Twain's Feast - Andrew Beahrs [91]
With sheepshead he’d have had many more options; many Creole cooks loved the fish. Creole cooks, I say again—unless he ate a home-cooked meal in the backcountry, Twain may never have eaten Cajun food in his life.
The distinction between Creole and Cajun cooking is sometimes lost, which is understandable; Louisiana’s food comes from a fantastic blend of people and place you’ll find nowhere else in the world. But Cajun food, though influenced by both Native Americans and people of African descent, is really the food of Acadians. Exiled from Nova Scotia in 1755 by the new English rulers of Canada, French-speaking Acadians eventually found a home along the bayous of southern Louisiana, where their name was quickly corrupted as “Cajun.” So Cajun food is country food, often one-pot food; think jambalaya, dirty rice, and the wonderful rich corn stew called maque choux. There’s also a lot more pork, including fantastic roasted suckling pig, or cochon de lait. The distinctive charcuterie, from boudin to chaurice to hogshead cheese, is that of people making the necessity of butchering into a total delight.
Creole food, on the other hand, is the food of the several groups who call themselves Creoles. It’s the food of the city, with roots among wealthy French and Spanish planters and—crucially—the black cooks they first enslaved and later employed in their city homes and on extensive country plantations. It tends to be less spicy, and somewhat more codified, than Cajun. Its gumbos use less sausage and Choctaw filé powder but more seafood and okra. It uses the classic sauces, such as meunière butter sauce over deep-fried trout or hollandaise over the artichokes and creamed spinach of eggs Sardou. Instead of hearty stews, there are delicate soups, such as turtle soup and crawfish bisque. And Creole dishes are much more likely than Cajun to be traceable to a single restaurant or cook, such as oysters Rockefeller and pompano en papillote (both invented at the still-thriving Antoine’s). Creole food also has more pastries and baked goods, things like beignets and king cake. It was the food of restaurants, of full-time cooks, and it was what Twain ate while in town.
Using gumbo to tease out the intertwined roots of Louisiana cooking is a cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s fun. So, briefly: Filé gumbo has roots on three continents, made in both Creole and Cajun variants (the original is Creole). The name filé is French and refers to the strings left by Choctaw-made sassafras powder; gombo is the Bantu word for okra. Gumbo begins with a French-derived roux, frying flour in fat until it’s as brown as the cook likes (using the fat left after browning chicken is awesomely good). But as the name suggests, its original roots are in long-simmered African meat-and-vegetable relishes served over rice. Gumbo can include almost anything taken from the bayou, ocean, gardens, and smokehouses of Louisiana; but while Creole gumbo is usually a relatively delicate brew built around seafood and thickened with African okra, Cajun generally ends by stirring Choctaw filé into a pot of sausage with chicken or oysters.
Whether you’re talking about Cajun or Creole food, you don’t often hear about sheepshead and croaker. That’s probably in part because they get lost among the riches—New Orleans easily has more beloved traditional dishes than any other American city. Barbecue shrimp, shrimp étoufée, beignets, calas, daube glacé, po’boys, muffulettas, trout meunière, trout amandine, boiled crawfish, soft-shell crabs, red beans and rice, pain perdu, pecan pie, bananas Foster, bread pudding with whiskey sauce . . . The temptation here is to fill several pages and then go eat, but the point is just that once you’re talking about sheepshead and croaker you’re pretty deep into the weeds.