Look man, we work with what we’ve got. We just stuck to the struggle a little longer than everyone else did.
There was a time in our history when America had a very rich and robust set of independent culinary practices, homestead food adapted from whatever cuisine that particular family or community brought with them to America, cooked out of whatever you could rustle up locally. A lot of that disappeared when grocery stores and mass production of food became practical and available. But the Cajuns, being the stubborn French children that we are, just decided nah, we’ll keep cooking up the gators and the sea bugs. I don’t need to go buy meat from the butcher when I can literally take a rifle twenty paces out my back door and sight three gators with it. Hell we had to kill a gator once that I wasn’t even hunting, but he came up on our property and tried to pick a fight with my dog. Well, now we have this big old dead gator laying in the yard. What do we do with it? You skin him and cook him, obviously.
This was in 1999. I haven’t lived there in a while but I’d bet my left nut stuff like that is still happening down there.
We still like the grocery store because you can’t go hunt up a case of Pabst out of the bayou, but some combination of the fact that a) cuisine is a big part of our culture, b) hunting your own food is cheap, and c) most parts of Louisiana have been poor as hell since the beginning of recorded history - all comes together to mean that the local cuisine has remained weird for a lot longer than most other places in America. It also means these same local recipes have been being perfected for 200 years. Your meal might be gator tail garnished with frogs and topped with a sauce you can’t pronounce, but it will be god damn delicious and that’s a promise.
Just like you French, stubbornly insisting on keeping your culture instead of submitting to the anglo-germanic industrialized and homogenized culture around you.
Look man, we work with what we’ve got. We just stuck to the struggle a little longer than everyone else did.
There was a time in our history when America had a very rich and robust set of independent culinary practices, homestead food adapted from whatever cuisine that particular family or community brought with them to America, cooked out of whatever you could rustle up locally. A lot of that disappeared when grocery stores and mass production of food became practical and available. But the Cajuns, being the stubborn French children that we are, just decided nah, we’ll keep cooking up the gators and the sea bugs. I don’t need to go buy meat from the butcher when I can literally take a rifle twenty paces out my back door and sight three gators with it. Hell we had to kill a gator once that I wasn’t even hunting, but he came up on our property and tried to pick a fight with my dog. Well, now we have this big old dead gator laying in the yard. What do we do with it? You skin him and cook him, obviously.
This was in 1999. I haven’t lived there in a while but I’d bet my left nut stuff like that is still happening down there.
We still like the grocery store because you can’t go hunt up a case of Pabst out of the bayou, but some combination of the fact that a) cuisine is a big part of our culture, b) hunting your own food is cheap, and c) most parts of Louisiana have been poor as hell since the beginning of recorded history - all comes together to mean that the local cuisine has remained weird for a lot longer than most other places in America. It also means these same local recipes have been being perfected for 200 years. Your meal might be gator tail garnished with frogs and topped with a sauce you can’t pronounce, but it will be god damn delicious and that’s a promise.
Just like you French, stubbornly insisting on keeping your culture instead of submitting to the anglo-germanic industrialized and homogenized culture around you.