I have achieved my blog ambition: to be named a “blog of interest” by The Independent back home in Louisiana. I’m flattered, even if their phrasing is suspiciously close to the “person of interest” wording law enforcement agencies use when they mean “the guy we’re pretty sure strangled that family of four, even if we don’t have the proof yet.”
Thanks to the folks I presume are responsible for this, Ind big dogs Scott Jordan and Reese Fuller (who needs to update his site).
The current Ind has a great piece by Friend of Crabwalk Mary Tutwiler (whose husband was my high school English teacher). It’s on the complex historical bond between Cajuns and crawfish. In particular, it gets at the ways in which what we consider “traditional” Cajun culture was actually forged relatively recently — post-World War II.
Fried crawfish and crawfish etouffee, for instance, didn’t arrive until the ’50s and didn’t hit the Cajun mainstream for a while after that. Go look at an old cookbook like the original Tony Chachere’s and you’ll notice a lot of “classic” Cajun dishes are missing; in their place you’ll actually find a lot of more “American” dishes like pork roasts.
There’s a dissertation in here somewhere, but I bet you could prove that Cajun cuisine circa 1930 or so was more similar to other rural Southern cuisines than it is today. The differentiation in food has increased at the same time that the broader-picture culture has become more homogenized. Discuss.
3 thoughts on “me in the ind, the evolution of cajun food”
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Wondering if you had finished John Mack Faragher’s book on the Acadiens yet? Awaiting your learned review…
i bought it right at publication, but got distracted. picked it up a few days ago for the first time and am about 100 pages in. first reaction: really interesting to me and fellow history buffs, not sure what kind of legs it might have outside that group. i mean, i’m loving it, but i don’t think i’d recommend it to folks without a particular interest in the topic.
that said, i’m still in the settlement-patterns-of-early-nova-scotia part, and i bet it gets a bit more exciting when the ethnic cleansing starts in a few chapters.
Being a fellow Cajun, and a history buff, I would agree with you. It wasn’t until about page 250 that things started to get exciting (after Nova Scotia / Acadia traded hands for the sixth time, it got a bit repetitive). Also, because I understand there was very little oral tradition (and I mean that in the PG rated way) and almost no surviving written records of the early Acadiens, there just weren’t a whole lot of interesting stories. Still, I loved the book and have already past it along to some people back home.