Table Of ContentC A J UN FOODWAYS
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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
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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
