Over the last four decades, a politically motivated, mass-marketed caricature of Louisiana's Francophone people, language and culture was created which had no regard or no precise knowledge of Louisiana's cultural, ethnic or linguistic diversity and history. As a prelude to a new series referred to as “Our People: The Forgotten French Creoles of Louisiana’s French Triangle…” "Louisiana's French CREOLE Culinary & Linguistic Traditions: Facts vs. Fiction, Before and Since Cajunization" seeks to repair this distortion by presenting a historically valid, culinary and linguistic study of the diverse cultures which created the rich, cultural embroidery known as our Louisiana Creole food menu and our enchanting old world French dialects! (Yes, there is more than one French dialect in "la Louisiane!)
The authors, John La Fleur II and Brian Costello, are both Louisiana French and Creole native-speakers and Creole cultural scholars, who along with Dr. Fandrich certainly bring color and facts together which will entertain, educate and inform our readers.
We seek to educate, enlighten and to tell the truth about Louisiana’s earliest multi-cultural ethnicities who are the creators of her unique Creole foods, language(s), culture and people; and which people have a right to claim and honor their own unique cultural, linguistic and ethnic history and heritage over any socially or politically fabricated labels.
Documented through beautiful vintage and contemporary photography, by award-winning, Louisiana native, Norris Fontenot, the reader gets to "see the history," through the lives of the historic characters, material culture, food and architecture; an epic story which spans almost three centuries, and ties Louisiana’s earliest families to a much older and varied culture, far beyond the shores of Louisiana to those of the Caribbean French Antilles to Africa, Spain and France, and leading as far away as to the Indian Ocean’s Creole corner of Réunion and Mauritius and ultimately, entailing Italian and Irish influences as well.
The historical, linguistic, culinary and genealogical information provides a compelling and sometimes, humorous family portrait of the inter-connectivity of all varieties of Louisiana's almost forgotten Creole people of the "French Triangle" and the historical primacy of their unique international, inter-racial and inter-cultural world, which lead us far beyond the limited shores of Acadian Canada. The aim of this book, therefore, is to demonstrate the primacy and diversity of the much older Louisiana native or Creole ethnicities in shaping both the languages and culinary heritage of Louisiana, including that of the Acadian/Cajuns whose, original culture remains foreign and unknown to Louisiana; but, which people nonetheless, fully assimilated Louisiana’s very old Creole culture, even as “Cajun” –used apart from its Acadian historical and ethnic meaning-is undeniably a sociological, political and cultural manifestation evolved during Louisiana’s turbulent racial past.
The development of our Louisiana Creole culinary tradition and especially, its linguistic evolution has a long history. And, in fact, it is colonial Louisiana's oldest, original culture, notwithstanding recent interpretations to the contrary.
However, this statement is in no way meant to discount Louisiana’s Native American contributions. But, Native American cultures were nomadic and can’t really be said to have originated a culture unique to the vast territory known as Louisiana which would endure and incorporate so many ethnicities and food traditions as would develop as a consequence of the intermarriage of these ethnicities to these indigenous peoples of “la louisiane.”
However, my statement is intended to underscore the unique and consequent development of Louisiana’s colonial-era culture, language and food tradition of which the Native American-Choctaw, and several other groups listed below, would constitute an impressive, original and manifold ethnic braid. It is to all of these colonial period ethnicities and cultures that Louisiana (the State) and parts of Mississippi, and Alabama still owe their uniquely evolved, three hundred and thirteen year old, French Creole culture, when counting from 1699, the year Bienville established Louisiana’s first colony at Fort Maurepas, near Biloxi.
In Louisiana, the result of international, intercultural, interdependency and interaction, married to a culinary savoir faire (notwithstanding, the “limited natural food resources”) of Old French, Choctaw, African, some Teutonic, and Spanish Classical and later, Italian cooking traditions, would produce a unique culinary menu. Delicious and satisfying, it was created and cultivated uniquely within the boundaries of the “Territory of Orleans” or Louisiana, as we know it today. However, some of its early precedents are found throughout the former North American settlements, the French Antilles, Africa, France, Spain and even Germany. French Creole culture in general, is five hundred years old and originates with the beginning of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
This unique cuisine was to become world-famous-twice! First, with the publication of Lefcadio Hearn’s, La Cuisine Créole, in 1885-and later, in the latter part of the 20th century, when it was re-labeled “Cajun” in the early 1970’s, (for which reasons will be provided in this book) by Chef K-Paul Prudhomme, himself, of Louisiana French Creole colonial Prudhomme and La Fleur family origins, both of which surnames antedate the arrival of the Acadians.
