The Ravenous Guide to Cajun Cooking

This lens will serve as an overall introduction to Cajun cooking and Cajun cooking resources on the web.

You can start with a video on hew to eat a crawfish. If you are looking for recipes, we point you to the best websites for finding authentic, sound Cajun recipes. You will also find a Cajun recipe search engine. You will find a few articles online that give an overview of Cajun culture and cooking, dispelling some misconceptions along the way.

You will find a GoogleMaps guide to eating in Cajun country. A bookstore of key Cajun cookbooks. You will find deals on dutch ovens - crucial gear for Cajun cooking.

I hope that you find this page a useful tool for exploring Cajun cooking and that you'll take the time to give it a good star rating.

Laissez le bon temps roulez!

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The Ravenous Guide to Food and Cooking.: The Ravenous Homepage. Start here to find any Ravenous resource.
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How to Eat a Crawfish

From Les Blank's documentary Always for Pleasure.

CLICK HERE FOR VIDEO Requires Real Player

Archived by the University of California Berkeley Media Resources Center.

- R E C I P E S -

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Ravenous Recipes

Ravenous Recipes: Cajun Cooking: Recipes and links to recipes for creating a serious Cajun kitchen.
The Ravenous Guide to Gumbo: This is the place to go to learn about all things gumbo.
Ravenous Recipes: Etouffee: A few crucial etouffee recipes.
Ravenous Recipes: Cajun Charcuterie: Learn how to make all that funky Cajun sausage.

Cajun Recipes

Recipes Written By People Who Know

There are a ton of Cajun recipe sites littering the digital bayou. These are sites that have authentic, sound recipes.

A recipe for chicken and sausage gumbo that calls for a bottle of chicken bouillion cubes is not a sound recipe. It may be authentic, but it is not sound and I'll try to stear you clear.

RealCajunRecipes.com: Created by three Cajuns born and raised in Acadiana. It is devoted to building the largest and most accurate collection of Cajun recipes handed down from one Cajun cook to another.
Cajun and Creole Recipes from John Holse: A full cookbook worth of recipes by Cajun chef John Holse of LaFitte's Landing at Bitterswett Plantation. You'll find recipes for wild game, frog, the gamut of shellfish as well as soup, sauces and salads. Many of the these are upscale and original recipes, well written and well considered.
Ingredients: Roux, Andouille, Boudin Blanc,. Tasso: Notes and recipes on these four key building blocks by John Folse.
Great Cajun Cooking: Developed by home cooks in Lafayette, this site has loads of real deal recipes.
Saveur: Don't Call it Cajun . . . Recipes: Links to the seven recipes from the Saveur Magazine article "Don't Call it Cajun"

Black's Oyster Dipping-Sauce, Chicken Sauce Piquante, Courtbouillon, Crab Boil, Crawfish Pie, Seafood Gumbo, Shrimp and Crab Étouffée
Saveur: East of Houston, West of Baton Rouge . . . Recipes: Links to the six recipes from the Saveur Magazine article: "East of Houston, West of Baton Rouge"

Boudin Balls, Crawfish Étouffée, Mayhaw-Veneered Duck, Peach Cobbler, Smother-Fried Garlic Potatoes, Sweet-Dough Pies
Coon Ass Recipes: Exactly what you would expect.

Crawfish etouffee, chicken and sausage jambalaya, alligator sauce piquante, corn maque choux, catfish courtbouillon, and the Holy Trinity.

- ABOUT CAJUN COOKING -

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Saveur Magazine on Acadian Cooking

From Don't Call it Cajun:

The dancers are framed by simple wood-slat chairs and checker-clothed tables laden with food. There are baskets of Louisiana blue crabs, their spiny shells turned bright orange-red in the restaurant's mammoth steampots, in water zapped with hot-pepper sauce, lemon, and salt. There are platters glistening with rosy crawfish tails cooked in their own juices with onions, cayenne, corn, and potatoes; plates of oysters and shrimp that have been dusted with cornmeal and fried to a turn; and bowls of rich brown gumbo teeming with more crab and shrimp, or with boldly seasoned sausage.

