Tasting Cajun Life

To learn about the foodways of a culture or region, how would you do it? Nothing beats making a personal trip and tasting well-known examples, enjoying meals of typical dishes, visiting locations where food is grown or raised, and talking to local experts.

To learn more about Cajun food and its relevance to Southern culture, I joined a field trip conducted by the Southern Foodways Alliance to Louisiana. To contrast urban and rural experiences, the trip focused on New Orleans as well as Acadian towns, principally Eunice (the prairie Cajun capital of Louisiana), where the Arcadian Cultural Center depicts Arcadian migration and culture, including foodways.

Cajun cuisine is a cooking style of French-speaking refuges exiled by the British from Canada who settled in Louisiana. They adapted local ingredients (such as game meats, rice and crawfish) to rural French cooking and were also influenced by Native American, Caribbean, and other European cooking styles.

The trip was helpful to understand how simple Cajun food preparation is and learn more about unique cooking methods such as smothering (cooking a vegetable or meat in its own juices), sometimes known as étouffée, and the importance of other methods such as boiling (for example, crawfish). The visit also helped to appreciate more the importance of rice (the second largest agricultural export of Louisiana) and sugarcane in Cajun cooking.

Typical Dishes

Classic Cajun dishes include:

• Jambalaya, a dish that contains rice, meat (such as chicken), seafood (such as shrimp), and vegetables (green peppers, onions, celery and chili peppers);


• Gumbo, a soup that takes its name from a word brought from western Africa that means okra, which is used as a thickening agent and is a principal ingredient.

In addition to jambalaya and gumbo, I was also able to enjoy and learn more about:

• Boudin, fresh sausage that is widely available and made fresh daily (becuase it doesn’t keep well for very long) with pork, rice, green onions, and spices and stuffed in a natural casing;


• Cracklin, fried pieces of pork fat with a small amount of attached skin, flavored after frying with peppery Cajun spices;


• Andouille, a spicy smoked sausage characterized by a coarse texture;


• Beignet, a French-style doughnut, that is fried dough covered with powered sugar. In the French Quarter of New Orleans, beignets are square and usually served in orders of three.

Memorable Meals

Several meal experiences were memorable. Each meal gave a particularly insight into Cajun food and together made the trip truly representative of Cajun foodways.

• Dinner at Calcasieu in New Orleans with chef Stephen Stryjewski (2011 James Beard Award Winner for Best Chef: South). Boudin and crawfish pie were appetizers; Louisiana chicken and sausage gumbo soup followed as the next course; entrees (all served family style) were catfish courtboullion, onion smothered pork, shrimp and eggplant dressing, and smothered greens. Pecan pie with praline ice cream and whiskey sauce was dessert.


• Crawfish feed at Hawk’s opened by Anthony Arceneaux, who has a reputation for serving the biggest, sweetest, and best seasoned crawfish. Established in 1983 near Rayne, La., Hawk’s proclaims to be in the middle of nowhere (it is because field trip members were not trusted to find it on their own by car and had to ride a bus).


• Smothered lunch at Le Village, a Cajun country retreat in Eunice, La., that featured smothered rabbit, smothered okra, smothered cabbage, and rice smothered in gravy.


• Lunch of boudin at the Mowata Store in Mowata, La., where owner Bubba Frey makes up to 400 pounds daily.


• Breakfast of boudin, sugarcane syrup, and biscuits prepared by The French Press of Lafayette, La.


• Rice dressing supper in Eunice, La. at Ruby’s Cafe, which has been preparing plate lunches since the 1950s, that also included pork loin stuffed with local sausage, coleslaw, okra, and bread pudding.

Rice and Crawfish Fields

Side trips to locations where food is grown or processed added to the understanding of Cajun cuisine:

• Rice fields and production of Cajun Grain in Kinder, La., owned by Kurt Unkel, who plants, grows, and mills brown jasmine rice that is a mixture of jasmine and wild red rice.


• Crawfish fields and operations of Craig and Troy West Crawfish in Mamou, La., who run one of the oldest commercial crawfish businesses in the state and supply clients from the Southwest to New York City.

Local Experts

Discussions with regional food experts helped to explain Cajun foodways so that the programs were more than just tasting events:

• Paul Prudhomme, owner of K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans, a restaurant where I had a bowl of chicken gumbo for lunch, described the challenges of bringing rural flavors and cooking styles into a big city.


• Jim Gossen, founder of Louisiana Foods (a leading crawfish wholesaler), explained how crawfish came to be farmed rather than fished.


• Donald Link (also a James Beard award-winning chef), a descendant of Germans of Acadiana, described Cajun food as “the self-sufficient food of people who live in the country and eat what they can take from the land.” (Link is also co-owner of the restaurant Cochon and in-house boucherie with Chef Stryjewski.)


• Bubba Frey explained why his boudin is so popular: He leaves out internal organs and uses very little grease. At the Prairie Acadian Cultural Center Kitchen in Eunice, he also demonstrated how cracklin is made.


