Cajun Food and Culture
Uploaded by Panda05 on Dec 22, 2004
Cajun Food and Culture
"Cajun" and "Creole" cuisine is native to the "Bayou" country in the State of Louisiana. Creole cuisine was the creation of the French and Spanish settlers and their Black servants, and it is perhaps the best characterized by the sauces. Creole sauces are creamy and full-flavored with the rich use of herbs and spices. Cajun cooking is, generally speaking, a countrified version of Creole cuisine. It tends to be more robust and hot-peppeory than its cusin. It took several generations for the emerging social structure and cultural identity to form in Cajun Louisiana. Acadian refugees to Louisiana gradually divided into two relatively distinct classes: the elite planter class and the working farmer class. Acadians gradually adopted some of the Anglo (English-speaking) culture at all levels of social class. If you know what, where, when, and with whom to eat, then you know a great deal about the character of society. Food choices and production are influenced by biological and social needs, technology, and ecological restrictions. Two groups of people settled Louisiana during the eighteen hundreds, their class and origin shaped the types of foods they developed and ate.
The Cajun culture eventually developed as a blend of French, Spanish, and English cultures. "Dictionaries generally define Cajuns as 'a Louisianan who descends from French -speaking Acadians'" (Acadian, Cajun or Creole, p1) The Cajun people represent ingenuity, creativity, adaptability, and survival. The Cajuns used what they had in order to survive. Unlike the Creoles they made no attempt to create dishes they had in Europe. "Cajun cuisine is a 'table in the wilderness,' a creative adaptation of indigenous Louisiana foods. It is a cuisine forged out of a land that opened its arms to a wary traveler." (Folse, 2) The Cajuns lived off the land and used what natural resources they had in order to survive. They lived in the bayou were fish shellfish and wild game were plentiful. The Cajuns did not try to replicate European dishes since they did not have access to the exotic spices and other hard to find ingredients that made up the more complex European dishes. The Cajuns were simple, hard working, lower class people living off the land.
The Creoles were European aristocrats who traveled to New Orleans in the 1690s for the opportunity to establish communities and traditions in the New World. The Creole people were the upper class of Louisiana. "The...