OK, they probably weren't born on the bayou, but I'm sticking with yesterday's theme. A reader responded with lots of great information on Cajun food. For me, it's always interesting to understand the connections between food and people. Onto the info:
One note on Cajun food – it can be really spicy, but most people don’t cook it that way. Outside of Louisiana, I never order anything on a menu that has the word “Cajun” in the name. Most people outside of Louisiana think it’s Cajun if you put cayenne pepper on it. (Barbarians.)
Some people assume it’s supposed to be like five alarm chili kind of hot when they see recipes that call for black pepper, white pepper, cayenne pepper and Tabasco sauce. They think that means “fiery hot.” Actually it means that, whatever heat you want in the dish should be achieved by mixing all four – it can be as hot or as mild as you want, you just need to divide the spices.
And, I hate to break it to you but jambalaya was not originally a Cajun dish – it’s Creole – although no good Cajun these days would consider his repertoire complete without a jambalaya recipe. But it’s an adopted child.
The origin dates to the mid 1760’s when Spain took Louisiana over from the French. When the Spaniards came in, they hired cooks (i.e. bought slaves) who were originally from Africa but trained in French cooking traditions of the day. They asked their cooks to make paella and tried to describe to them what it was. Jambalaya was what they came up with.
There had been a surge of German immigration to New Orleans several years before, and it was the Germans that made sausage and ham pretty widely available in the area for the first time.
The name Jambalaya is a contraction of the original name: “jambon ala yaya.” Yaya being a west African word for “rice.”
The dish actually arrived about the same time the Cajuns in Louisiana – the Acadienne were expelled from Nova Scotia when Britain captured Canada from the French in 1763; the same time that the Spanish had gotten the Louisiana territory (all these land swaps were part of the settlement of the Seven Years War – our American piece of it being the French-Indian Wars), so the Acadienne headed there, attracted by both Louisiana’s French roots and the fact that Spain was a Catholic power.
If you’re looking for the French roots of Cajun cooking, think of basically French peasant cuisine adapted over a couple of hundred years to local ingredients in Nova Scotia, and then in Louisiana. (Creole was based more on mainstream European “high society” cuisine.)