Before this era, it is quite impossible to find any “Cajun” cooking or cookbooks ever discussed or published (unless, they have been re-labeled "Cajun" for contemporary marketing).
The reason is simple: there was nothing new about what would be forever, after 1972, mass-marketed as “Cajun” cuisine!
The first official American documentation of the historic Louisiana Creole culinary menu occurred, as stated above, in New Orleans with the publication of Lefcadio Hearn's “La Cuisine Créole,” which had sought, but failed to make its début at the Cotton Centennial Exposition of that era. Nonetheless, the book appeared the year after and provided the spotlight New Orleans needed to become America’s famous center of fine, “American” Creole cuisine. And, the book sold well! This cuisine was the standard fare throughout colonial French and later, Spanish Louisiana and it remains so, today. In spite of “Cajunization” our unique culture and its racially diverse people live on.
Hints of the original menu, however, are found in earlier documents of inhabitants of the Louisiana territory who knew Jean-Baptiste le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, (one of Louisiana's first governor's) personally. For starters, historian André Pénicaut tells us about “fish fricassée” (fish stew) and grillades and grits. These culinary traditions existed long before the building of New Orleans. For example, Antoine-Simon du Pratz, who mentions grits and sagamité in his, History of Louisiana and the early documentation of André Pénicaut further attest the pre-existence of both Indian and African-Creole cuisine even prior to the arrival of the Acadians. Gumbo was cooked by African women as early as 1763 in the French Quarter of New Orleans, but, Native-Americans had their own chicken and smoked meat (tasso) gumbos (with rice!), as early as 1000 A.D.
And, even if unnoticed by the American public, then, and since, scholars, to be sure, began to realize that Louisiana had its own unique, Louisiana French Creole vocabulary which antedated the arrival of the Acadians.
Of course, after the detonation of “Cajunization” mass-marketing and cultural re-labeling of the late 1960s and the following two decades, it appears as if few scholars, historians and linguists-outside of New Orleans-actually realized this fact of a much earlier period in which both Louisiana’s culinary and linguistic traditions developed!
Ironically, it was also during these decades that linguistic and historical research would rise as if ghosts from the graves of Louisiana’s conveniently forgotten colonial past, to confront, correct and reprove the presumption and irresponsibility of the “Cajunist” mass-marketing movement which had succeeded in re-labeling the French-speaking Triangle and in incorrectly stereotyping the francophone community along racial lines-a gesture clearly indicative of the underlying political agenda of early CODOFIL, whose own birth occurred during the racially polarizing decade of the 1960s. The result was that all white francophones would indiscriminately be labeled as “Cajun” regardless of their pre-existence in Colonial Louisiana, as French, Indian, African, Spanish or any other ethnicity before the Acadian presence in Louisiana. Adding to the ethnic misrepresentation, they stereotyped only black francophones as “Creole” as if “Creole” had always represented only black French-speakers or this race, alone! This deception worked because later generations of white Americans usually associated “Creoles” with Haiti! And, the children of white and black Creoles weaned on Lafayette regional television were conditioned to think the same thing.
The Lafayette, Louisiana Tourist Bureau and certain international mass-marketing agencies propagated these sins of misinformation via the Lafayette regional television media. And, the re-labeling and mislabeling worked among the misinformed, poorly educated, white francophone Creoles, who feared racial confusion with non-white “Creoles of Color” or who began thinking of themselves as “Cajun” -having mistakenly confused a Creole metaphor with their own historic ethnicity. Our tradition of illiteracy and disinterest in reading has left its consequences. Sometimes, but not always, even “educated” folks have been confused, (or convenienced) by the success of this mass-marketed distortion and stereotyping, having sold millions of “Cajun” music records, seasonings and various commercial paraphernalia, including magazines promoting this epic cultural masquerade.
Another unexpected source of this cultural/racial stereotyping came from CODOFIL, the agency charged with preserving and teaching French in Louisiana schools. Its focus was, and remains primarily on an Acadian/Canadian cultural source as the basis for south Louisiana’s mythic cultural and linguistic heritage. These stereotypes and the mythic cultural dependency upon Acadian Canada, however, are false, but, deliberate distortions of both our francophone historical and ethnic reality. Adding to their sins of omission and consequent, deception of the public, is the impression given by Cajunist writers that there was, in effect, no real culture, culinary tradition or francophone heritage established outside New Orleans before the arrival of the Acadians in southwest Louisiana and long known as the “Creole parishes” before 1971, and also, as the “French Triangle.” These pretensions are false.
