Cajun Culture, Cuisine: The World Invades the Bayous

Hunched over his accordion in the shade of a live oak tree, Lennis Romero was letting his ethnic pride show.

“ Cher , it don’t surprise me one tam bit that Cajun food is a-big, yeah, in London, Holland and Russia.” he says. “The rest of the world just been a ‘ti slow in catching up with the good things in life.”

Lennis and his brother, Ophe, a virtuoso on the ‘ti fer, or triangle, had just stomped out “Jambalaya” for some “foreign French” on the banks of Bayou Teche. The tourists had just stepped off a bus marked “un voyage au vrai pays des Acadiens,” a trip to the real Cajun country.

Spicing Up British Cuisine

Me oh, my oh! Cajun culture has busted out of the Bayou and gone global. Suddenly last summer, crawfish etouffee and file gumbo were on the menu at the summit in Moscow. Amsterdam’s hottest new restaurant is Riekje Sluizer’s Cajun Louisiana Kitchen, “geopend voor lunch.” London now has two Cajun-style restaurants, and liberal doses of sauce piquant are spicing up the traditionally bland British cuisine at posh nosheries such as Wilton’s and the Savoy Grill.

Now busloads of European tourists, led by the French, are venturing deep into the bayous where, before World War II, paved roads were few.

As Ophe conceded, there was a ‘ti language problem at first. The Romero brothers speak a quaint kind of French that, like the meandering bayou, has been bent out of shape over the last two centuries. Once the visitors from Paris and Lyons figured out that ‘ti was Cajun for petit and that an alligator was neither un caiman nor un crocodile , they were able to communicate their desire to sample soupe de cocodrie.

In St. Martinville, the spiritual capital of Cajun country, the tour group posed for photos around the statue of Evangeline, the heroine of Longfellow’s epic about the British expulsion of French settlers from Acadia, or Nova Scotia, in 1755. Then, in the old Indian cemetery, they visited the grave of Emmeline Labiche, whose real-life separation from her lover inspired the poem.

As Americans cram into the Crazy Horse Saloon in Paris, the French contingent here braved the overflow crowd at Mulate’s, the Cajun nightclub in Breaux Bridge, for a fais do-do (literally “make go to sleep”), the Saturday night dance named for the tiny room where small children could doze while their parents two-stepped until dawn.

Music Catching On

Cajun music, like Cajun cooking, is catching on around the world. Bayou artists such as fiddler Michael Doucet and pianist Zachary Richard have rabid fans in Paris, Montreal, Quebec, Martinique, San Francisco and New York’s Greenwich Village. Don Montoucet’s Cajun combo had the comrades jumping when Chef John Folse from Lafitte’s Landing in Donaldsonville set up a Cajun restaurant at the Moscow World Trade Center during the summit last June.

If Chef Paul Prudhomme had shown up that night at Mulate’s, he would have been mobbed for autographs by both locals and French pilgrims on the trail of what their cultural influence has brought forth on this continent.

Prudhomme, the first American chef awarded the French government’s Merite Agricole, is proprietor of K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans. He has become a culinary superstar on TV, radio and videotapes, and is the author of cookbooks that have sold more than 600,000 in hardback editions.

He is also the author of observations on Cajun culture, such as:

“An authentic Cajun is one who anticipates the start of the crawfish season as much as his wedding night.”

‘It Tastes Grandma’

“Good Cajun cooking doesn’t taste country; it tastes grandma.”

“If you don’t hover between pleasure and pain when you eat it, chances are you haven’t made your sauce piquant hot enough.”

Prudhomme popularized the “blackening” method of sealing in the flavor of meat or fish with intense heat, as if over an open fire. Its popularity has produced menu aberrations such as blackened meat loaf and blackened omelets and has made the lowly redfish, once disdained in haute cuisine, an endangered species in Texas and Louisiana waters. (Some months ago, agents of the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department conducted a “sting” to catch commercial fishermen and food wholesalers dealing in illegally caught redfish.)

