and cooking for heads of state and media celebrities. The excitement generated by his enthusiasm and spicy seasonings brought Cajun culture and its cuisine to the attention of the nation, fueling a fad which swept through restaurants across the country. Unfortunately, fads are usually based on trendy fascination instead of deep understanding, and many came to know only a caricature of Cajun cooking. Chefs everywhere copied Prudhomme's blackened redfish, and eventually blackened just about everything else. Cayenne peppers began to appear everywhere, including Prudhomme's Cajun martinis and "Original Cajun Flavored Beer" (brewed "in the time-honored Cajun tradition," in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.) Here in south Louisiana, many people have become self-conscious about the new popularity of things Cajun. Efforts to improve connotation of the word Cajun date back only to the late 19605. Before that, Cajun in English usually referred to the poor, white, French-speaking underclass. Yet by the 1970$, the sports teams of the University of Southwestern Louisiana were called the Ragin* Cajuns. Soon after, many restaurant owners began including the all-important new key word in their mes- sages, including Enola Prudhomme's Cajun Cafe, Lagneaux's Cajun Style Buffet, Prejean's Comfortable Cajun Dining, Don's Seafood Hut Serves a Good Cajun Meal, Blair House Traditional and Progressive Cajun Cuisine, RandoPs Restaurant and Cajun Dance Hall, and, of course, Mulate's, the World's Most Famous Cajun Restaurant. This burst of ethnic pride coincided with the appearance of the word vn viii Foreword Cajun on just about every commodity remotely associated with Louisiana French culture: one can now go fishing in a Cajun brand bass boat, using Cajun brand crickets for bait, keeping Cajun brand beer on Cajun brand ice in a Cajun brand cooler, and cook the catch later in a "Cajun micro- wave" (actually, a moist-heat smoker). A local portable toilet company calls itself K-Jon. It's almost as though we have been afraid of forgetting who we are. When local musician, accordion builder and sage, Marc Savoy, was asked recently, "Aren't you sorry the Cajuns have been dis- covered?", he answered, "I'm even sorrier the Cajuns have discovered themselves," and went on to predict that Cajun society was in danger of dying of "acute cuteness." On the other hand, there has been an explosion of creativity in Cajun cooking. Beginning as far back as the turn of this century, newspaper recipes and new commodities such as stoves and refrigerators made new ingredients and new techniques available to housewives who were in- creasingly freed from outdoor farm duties to concentrate their efforts in their kitchens. Restaurant chefs experimented with the bounty of seafood available and introduced such delicacies as Oysters Rockefeller and Crab- meat au gratin to the local population. Crawfish, so closely associated now with Cajun identity, have not been widely eaten until recently. As late as the 19305, a USDA agent complained in a letter to his superiors that crawfish were plentiful and would be an excellent source of protein for poor Cajuns but that he could not convince them to eat the crawfish more frequently. A dish as seemingly definitive as crawfish etouffee only ap- peared as late as the 1950$ when a few entrepreneurs first made peeled crawfish tails commercially available. Since then crawfish tails have found their way into surprising new dishes. Today, there are crawfish egg rolls, crawfish enchiladas, and crawfish fettucini. Housewives and restaurant chefs continued to experiment with new Cajun foods, keeping the Cajun tradition not only alive, but ever changing. My own mother has devel- oped a wonderful casserole with crawfish, Swiss Gruyere cheese, butter, cream, and mushrooms. Yet the Cajuns' now-celebrated cuisine was once a source of embarrass- ment and self-deprecating humor: Q: Do you know the difference between an ordinary zoo and a Cajun zoo? Foreword ix A: A Cajun zoo has a recipe next to the name of the animal on each cage. And, this example: Q: Do you know what a Cajun seven-course meal is? A: A pound of boudin and a six-pack. But with the fad, Cajun music joined Cajun cooking as a rallying point for ethnic pride. A few years ago, a rash of bumper stickers boldly declared that "Cajuns make better lovers because they eat anything." Crawfish have become a cultural symbol, as afficionados sport T-shirts with a cryptic (and suggestive) version of the directions for eating boiled crawfish: "Pinch my tail, suck my head." A new wave of telegenic Cajun chefs, such as Paul Prudhomme, Alex Patout and John Folse, seem to be undoing some of the media damage caused by years of parodies by such comedians as Cajun chef Justin Wilson. Even McDonald's marketed a Cajun McChicken sandwich and Cajun Fries. So I was somewhat surprised recently when a friend showed me an article in The New York Times entitled "Cajun Cooking is Dead." So, that was it. Ah, well, easy come, easy go. Live by the fad, die by the fad. Cajun cooking was dead and we didn't even know it here in south Louisiana. I didn't know how I would break the news to my mother. I read on and learned that the article under this presumptuous little title was actually a food critic's review of the temporary branch of K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen in the trendy city. What the critic meant was that his interest in Cajun cooking, specifically Paul Prudhomme's version, was dead, along with the interest of most of his hyper-hip readers who depend on such reviews to know where they're not supposed to be seen eating that week. I was relieved. I went home and had a bowl of gumbo to celebrate. Mama laughed. Despite the critic's gloomy pronouncement, Cajun cooking has been recognized as one of America's regional culinary styles and what are perceived as Cajun dishes now adorn menus in many restaurants across the country. Despite the popularity of Cajun food, most Americans still know little about the culture behind the menu entries. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss made it abundantly clear in The Raw and the Cooked that there is an important relationship between people and the food they eat. In this book, C. Paige Gutierrez applies the principals of an- thropological food ways research to her study of Cajun culture of south
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