. . . In the midst of this cultural melting pot, real pots bubbled away. Acadian cooking had its roots in the French farmhouse style of its Canadian ancestors, but its flavors were enlivened by the richness of local ingredients-okra from Africa, cayenne from the Caribbean, Native American corn and ground sassafras leaves (filé), and more.
Either okra or filé-never both-are used to thicken gumbo, the most famous of all Acadian specialties. There are as many gumbos in Acadiana as there are cooks. Perfected on thousands of stovetops over tens of generations, gumbo evolved as a succession of newfound ingredients and techniques reshaped Acadian cooking.

. . .One of the few remaining old-fashioned meat markets in Acadiana is Hebert's, . . . Pork is central to Acadian cooking, and Hebert's is a temple of pork. . . . Inside the case are such wonders as pans of spicy hogshead cheese; chunks of the intensely flavored pork jerky called tasso; patties of onion-flecked ground pork encased in caul fat; whole calf's and pig's stomachs bulging with zestily seasoned ground pork, to be baked and sliced as a rustic terrine. In various parts of the shop are a gastronome's ransom of earthy sausages-andouille, chaurice, boudin blanc and boudin rouge. Hebert's is a living lesson in the history of Acadian charcuterie.

There's no such thing as a Cajun restaurant," says André Begnaud, former sous-chef to Emeril Lagasse at the noted Emeril's restaurant. "Cajun's what you eat when your mama cooks."

Evangeline

An Excerpt from Longfellow's Evangeline:

Thus ere another noon they emerged from the shades; and before them
Lay, in the golden sun, the lakes of the Atchafalaya.
Water-lilies in myriads rocked on the slight undulations
Made by the passing oars, and, resplendent in beauty, the lotus
Lifted her golden crown above the heads of the boatmen.
Faint was the air with the odorous breath of magnolia blossoms,
And with the heat of noon; and numberless sylvan islands,
Fragrant and thickly embowered with blossoming hedges of roses,
Near to whose shores they glided along, invited to slumber.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
On the banks of the Têche, are the towns of St. Maur and St. Martin.
There the long-wandering bride shall be given again to her bridegroom,
There the long-absent pastor regain his flock and his sheepfold.
Beautiful is the land, with its prairies and forests of fruit trees;
Under the feet a garden of flowers, and the bluest of heavens
Bending above, and resting its dome on the walls of the forest.
They who dwell there have named it the Eden of Louisiana!

A Word on Paul Prudhomme, Blackened Anything and the Aftermath of the Cajun Food Craze

From The GumboPages by Chuck Taggart: .

Chef Paul Prudhomme, of K-Paul's Restaurant in New Orleans and a native of Opelousas, Louisiana, can be given a lot of the credit for popularizing Cajun-style cooking in America. For nearly 20 years he has been one of Louisiana's most innovative and influential chefs, and has launched the careers of many other prominent Louisiana chefs from his world-famous French Quarter restaurant.

The dish that became his signature was Blackened Redfish, for which he created a new, simple but brilliant technique for cooking fish (or steak, chicken, etc.) which involves cooking fish dipped in clarified butter and sprinkled with Creole seasoning in an iron skillet over incredibly high heat, creating a blackened crust and preserving the natural juiciness of the fish.

However, there have been drawbacks to this innovation. Throughout America, blackened redfish became synonymous with Cajun food, even though its creator does not describe it as such. You'll hear ill-informed people talking about how blackening is a "200-year-old Cajun technique", when in fact Chef Prudhomme developed it in the late '70s while executive chef at Commander's Palace, and popularized it at K-Paul's.

Myriad so-called "Cajun" restaurants opened all over America to capitalize on the craze, many of which were operated by people who had no idea what Cajun cuisine was really like, and who served execrable food. Many of them couldn't even do blackening properly, and turned everything that wasn't nailed down into burnt, dry pieces of roofing shingle. (I've even seen places that offered "blackened hot dogs"! Run away!) The dish's enormous popularity also ended up causing redfish to be fished almost to extinction; it is still illegal in Louisiana to serve redfish in that has been caught in local Gulf waters. And somewhere along the line, "Cajun" became synonymous with "hot".

Cajuns do like their food well-seasoned, and this seasoning almost always includes black pepper and cayenne pepper, but the idea that Cajun food is like regular food with a pound of pepper on it is a misconception. Good, well-seasoned food in southwest Louisiana will definitely have a zing; the cayenne tends to sneak up on you, catching you in the back of your throat, and you notice you start to perspire after about six or eight bites. But if Cajun food burns your mouth, it means you've got too much pepper in it.

