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Crescent City Culinary Origins

A brief history of settlers who taught a kitchen to sing

by Honey Naylor

Imagine, if you will, the French or Spanish master of a New Orleans household struggling to teach the kitchen help to prepare his favorite dish. The cook may have been a slave from Africa, or a free person of mixed race, whose cooking experience was based entirely on the preparation of his or her native foods. It was left to the cook to interpret a complicated recipe, in a different language, using new ingredients. Authenticity was irrelevant; getting dinner on the table was all that mattered.

The Creoles of the French Quarter in the 1800s lived comfortably This watercolor shows Dumaine Street between Dauphine and Bourbon Streets at that time.

Now imagine these same "European" recipes being taught by slave to freed slave to immigrant, perhaps even someday being taught to a classically trained chef, who probably wouldn't even recognize its buried origins. All that remained of the original was a misspelled word or a questionable reference to a particular technique. What now existed on the plate, what took this chef's breath away, was something entirely new. It was a cuisine born in and for a new world. And it was terrific.

There is no moment at which we can say, Look, there it is, the birth of New Orleans cuisine. Every moment in the city's history has been part of this birth, and, truly, the cuisine is constantly being reborn. Every French or Spanish colonist added something to the pot. Every cook added the flavors of his or her own experience. And in their search for the taste of home, each immigrant group—Sicilian, Greek, German, Irish, Croatian, Vietnamese, Thai—added something.

The outside world would give this cooking a name—usually Creole, or out in the countryside, Cajun. But this food is the child of everyone who has ever cooked a meal in New Orleans.

Historians, perhaps grabbing at straws, have come up with one incident that at least symbolically evokes the beginning of New Orleans Creole cuisine. In 1722, in what became known as the Petticoat Rebellion, about fifty young wives marched on Governor Bienville's mansion in New Orleans, pounding their frying pans with metal spoons and protesting their dreary diet of cornmeal mush.

With a dash of admirable dexterity, Bienville put the women in touch with a certain Madame Langlois, who had learned more than a few secrets from the local Choctaw Indians.

It was she who calmed the angry wives by teaching them how to use powdered sassafras for flavor in the gumbo they'd already tasted from the hands of African slaves (gumbo being the West African word for okra), how to prepare hominy grits, how to squeeze the most flavor (and indeed the greatest variety of meals) from the region's abundant fish (such as trout, red snapper, and the highly prized pompano), shellfish (shrimp, crabs, and crawfish—also called "mudbugs" by locals), and game.

It is not an error to say Creole cooking is French, even though that is a gross oversimplification. The French founded the colony they called La Nouvelle Orleans in 1718, near the mouth of the Mississippi. At that time child-king Louis XV sat on the throne, but France was actually ruled by its regent, Philippe II, Due d'Orleans. It was for the duke that the new settlement was named. Its first streets were named after French royals of the day.

The famous French Market of New Orleans was so central to the city's culinary life that it even turned up on coffee labels.

From the beginning, New Orleans cuisine incorporated a flurry of French words and, at least in certain ways, the flavors of France. There were ravigotes and rémoulades, étouffées and beignets. There was reverence for lush sauces, from béarnaise to hollandaise; butter and cream were used generously. But later generations would scratch their heads at New Orleans recipes, wondering how a dish with a name found back in France looked and tasted so little like its namesake.

Perhaps the richness of the food consoled the colonists through those hard first years—and they needed consolation indeed. Set on the bank of a great crescent in the wide brown river, much of the city lies five feet below sea level, with surrounding swamps and bayous as far as the unhappy eye can see. The colony had to be carved out of thick canebrakes, and the Creoles were forced to battle hurricanes, floods, and yellow fever without rest. New Orleans' penchant for partying may actually stem from those tragic earliest days, when mere survival was cause for celebration.

The first colonists of La Nouvelle Orleans were soon joined by African slaves and then by German settlers. In the mid-eighteenth century, New Orleans came under the control of Spain—introducing a host of new flavors and techniques from Spanish holdings across the Americas, ranging from tomatoes to corn to the act of deep-frying itself.

Italian fruit vendors in the French Market at the turn of the century.

It was during this colonial period that thousands of Acadians (or Cajuns) came to southern Louisiana from present-day Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in Canada. They were descendants of French speakers who, at the dawn of the seventeenth century, colonized those Canadian provinces—only to be driven out and down the coast by the British.

This was also when New Orleans suffered two devastating fires; the rebuilt city we see today reflects a decidedly Spanish flavor, resembling Old San Juan more than it does Paris, Rouen, or Nice. After the turn of the nineteenth century, Spain let Louisiana slip back to France, but the French flag flew over the colony for only twenty days.

The port of New Orleans is less than a day's steam from the spot where the Mississippi River meets the Gulf of Mexico. In 1803 the port was a bustling center of trade, and Thomas Jefferson—bent on keeping it out of Napoleon's hands—purchased the entire Louisiana Territory for fifteen million dollars. This single transaction gave the United States a vision of itself that within a handful of years would reach outward to the Pacific Ocean.

Thousands of people rushed to the new American city. By 1840, New Orleans was one of the largest and wealthiest cities in the nation—with restaurants worthy of patrons who wanted to (and could afford to) eat well. Nearly all the places founded then are only memories now. There was Moreau's, reputed to be the best, and a place called Fabacher's, by far the largest. The latter served up to two thousand meals on an average day, as many as five thousand on Mardi Gras—an irony, since most fine dining establishments now lock their doors on Fat Tuesday.

Begue's was a Creole landmark near the French Market, famed for its gargantuan breakfasts of seafoods, meats, and wines that could last up to four hours. New Orleans' oldest surviving restaurant, the world-famous Antoine's, started out as a humble boardinghouse.

Today, New Orleans is a diversified commercial and tourist center, yet its riverfront is still a significant component of the economy. It has extensive dock facilities along the river and along man-made shortcuts like the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway and the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet. Exports from New Orleans' vast hinterland include grains, cotton, and petroleum products. Crawfish and catfish production are also important industries, and Louisiana is known for the quality of its rice, sweet potatoes, sugar cane, strawberries, and tomatoes.

Despite some nods to the twentieth century—a proliferation, for instance, of high-rise, high-tech convention hotels-New Orleans still has a foot firmly planted in the past.

New Orleans is anything but a neat, orderly city, and therein lies part of its charm, as well as its great appeal to writers and artists. The French Quarter, one of the city's ten historic districts, is carefully preserved, right down to its peeling paint and cracked flagstones. It is a lively living museum, a business center, and even a residential district, as well as the city's primary tourist attraction.

If you stop in the Quarter near the Vieux Carré for beignets and a cup of chicory-laced coffee, you will be near the site of the original colony of La Nouvelle Orleans, with the same boundaries today as when it was first laid out by French engineers in the eighteenth century.

Bagnets and cafe au lait have been a New Orleans pleasure since the 1800s

The city cherishes its French heritage and loves its legends of voodoo queens and grinning buccaneers. Yet we also take pride in the fact that New Orleans is the first American city in which opera was performed. For the most part, day in and night out, New Orleans is mindful of those qualities that make it unique—on the street or on the plate. We take pride in our food, our music, and our fun; and we wake up each day inviting the world to join us.