In this treasury of Cajun heritage, the author allows the people who are the very foundations of Cajun culture to tell their own stories. Nicole Denée Fontenot visited Cajun women in their homes and kitchens and gathered over 300 recipes as well as thousands of narrative accounts. Most of these women were raised on small farms and remember times when everything (except coffee, sugar and flour) was home-made. They shared traditional recipes made with modern and simple ingredients.
"Despite the increased popularity of Cajun foods such as gumbo, crawfish etouffee, and boudin, relatively little is known about the history of this cuisine. Stir the Pot explores its origins, its evolution from a seventeenth-century French settlement in Nova Scotia to the explosion of Cajun food onto the American dining scene over the past few decades. The authors debunk the myths surrounding Cajun food - foremost that its staples are closely guarded relics of the Cajuns' early days in Louisiana - and explain how local dishes and culinary traditions have come to embody Cajun cuisine both at home and throughout the world." -- from the publisher.
The author of the New York Times bestseller The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry tells the inspiring story of how she helped nine others find their inner cook. After graduating from Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, writer Kathleen Flinn returned with no idea what to do next, until one day at a supermarket she watched a woman loading her cart with ultraprocessed foods. Flinn's "chefternal" instinct kicked in: she persuaded the stranger to reload with fresh foods, offering her simple recipes for healthy, easy meals. The Kitchen Counter Cooking School includes practical, healthy tips that boost readers' culinary self-confidence, and strategies to get the most from their grocery dollar, and simple recipes that get readers cooking.
Cajun Women and Mardi Gras is the first book to explore the importance of women’s contributions to the country Cajun Mardi Gras tradition, or Mardi Gras “run.” Most Mardi Gras runs--masked begging processions through the countryside, led by unmasked capitaines--have customarily excluded women. Male organizers explain that this rule protects not only the tradition’s integrity but also women themselves from the event’s rowdy, often drunken, play. Throughout the past twentieth century, and especially in the past fifty years, women in some prairie communities have insisted on taking more active and public roles in the festivities. Carolyn E. Ware traces the history of women’s participation as it has expanded from supportive roles as cooks and costume makers to increasingly public performances as Mardi Gras clowns and (in at least one community) capitaines. Drawing on more than a decade of fieldwork interviews and observation in Mardi Gras communities, Ware focuses on the festive actions in Tee Mamou and Basile to reveal how women are reshaping the celebration as creative artists and innovative performers.
A badass modern Cajun cookbook from Top Chef fan favorite Isaac Toups and acclaimed journalist Jennifer V. Cole, featuring 100 full-flavor stories and recipes. Things get a little salty down in the bayou... Cajun country is the last bastion of true American regional cooking, and no one knows it better than Isaac Toups. Now the chef of the acclaimed Toups' Meatery and Toups South in New Orleans, he grew up deep in the Atchafalaya Basin of Louisiana, where his ancestors settled 300 years ago. There, hunting and fishing trips provide the ingredients for communal gatherings, and these shrimp and crawfish boils, whole-hog boucheries, fish frys, and backyard cookouts -- form the backbone of this book. Taking readers from the backcountry to the bayou, Toups shows how to make: A damn fine gumbo, boudin, dirty rice, crabcakes, and cochon de lait His signature double-cut pork chop and the Toups Burger And more authentic Cajun specialties like Hopper Stew and Louisiana Ditch Chicken. Along the way, he tells you how to engineer an on-the-fly barbecue pit, stir up a dark roux in only 15 minutes, and apply Cajun ingenuity to just about everything. Full of salty stories, a few tall tales, and more than 100 recipes that double down on flavor, Chasing the Gator shows how -- and what it means -- to cook Cajun food today.