Marc Savoy, a musician and accordion-builder in Eunice, Louisiana, and his wife Ann are very involved in the preservation of Cajun culture. In Les Blank's marvelous documentary film about Cajun and Creole cuisine, "Yum! Yum! Yum!", he tells an amusing story about how he took his family to Disneyland.

They stayed at the Disneyland Hotel, which had a nice restaurant. They decided to dine there, and they saw a listing on the specials board for "Cajun Fish". Marc mischeviously said, "Let's see what they mean by this," so when the waitress came to take their orders he played dumb and asked her (in his thick Cajun accent), "What is this word 'Cajun', what does that word mean?" She was honest and said she didn't know, but she thought it meant a style of cooking from New Orleans.

"She didn't even know that there was a whole culture attached to it," Marc said, "she just thought it was a style of cooking." And what's more, the New Orleans cooking style is Creole, not Cajun. So he went ahead and ordered it, and when it arrived he said it was a nice piece of fish, but he found it inedible because it was "absolutely encased in pepper", with a crust of cayenne. "I wrapped it in my napkin and took it back to our room, went into the bathroom and washed all the pepper off. After that, it was a pretty good piece of fish ..."

R E S O U R C E S

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Cajun Cooking Resources

Wikipedia: Cajun Cuisine: Great place to start to learn about Cajun cuisine or add your two cents worth of knowledge.
RealCajunRecipes.com: created by three Cajuns born and raised in Acadiana. It is devoted to building the largest and most accurate collection of Cajun recipes handed down from one Cajun cook to another.
Boudin Link: An informative website that ranks and reviews the best places to buy boudin in Acadiana.
The Encyclopedia of Cajun Culture: An extensive and thoughtful A-Z of al things Cajun.
The Gumbo Pages: Where To Get Creole/Cajun Ingredients: Vendeors for crawfish, boudin, etc. In Louisiana and all over the country.
The Gumbo Pages: The Creole and Cajun Food of Louisiana: Thoughts by Malcolm Hebert, a food wrtier with Creole parents, raised in Cajun country.
A History of Creole and Cajun Cooking: From Cajun chef John Folse.
Ingredients: Roux, Andouille, Boudin Blanc,. Tasso: Notes and recipes on these four key building blocks by John Folse.

Crawfish

curated content from Flickr

Etoufee and the Beaux Bridge Crawfish Festival

From Saveur:

One of the many legends of Acadiana: When the Acadians left Nova Scotia for Louisiana in the mid-18th century, a gaggle of North Atlantic lobsters followed them south to the bayous. Along the way, they molted repeatedly, each time acquiring smaller shells. By journey's end, they had become crawfish. If the crustaceans' transformation was an expression of sympathy for the Acadians, though, that compassion has not been reciprocated: Generations of Acadian cooks have tossed millions of crawfish into boiling cauldrons, stewpots, sauté pans-even, in modern times, empty ice chests used as makeshift steamers.
The center of the crawfish universe is Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, site of an annual crawfish festival and birthplace of the most celebrated crawfish creation of all, crawfish étouffée-crawfish tails long-cooked in a lidded black iron pot with onions, cayenne, and crawfish fat, among other ingredients. According to local restaurateur Dickie Breaux, the dish was invented here in the late 1920s, in the old Hebert Hotel, by Mrs. Charles Hebert and her daughters, Yolie and Marie. The Hebert sisters passed the recipe on to their friend Aline Guidry Champagne, who served the dish at her Rendez-Vous Café, also in Breaux Bridge. Champagne dubbed it "étoufée", French for "smothered", a reference to its long cooking in a lidded pot.

BEAUX BRIDGE CRAWFISH FESTIVAL HOMEPAGE

Out of the Frying Pan has an excellent page on the festival.

Cajun Cooking Zine

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NOLA Cuisine

Fine New Orleans food blog.

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Potlikker

A Southern Food Blog

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B O O K S T O R E

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BOOKSTORE: Time/Life Foods of the World - Creole and Acadian

The Time/Life Foods of the World series is the finest collection books on regional cooking ever written.

If I was going to recommend one book on the subject of Cajun cooking, this would be it.

Written in 1971 before all the hype, the recipes in this book are authentic, developed over generations before anyone could add cayenne pepper to anything and call it Cajun.

A great combination of background on Cajun and Creole culture, history and traditions with recipes.

