Where the Cowboys Speak French!
Louisiana's Cajun country is a lively part of France transplanted to America
Back when I was a reasonably young man, seemingly not too long after the invention of internal combustion, it became my honor and privilege to hang out with the Cajun people of Mamou, a tiny town in Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, which brands itself “The Cajun Music Capital of the World” and where the language is almost exclusively French and just about everybody is up for having a good time, anytime, all the time.
Of course everybody there also speaks English, which I recommend instead of trying show off your high school French because Cajun French is French which has gone through numerous permutations, adaptions, add-ons, filters and amendments and which is only tortuously understood by actual French people speaking actual French.
Calvin Trillin, the delightfully funny New York writer and devotee of good food, once told of visiting Cajun country and asking a friend in New Orleans beforehand where to eat when he got there.
“Eat anywhere,” the friend advised him.
Indeed, Cajuns take cooking so personally and are so serious and competitive about making food taste exceptional that you really can eat just about anywhere and find it remarkable whether it’s a three-star place with white linen tablecloths or a filling station cafe with fried shrimp so delicate that it makes your tongue lap your brain.
The practice of “blackening” food, specifically fish or meat in a hot skillet, has long been part of the repertoire of some African-American cooks and was made all the rage by the late Paul Prudhomme, famous Cajun chef, who influenced chefs all over America to “blacken” certain dishes. Unfortunately, Prudhomme’s insistence on doing this with redfish filets almost wiped out this species of game fish, popular around the Gulf Coast. Paul later recanted and the fish have since recovered.
Louisiana is the crawfish capitol of America, producing about 98 percent of the nation’s supply annually. Much of this production comes from the Cajun “prairie” parishes, where large, flooded rice paddies double as habitat.
My dear friend, Savy Augustine was a rice farmer in Mamou, who periodically flooded his fields for crawfish production, thereby providing me with the privilege of catching my own and adding them to the crawfish boil, which he hosted in the evenings at his camp.
At a crawfish boil, your hosts will spread out sheets of newspaper on a large picnic table, drain the hot crawfish in colanders and strew them out onto the newspaper. Then you just grab a handful and start peeling before the next batch is done. A good “boil” recipe includes salt, red pepper, a couple of cut up onions, two or three quartered lemons, an orange, a few bay leaves and a box of Zararain’s Crab Boil, all of which is simmered for a half-hour before dumping the crawfish in.
This Mardi Gras is not in New Orleans!
It’s out there in the countryside, 147 miles northwest of New Orleans, in little farming towns like Mamou. There it starts before dawn at the American Legion Hall with a bunch of cowboys on horseback, dressed in bizarre outfits, drinking beer between shots of whiskey and having a grand time. At a certain signal, one of them gives a loud command to ride off for a day of begging farm neighbors for chickens and vegetables for the evening’s gumbo pot. Then they gallop off in the dawn’s early light, followed by a flatbed truck on which is a loud band playing Cajun music. All Day! They do this all day!
The original Cajun settlers in Louisiana were tragically forced out of their homes and off their lands by the British in Acadie— now Nova Scotia. At the time, Spain owned Louisiana and needed people to farm the land north of New Orleans and west of the Atchafalaya River so they offered the wandering Cajuns land grants to move there.
The 20-mile wide wide Atchafalaya swamp effectively cut them off from the rest of the world until recently, enabling them to keep their French language, unique music and customs intact for 200 years.
Many of those settlers could trace their ancestry back to the Vendee (western) region of France, where a lot of family names end in “eau” or “eaux” or “ot” Thus, today throughout those parishes you find names like “Boudreau”, “Thibodeau”, “Arceneau” or “Fontenot”.
Boudin (“boo-dang”) is a delicious mixture of cooked rice, pork fat, pork meat, green and white onions stuffed into a sausage casing and gently poached until done. The Cajuns brought it with them from France way back when and it continues today as a uniquely Cajun specialty.
I asked Savy one day if he could teach me to make my own boudin. His response was quick.
“Get in the truck.”
“Where we going?”
“We goan learn you makin’ some boudin, cher.”
We spent the day driving his pickup through the countryside around little towns like Ville Platte, Bunkie and Opelousas, stopping at places where people were making boudin. Savy spoke to them in French and asked them for their recipe and said I was his guest and not from around there and would not compete with them. They obliged.
The Cajuns of Louisiana are close to the land. They live to work hard and play hard and if they decide you’re a friend, you’ll be rewarded with their lasting loyalty and friendship.
One of my favorite Cajun dishes is crawfish etoufee. You can also make this with crab or shrimp but I much prefer crawfish. It can sometimes be difficult to find crawfish tail meat but you can search online for companies who will ship it to you.
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