“Dining out these days, you don’t know if that blackened menu special is the chef’s favorite or his latest failure,” joked Joe Cahn, president of the New Orleans School of Cooking, which daily instructs nearly 100 students and was the finishing school for Andre Numan, Amsterdam’s Cajun chef.

History of the Cuisine

Cajun cooking has been around since the earliest exiles from Nova Scotia found love at first bite of alligator tail meat. Its delights took a while catching on beyond the swamps of the Atchafalaya.

When Fannie Merritt Farmer collected America’s best recipes for her Boston Cooking School cookbook in 1896, the word Cajun didn’t make the index.

Even today, Antoine’s in New Orleans, founded in 1840, doesn’t mention the word Cajun on its extensive menu, although there are half a dozen “Creole” dishes,

from “gombo (sic) creole” to poulet a la creole . Bernard Guste, the great-great-grandson of founder Antoine Alciatore, admitted, however, to being “a bit more heavy-handed with the pepper pot to please tourists who expect Louisiana cooking to be hot, real hot, which was never the Creole style.”

Prudhomme points out that “as Louisiana food has grown in popularity throughout the country, the distinction between Cajun and Creole has almost vanished.”

Creoles in Another Class

In history, the difference is much clearer. Creoles are descended from aristocratic refugees from the French revolutions, who sometimes fled with their chefs, dressmakers and dancing masters. They intermarried with Spanish settlers whose cooking pots bubbled with spices and condiments from the Aztec, Inca and Caribbean cultures. Black cooks on the plantations added another dimension, such as okra and gumbo (both African words). Creole society was gallant and refined; its cuisine was elegant, subtly seasoned and rich in sauces.

The term Cajun is a corruption of “archadia,” the name given Canada’s maritime provinces by the explorer Verrazano on first sighting their virgin forests. The people known as Cajun were the victims of one of this worst human-rights atrocities of American history.

Originally from Normandy, Brittany and Picardy, they were deported from Nova Scotia, which France lost to England in the War of Spanish Succession. The year of Le Grand Derangement was 1755, and D-day was Sept. 5. On that day entire villages were summoned to the churches to hear King George II’s proclamation that their lands, homes and cattle were being confiscated and they would be sent into exile. Soldiers hurried them down to waiting boats, sometimes separating husbands from wives, mothers from children, and parting lovers as in the tale Hawthorne told Longfellow.

Smallpox Blankets Used

The tragic result fell just short of genocide. The British commander, Lord Jeffrey Amherst (who got a liberal arts college named for him), was all for it. In a letter to a Col. Bouquet, he wrote: “You will do well to try to spread smallpox by means of blankets and by every other means which might help exterminate that abominable race.”

The survivors, mostly trappers, fishermen and farmers, settled into Louisiana’s swamplands. Their hardy, food-loving descendants seldom ventured beyond the range of their pirogues and pickup trucks until 1947, when the first oil rigs rose over the marshes. Their cuisine was culled from the woods, bayous, tiny gardens and barnyard animals ready for the stew pot. It took slow cooking and high-octane sauces to tenderize the cuts of squirrel, wild rabbit, alligator and senile cows and hens.

Even to the current generation, as both Prudhomme and Cahn recall, Cajuns seldom went to the store and dined out even less often.

Food Off the Farm

“We grew virtually everything we ate,” said Prudhomme, who was the youngest of 13 children growing up on a farm near Opelousas. “If a chicken didn’t lay or a rooster couldn’t fertilize or a mother pig was too old to have babies (sic), we killed them for food for the family.”

Cahn points out that “sauce piquant was a necessary camouflage when gourmandizing on ‘possum, muskrat and nutria.”

It is doubtful whether a yuppies hovering over their food processors in quest of an authentic Cajun dish could bring themselves to “trim away any and all hair” to prepare a 12-pound hog’s head for fromage de tete de cochon --head cheese--or to remove “the glands located on each shoulder and behind the knees” of a squirrel or rabbit, as prescribed in the Prudhomme Family Cookbook.

As for real back-bayou cooking, Prudhomme said he regrets that “there are almost no sources for purchasing fresh pig’s blood” to make red boudin Cajun sausage. And he conceded that in this age of fat-consciousness, he “couldn’t sell food cooked in pork lard” in his restaurant.

