|
a ACADIAN REBIRTH article
Cultures
of Acadiana |
Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, April 27, 1999
Cajuns didn't always cook with hot sauce
Other Louisiana cultures had big influence on Acadian cuisine
by Jim Bradshaw
The popular misconception of Cajun cooking is that it requires onions, bell pepper, and plenty of hot sauce. But neither the Acadians on the prairies nor those on the bayous had a wide variety of condiments available to them.
They cooked what was at hand and seasoned it with a few basic items, using techniques that they brought with them from old Acadie.
As Carl Brasseaux points out in "The Founding of New Acadia," "Age-old Acadian cooking techniques remained fundamentally unaltered throughout the 18th century, despite radical changes in the immigrants' diet. In Acadia the diet had revolved around the seasonal fruits of agriculture, fishing and hunting. During the spring and summer months (in Canada) wild game and fish provided....a steady source of protein, while the.... family garden yielded peas and la large variety of other vegetables. In autumn, surplus livestock - particularly hogs - was slaughtered and though some beef and pork were consumed immediately, most of the meat was salted for use during the approaching winter months. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century observers consistently reported the Acadian affinity for salt pork, noting that the Bay of Fundy area settlers preferred bacon to wild game."
He notes that in Canada. "Acadians generally prepared their meals with two basic cooking techniques - boiling and frying."
The Acadian diet changed when they reached Louisiana, but the way of cooking didn't. For example, corn bread replaced wheat bread on Acadian tables. Turnips and cabbage were a staple in Canada, not so widely available in Louisiana. It wasn't until the Acadians began to sample and study other forms of cooking in Louisiana that the recipes of today began to emerge.
"The emergence of gumbo in the Acadian culinary repertoire represented a new departure in Acadian cuisine," Brasseaux reports, "for it reflected the melding of cooking techniques developed by Franco-American, Indian, and African cultures. Thrust into a small geographic area with little mobility, the white, red, and black residents of south Louisiana were forced to interact on a daily basis, and although these confrontations were often unpleasant, all of the participating groups were inevitably influenced by their neighbors.
"Okra, for example, is an African vegetable introduced to Louisiana by blacks via the West Indies. By 1804 gumbo featured okra, at least on the Acadian Coast. The black contribution to 'Cajun' cooking was not limited to the prolific green vegetable; the ragu (sic) sauces now associated with Cajun cuisine bear striking resemblance to those of perhaps introduced into South Louisiana by slave cooks."
According to Brasseaux's research, a typical Acadian meal in the late 18th century consisted of salt pork, corn bread, and whatever fruits or vegetables were in season.
"Rice was consumed only rarely and then in small quantities, except in years when the corn crop failed", Brasseaux says. "The steady diet of salt pork was often punctuated by eggs and wild game bagged by farmer-hunters. ...A less common protein substitute was poultry, because eggs constituted an important link to the Acadian food chain. Hens were slaughtered only when they had grown old and unproductive."
Necessity apparently brought another of the hallmarks of Cajun cooking. Meals were cooked for a long time over a low fire because the old hens were too tough to cook any other way. Cajun beef cattle ran wild and ate the grasses of the prairie, producing stringy, tough meat that also required extensive cooking. It was also necessary to cook salt pork for some time to purge the salt.
Without necessity and neighbors, historians suggest the famed Cajun cuisine might still be much closer to a traditional New England boiled dinner than the Creole method cooking from which Acadians learned new ways to use seafood game and the abundant harvest available in South Louisiana.