Today, CODOFIL’s new leadership appears concerned with reconciling reality to history, acknowledging the fact of historic white Creole presence, their non- “Cajun” French legacy, cultural individuality and historic precedence in the region now known as “Acadiana” since 1971. But, for all its professed good intentions, it still seems rooted in the promotion of all things “Cajun” and so far, we’ve not seen any promotion or invitation allowing discussion of how white Creoles factor into the larger picture of Louisiana’s contemporary francophone culture. More embarrassing, is the fact that many of CODOFIL’s “educated” representatives and “Cajun” French teachers are direct descendants of the St. Landry/Evangeline Parish Alabama French/Choctaw Creoles; yet, insist on their “Cajunité” and are annoyed with us who know better and choose to remain loyal to our historical “Créole” family heritage!
Having built an international economic powerhouse upon racial/cultural myths and factual half-truths or omissions, simple history becomes an “inconvenient truth” to the pro-Cajunist script of Louisiana cultural and ethnic history. Since La. Gov. Bobby Jindal cut its funding, I’ve been told that its previous, culturally misleading and ethnic stereotyping website may not be updated anytime soon. I must wonder, then, not about how difficult it is to replace an inaccurate website, but, rather, at how important it is to CODOFIL to represent the full truth about Louisiana’s francophone heritage.
The impression long given, from CODOFIL, of French Creole cultural insignificance and its ancillary implication of French Creole non-historical/cultural precedence in the shaping the cultural and ethnic evolution of the Louisiana/Acadian/Cajun culture resulted in the need to focus upon and emphasize, specific and limited components of the Louisiana Creole culture, as unique features of an implied “Cajun” cultural originality. But, this abuse of the media and contempt for historical truth would not go unnoticed or unchecked by informed, honest scholars and citizens, alike. And, this book reflects the findings of these honest scholars. For example, the francophone Africans and Indians were often credited for influencing the Acadians, to the exclusion of the rural French Creoles of the French Triangle, as if they had never existed in the region. This was just the beginning of a “Cajunization” effort which would show little regard for history or integrity in representing other Louisiana francophone ethnicities. But, in fact, it is clear that intermarriages between the two francophone groups did occur in the southernmost parts of the bayou state and hence, cultural assimilations of both the indigenous French language and cuisine of Louisiana was voraciously adopted.
The desire to create an impressive history for a group who had little to offer initially, and who refused to participate in the larger culture, Creole or American, further resulted in the creation myth of a “French Synthesis” theory, offered by former University of Lafayette Cajunist writer/teacher, Glenn Conrad. His language theory postulates “Cajun” French dominance over Louisiana’s historic lingua franca of Colonial French Creole in the “French Triangle” (refers to the francophone parishes which on the Louisiana map form a triangular pattern) which was cleverly and conveniently, re-designated as “Acadiana” in 1971. This was part of the “Cajunist” marketing creativity in a clear effort to bolster the perception of a historical Acadian cultural dominance. And, it worked because few Louisiana French people had the educational qualifications in French or English, to disagree, disapprove or to discuss the issue at that time. The representative voices who did know better often capitulated to the new socially, politically and economically motivated fad of “Cajunization” in greater concerns for profit over any concerns for historical accuracy. No less a figure on the stage of “Cajun” characters than the recently deceased, Mr. Hadley Castille admitted to me, personally, during an interview at the Palace Café, in Opelousas, La., his capitulation to this fad although he was, in fact, a Franco-Spanish Creole. Others, such as the famous Tony Chachere would not go along with this marketing fad. Castille never understood why Dr. Barry Ancelet, a noted Acadian/Cajun folklorist, would never invite him to his true Acadian/Cajun ethnic music fests and social gatherings. The white French Creoles had also become disenchanted with the once proudly held cultural and ethnic designation of “Creole” once seen in George Washington Cable’s many books about the white Creoles of New Orleans.
This same pride was held in the rural parishes of the *French Triangle, too, until the beloved term became politically incorrect, in white, Anglo-American Louisiana, because “blacks started calling themselves, Creole.” Some, although knowing these truths remain apathetic, or complicit, to the re-labeling program in disregard of their own historical, cultural and ethnic reality.
“Le Monde de couleur libre”