Heritage of Centuries

The five flags flying from the columned porch of the Presbytere, or priests’ house, in St. Martinville chronicle the course of Cajun culture from the French Bourbon kings in 1756 to the Spanish in 1762, to Napoleon’s First Republic in 1800, to Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory in 1803 and the Confederate government during the Civil War.

Just down the road a piece bubble the vats of two of the most prodigious purveyors of that Cajun napalm known as hot pepper sauce.

The tabasco (from the Spanish for “damp earth”) has been grown in Louisiana since an unknown soldier brought back some dried peppers from the Mexican War and gave them to Edmund McIlhenny, who planted the seeds in his wife’s garden on Avery Island. One war later, in trying to salvage his plantation after it was overrun by Union troops, McIlhenny bottled and brought to market a batch of hot sauce.

Now the family-owned McIlhenny Co., with annual sales of nearly $12 million, exports this incendiary element of the Bloody Mary to 100 countries and goes beyond Avery Island’s still-thriving tabasco patch to pick peppers from Mexico, Honduras, Venezuela, Colombia and the Dominican Republic.

Hot Sauce for Export

In nearby New Iberia, B. F. Trappey’s Sons have been marketing a variety of hot sauces, pickled okra, candied yams, red beans and other Cajun staples for 90 years.

“The Arab countries are our best overseas market for pepper sauce,” Jack Blenderman said from behind the president’s desk at the Trappey plant. “At lunch, they’ll empty a three-ounce bottle on a bit of bread and cheese. The Japanese are also big importers of our 55-gallon drums.”

Trappey’s also ships its smoldering sauces to Nova Scotia, where natives deprived of the Louisiana experience have perpetuated a bland diet.

In the pepper sauce business, hotness is measured by the Scoville Heat Index, a sort of intestinal BTU scale that ranks the relatively hot tabasco, jalapeno and cayenne peppers in the 30,000 range, far behind the tiny Chinese pepper, which festers above the 100,000 mark. On Trappey’s pepper-picking assembly line, workers wear special gloves and are warned not to rub their eyes.

The craze for Cajun culture has seemingly endless manifestations. Cajun humorist Justin Wilson’s cooking show is now aired in bizarre bayou-busted English on 284 public TV stations. “Belizaire the Cajun” is emblazoned on movie marquees, and for mystery fans author Daniel Woodrell chronicles the cases of Cajun cop Rene Slade.

Cajun gumbo mixes, crab boils and other delicacies are available by mail order from Boudin King, Chef Chauvin, Frey of Louisiana, Tony Chachere, Cajun Magic (a Prudhomme enterprise) and an ever-growing number of dealers.

Now there is a Cajun beer, Cajun cola, Cajun potato chips, Cajun popcorn, “Cajun Mary” cocktail mix, Cajun pickles (with the label upside down, in keeping with Justin Wilson’s self-deprecating Cajun humor), “Cajun Sweet Smoke Pecan Shells” and even a Cajun kosher cookbook. Aggressive marketing has brought the “Four Foot Shelf” of Cajun spices to many supermarkets across the country.

To preserve the language, Msgr. Jules Daigle, an 88-year-old retired priest in Welsh, La., compiled a 600-page Cajun Dictionary that was accepted by the French Academy as a scholarly work. It was the monsignor’s thesis that, although deeply rooted in French, Cajun evolved into a separate language over the span of two centuries. At the time of his dictionary’s publication, he cited the example of “a French priest who came to St. Martinville some years ago and announced from the pulpit that a foire , the French word for bazaar, would be held in the parish next week. The congregation fell apart laughing. In Cajun, foire had come to mean diarrhea.”

Chef Cahn credits food writers and restaurant critics with helping to heat up the Cajun craze. “They’re like fashion writers in setting new trends. When I was working in Los Angeles, one restaurant went from nouvelle cuisine to Mexican to sushi to Cajun in a four-year period. Same chef. Same owner. Same location. When you’re hot, you’re hot, and right now Cajun is hot every which-way.”