WetLeather Motorcycle Rider Information

The French quarter is the original settlement.

There are two important food cultures in southern Louisiana, Creole and Cajun.

Creole food is aristocratic, developed in homes with cooks and servants, and in restaurants. Creole food is the highest development of continental, with native American and African influences. (In the first known cooking school in the Americas, a native American taught French women to use local ingredients. Creole is often, but not necessarily, spicy, and it is _necessarily_ upscale. Most of the Very Old and Snooty restaurants in New Orleans are Creole, and it could be argued that Creole food is precisely that food served in the Very Old and Snooty restaurants.

Cajun food is the Louisiana peasant food, developed in the swamps and marshes by hardworking people who grew or caught much of their own food and did their own cooking. It's more vegetables and fish than meat, and made interesting by spicing.

First Diatribe: Cajun food should be exciting, but not painful. The fucking tourists have ruined good New Orleans restaurants by demanding spicier food, thinking that what they'd been served wasn't "authentic". (Yuppies, having no taste of their own, cannot distinguish between Thailand and Louisiana. But I'm not bitter.) Anybody who thinks eating Cajun food is supposed to be challenging has missed the premise.

At an ABSOLUTE MINIMUM, New Orleans style food is good. Bad restaurants simply cannot survive. Good Italian is more New Oreleans style than bad Southern. Jambalaya is legitimate New Orleans, but I suspect they'd have fobbed you off with an okra gumbo. Shrimp scampi is certainly not Cajun, and, as it's redundant in French, unlikely to be Creole. Collard greens, black beans, and hush puppies aren't New Orleans food, they're Southern (southern Louisiana is Cajun and Creole, northern Lousiana is Southern). The two alternatives for "Cajun style" catfish are deep fried and simmered in a tomato sauce, wanna bet whether that's what they meant?

Second diatribe. Blackened is a tourist invention. While Paul Prudhomme was working for one of the famous Creole restaurants, he invented a nouvelle cuisine approximation for trout almondine, a lovely old New Orleans dish that's approximately crispy deep fried trout with an almond butter sauce. His version kept the spicing, but forwent both the frying and the sauce. Not an unreasonable thing to do, but touristy nonetheless. When he opened his own restaurant, lack of capital plus the oppressive fire regulations in the French quarter prevented him from putting in a grill. (The fire regulations were put in place after the BIG fire which leveled New Orleans. I'm sure you all recall it, early 1700's?) He put his spices on the cheapest available fish (redfish used to be a trash fish), and, lacking a grill, tossed it into a superheated frying pan. Voila, blackened. Damned tourist food. Prudhomme has singlehandedly wreaked pseudo-Cajun on most of North America. Badly overspiced burnt stale redfish is sine qua non at restaurants all over America (because yuppies, lacking taste of their own, insist on authenticity, which means old redfish is trucked for days across the country to substitute for the real ingredient, whatever's fresh and cheap. The same thing that's ruined coffee, wine, and BMW cars). OTOH, and Credit where Credit is due. Prudhomme is certainly a Master of his craft, his restaurant is always full, and who else among us can claim to have singlehandedly endangered a species?

There are two interesting points to hushpuppy recipes.

The first is that it's a trick.  All published hushpuppy recipes are bland and boring. You have to cosy up to a genuine Southerner to find out that, well, for themselves they might add a jalapeno or two, but that's not really hushpuppies. I think southern-food-as-cooked-outside-the-south is a grand conspiracy to take revenge for the Civil War. How else to explain the tastelessness of grits? My hushpuppy recipe was developed with Carl's able assistance.

The second point should tickle your funny bone. The ONLY bad food we encountered in our trip to Louisiana was hushpuppies. Hushpuppies are Southern. Cajuns make lousy hushpuppies. So one could argue that your hushpuppies were authentic ;-)

Sadly, despite the claim that you were eating poor New Orleans food, all you got was bad Southern food. I remember the collard greens and hush puppies in Vicksburg (pause, reminisce, wipe drool off keyboard). You have to have dry cured ham to make good collard greens, the cook was either lazy or inexperienced.

No such thing as "Cajun Style" BBQ. All BBQ styles are Southern, except for Texas, which is at least foreign, if not entirely alien (Texas, not the BBQ style).

Red beans and rice are not, classically, particularly hot. Not that that's ipso facto a bad thing, but it's not Authentic.

I'll be there in a couple of weeks. If I find any bland and boring food I'll be sure to let you know. Right.

Next time we have a ham flown in, we could do a Louisiana five pound weekend. Dinner, breakfast, dinner, breakfast, lessee, jambalaya, grits scrambled eggs and fried ham, trout almondine, grillades and grits.

Anybody hungry?

Martin