• Pableaux Johnson, writer and photographer, discussed the art and practice of smothering.

Tasting Cajun food (while also learning about Cajun history and listening to Cajun music) in Louisiana gives anyone a better understanding and appreciation of the importance of Cajun culture in the American South.


Note: Click here to see pictures taken during the Louisiana field trip.

As Southern as Cajun Music

The American South is known for its musical expression. In fact, Mississippi even proclaims itself as the “Birthplace of American Music,” and giving that state due credit for some genres seems deserved. However, a special form of American music with a rich past is Cajun music in Louisiana.

The home of Cajun music is Acadiana, a 22-parish region of Louisiana officially recognized in 1971 by the state legislature where a large French-speaking population lives. (Acadiana is also home to Native American tribes and mixed-ethnicity Creole people, who historically spoke French and Créole French.) In addition, German settlers immigrated to Acadiana as early as 1721.

Cajuns are primarily the descendants of refugees forced by the British and New Englanders to leave Canada’s maritime provinces during the French and Indian War (1754-63) (the American term for the war known elsewhere as the Seven Years War). When the Acadians arrived in Louisiana in 1764, they brought ballads (many from France) that told stories of the “old days.”

Instruments of Cajun music start with the fiddle and include traditions of twin fiddling brought to Louisiana by immigrants. One fiddle plays the melody, while the second provides backup. When accordions arrived in Acadiana in the 1890s, they quickly became popular and a main component of Cajun music. Later in the 1930s when Texas groups began to influence Cajun music, instruments such as mandolins, pianos, and banjos were added to create a jazzy swing before country music became a major influence in the 1940s. During this time, bass and steel guitars became common components of Cajun music. However, the accordion regained its popularity as the lead instrument after World War II. Finally, modern influences added the acoustic guitar (mostly as a rhythm instrument) and the triangle for percussion. In addition, some groups often include drums, electric bass, and electric guitars.

Song lyrics are usually entirely in Cajun French, and the songs also derive from folk influences of black, white and Native American traditions. Born from ballads, Cajun music has transformed to dance music, which has been is promoted and sustained by a network of radio stations in Arcadiana. For example, KBON (101.1 FM) in Eunice, the most listened to state radio station on the Internet, devotes more than 85 percent of its airtime to Louisiana artists.

Cajun music is also promoted and preserved by the Cajun French Music Association, which was founded in 1984 in Basile, Louisiana, and has expanded to a membership of more than 2,000 families in Louisiana and southeast Texas (and one in Chicago). The association is the host of the annual LeCajun Awards (the equivalent of the Grammy Awards for Cajun music). The Grammies also has recognized the importance of this musical genre with a category of Cajun Music Album in the folk music category until 2012, when Cajun albums will be considered in the Best Regional Roots Music Album category.

In addition, the Cajun Music Festival in Mamou, held annually, includes a variety of Cajun musicians and groups. Visitors can enjoy the music or join the crowds on the dance floor. The festival includes classes in dancing, accordion making, and Cajun music and also offers contests such as egg throwing, boudin eating, a washer board tournament, the Cajun "dizzy dash," and watermelon eating.

However, the best effort to preserve Cajun music probably occurs at Fred’s Lounge in Mamou, a quiet town of 3,500 citizens in Evangeline Parish, which bills itself as “The Cajun Music Capital of the World.” Its musicians, particularly musicians who have performed at Fred’s (literally a shrine for Cajun music), have helped to expand the audience for Cajun music far beyond Southwest Louisiana.

Although Fred’s Lounge is open on only Saturdays (8 a.m.to 2 p.m), it features a weekly live Cajun music show broadcast for two hours on a local AM radio station, although the music starts about 9 a.m. and continues usually until 1:30 p.m. The two-hour radio broadcast has been continuous since 1962 (now heard over KVPI in Ville Platte). The music is clean family fun, dancing to the music is pretty much nonstop, but Fred’s is a bar, and most customers are enjoying a liquid breakfast before walking to a diner for a late lunch and good Cajun food. Fred’s celebrated its 50th anniversary in 1996 when Louisiana Governor Mike Foster participated in a ceremony and unveiled a plaque in memory of Alfred “Fred” Tate (who died in 1992). When I was in Mamou as part of a field trip conducted by Southern Foodways Alliance, Fred’s impressed me as truly authentic (as a YouTube video illustrates) and unadulterated by other cultural influences.

The field trip also included a visit to Les Rendezvous des Cajuns Radio Show held at Liberty Theater in Eunice. When I visited, the Jambalaya Cajun Band was onstage featuring fiddler Jamey Bearb and being broadcast on radio throughout Acadiana. Because Cajun music is dance music, the floor in front of the band was never empty.

Cajun music is as Southern as jazz, blues, gospel, and country. As part of the rich musical expression in the American South, Cajun music will continue to be an important part of the musical traditions of this region and beyond.