Winner, James Beard Award for Best Book in U.S. Foodways Winner, IACP Book of the Year Winner, IACP Best American Cookbook An NPR Best Book of the Year A Saveur, Washington Post, and Garden & Gun Best Cookbook of the Year A Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, Eater, Epicurious, and The Splendid Table Best New Cookbook A Forbes Best New Cookbook for Travelers: Holiday Gift Guide 2021 Long-Listed for The Art of Eating Prize for Best Food Book of 2021 “Sometimes you find a restaurant cookbook that pulls you out of your cooking rut without frustrating you with miles long ingredient lists and tricky techniques. Mosquito Supper Club is one such book. . . . In a quarantine pinch, boxed broth, frozen shrimp, rice, beans, and spices will go far when cooking from this book.” —Epicurious, The 10 Restaurant Cookbooks to Buy Now “Martin shares the history, traditions, and customs surrounding Cajun cuisine and offers a tantalizing slew of classic dishes.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review For anyone who loves Cajun food or is interested in American cooking or wants to discover a distinct and engaging new female voice—or just wants to make the very best duck gumbo, shrimp jambalaya, she-crab soup, crawfish étouffée, smothered chicken, fried okra, oyster bisque, and sweet potato pie—comes Mosquito Supper Club. Named after her restaurant in New Orleans, chef Melissa M. Martin’s debut cookbook shares her inspired and reverent interpretations of the traditional Cajun recipes she grew up eating on the Louisiana bayou, with a generous helping of stories about her community and its cooking. Every hour, Louisiana loses a football field’s worth of land to the Gulf of Mexico. Too soon, Martin’s hometown of Chauvin will be gone, along with the way of life it sustained. Before it disappears, Martin wants to document and share the recipes, ingredients, and customs of the Cajun people. Illustrated throughout with dazzling color photographs of food and place, the book is divided into chapters by ingredient—from shrimp and oysters to poultry, rice, and sugarcane. Each begins with an essay explaining the ingredient and its context, including traditions like putting up blackberries each February, shrimping every August, and the many ways to make an authentic Cajun gumbo. Martin is a gifted cook who brings a female perspective to a world we’ve only heard about from men. The stories she tells come straight from her own life, and yet in this age of climate change and erasure of local cultures, they feel universal, moving, and urgent.
Everybody has one in their collection. You know—one of those old, spiral- or plastic-tooth-bound cookbooks sold to support a high school marching band, a church, or the local chapter of the Junior League. These recipe collections reflect, with unimpeachable authenticity, the dishes that define communities: chicken and dumplings, macaroni and cheese, chess pie. When the Southern Foodways Alliance began curating a cookbook, it was to these spiral-bound, sauce-splattered pages that they turned for their model. Including more than 170 tested recipes, this cookbook is a true reflection of southern foodways and the people, regardless of residence or birthplace, who claim this food as their own. Traditional and adapted, fancy and unapologetically plain, these recipes are powerful expressions of collective identity. There is something from—and something for—everyone. The recipes and the stories that accompany them came from academics, writers, catfish farmers, ham curers, attorneys, toqued chefs, and people who just like to cook—spiritual Southerners of myriad ethnicities, origins, and culinary skill levels. Edited by Sara Roahen and John T. Edge, written, collaboratively, by Sheri Castle, Timothy C. Davis, April McGreger, Angie Mosier, and Fred Sauceman, the book is divided into chapters that represent the region’s iconic foods: Gravy, Garden Goods, Roots, Greens, Rice, Grist, Yardbird, Pig, The Hook, The Hunt, Put Up, and Cane. Therein you’ll find recipes for pimento cheese, country ham with redeye gravy, tomato pie, oyster stew, gumbo z’herbes, and apple stack cake. You’ll learn traditional ways of preserving green beans, and you’ll come to love refried black-eyed peas. Are you hungry yet?
An untamed region teeming with snakes, alligators, and snapping turtles, with sausage and cracklins sold at every gas station, Cajun Country is a world unto itself. The heart of this area—the Acadiana region of Louisiana—is a tough land that funnels its spirit into the local cuisine. You can’t find more delicious, rustic, and satisfying country cooking than the dirty rice, spicy sausage, and fresh crawfish that this area is known for. It takes a homegrown guide to show us around the back roads of this particularly unique region, and in Real Cajun, James Beard Award–winning chef Donald Link shares his own rough-and-tumble stories of living, cooking, and eating in Cajun Country. Link takes us on an expedition to the swamps and smokehouses and the music festivals, funerals, and holiday celebrations, but, more important, reveals the fish fries, étouffées, and pots of Granny’s seafood gumbo that always accompany them. The food now famous at Link’s New Orleans–based restaurants, Cochon and Herbsaint, has roots in the family dishes and traditions that he shares in this book. You’ll find recipes for Seafood Gumbo, Smothered Pork Roast over Rice, Baked Oysters with Herbsaint Hollandaise, Louisiana Crawfish Boudin, quick and easy Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits with Fig-Ginger Preserves, Bourbon-Soaked Bread Pudding with White and Dark Chocolate, and Blueberry Ice Cream made with fresh summer berries. Link throws in a few lagniappes to give you an idea of life in the bayou, such as strategies for a great trip to Jazz Fest, a what-not-to-do instructional on catching turtles, and all you ever (or never) wanted to know about boudin sausage. Colorful personal essays enrich every recipe and introduce his grandfather and friends as they fish, shrimp, hunt, and dance. From the backyards where crawfish boils reign as the greatest of outdoor events to the white tablecloths of Link’s famed restaurants, Real Cajun takes you on a rollicking and inspiring tour of this wild part of America and shares the soulful recipes that capture its irrepressible spirit.
You can't go wrong with 13 chapters of backwoods Cajun cooking and lots of helpful hints. These are the favorite recipes of northern and southern Louisiana families. Join them in their best memories around the table. Benefits community projects.