American cooking: Creole and Acadian (Foods of the world)

by: Peter S Feibleman

Amazon Price: (as of 12/24/2009)
List Price: $16.95
Used Price: $34.25

Recipes: American cooking : Creole and Acadian (Foods of the world)

by: Peter S Feibleman

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BOOKSTORE: Cajun Cookbooks

The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine

by: John D. Folse

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List Price: $64.95
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Cajun Cuisine: Authentic Cajun Recipes from Louisiana's Bayou Country

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The Top 100 Cajun Recipes of All Time

by: Trent Angers

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Cookin' Cajun Cooking School Cookbook: Creole and Cajun Cuisine from the Heart of New Orleans

by: Lisette Verlander, Susan Murphy

Amazon Price: $10.85 (as of 12/24/2009)
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Cajun Foodways

by: C. Paige Gutierrez

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The Evolution of Cajun and Creole Cuisine

by: John D. Folse

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Cajun Men Cook: Recipes, Stories & Food Experiences from Louisiana Cajun Country

by: Beaver Club of Lafayette

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Cooking With Cajun Women: Recipes and Remembrances From South Louisiana Kitchens

by: Nicole Denee Fontenot

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Cajun Revelation: Cooking Secrets from Acadiana's Award-Winning Chefs

by: American Culinary Federation

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BOOKSTORE: Paul Prudhomme

From Saveur:

To most Americans, "Cajun cooking" means the blackened redfish (or tuna, or whatever) and jalape�o-laced sauces that are key elements in the cuisine of Paul Prudhomme, the most famous and influential of New Orleans-based chefs. In fact, neither the white-hot blackening pan nor the fiery Mexican chile has ever been a part of mainstream Acadian cuisine. According to Ella Brennan, co-owner of Commander's Palace in New Orleans's Garden District, the first redfish was blackened not in a humble cabin in Acadiana, but in her restaurant's kitchen in the 1970s, when Prudhomme was chef there. But that's beside the point. "Authentic" or not, Prudhomme has been the great liberator of South Louisiana cooking, influencing a generation of young chefs. Before K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen opened its doors in the French Quarter in 1979, Creole-Cajun restaurant menus were largely copycat affairs-same old ingredients, same old sauces. (The saying was that there were 500 restaurants in New Orleans, but only five recipes.) Prudhomme, more than anyone else, proved that the remarkably original cuisine of Acadiana need not be a prisoner of its past.

This article was first published in Saveur in January/February 1995.

Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen

by: Paul Prudhomme

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Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Tastes : Exciting Flavors from the State that Cooks

by: Paul Prudhomme

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Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Cajun Magic Cookbook

by: Paul Prudhomme

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Kitchen Expedition

by: Paul Prudhomme

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BOOKSTORE: Justin Wilson

One commenter on IMDB.com remembers Justin Wilson::

I admit I can't remember many recipes, but I do remember Wilson's folksy style and his impeccable skill at measurement: he often picked up a palmful of sugar, baking soda or some-such, declared it a tablespoonfull, and then proceeded to pour it into a tablespoon, showing it to be precisely right. His measurements on wine, though, weren't quite as accurate. I can still see him holding a gallon jug of domestic red upside down over a steaming pot until half of it was empty, then mumble, "That's about a cup," and setting it down - after taking a quick swig. Maybe someday, we'll see this come around again. Food Network, maybe?

Justin Wilson's Homegrown Louisiana Cookin'

BOOKSTORE: Junior League Cookbooks

Pirate's Pantry: Treasured Recipes of Southwest Louisiana

BOOKSTORE: Magazine Rack

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Reply

BradKamer BradKamer May 20, 2008 @ 12:40 pm

Nice Lens. I love it all gumbo, crawfish ettouffee, creole. Always a challenge to find this good food up in the north. Thanks for sharing your lens.

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Evelyn_Saenz Evelyn_Saenz Mar 22, 2008 @ 7:44 am

What a great lens!
The Purple Gallinules just flew over with a virtual Alligator Pie to celebrate your fascinating lens.

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Evelyn_Saenz Evelyn_Saenz Feb 7, 2008 @ 6:50 pm

The alligators love this lens so much they are sending your a virtual Valentine Rose! (As long as they're not on the menu.)

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YourSmilingChef YourSmilingChef Feb 23, 2007 @ 12:31 am

Marc, this is a fabulous lens! It doesn't matter that I am too chicken to watch the crawfish eating video...there's plenty of other great stuff here!