re: Why are tomatoes absent in Cajun cuisine?

Lotus Club in Mecca has a little chopped tomato in its seafood gumbo. It’s very good.

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bayou cajun shrimp spaghetti

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Creole Seafood Meatballs and Sauce

1 lb Louisiana crawfish
1 lb of shrimp
Clean and devein shrimp, set aside/reserve a handful of whole peeled and deveined shrimp

Using shrimp shells, make 3-4 cups of Shrimp Stock:
4 cups water
1 teaspoon of Zatarain’s crab boil
1/2 bell pepper
Stalk of celery
Onion
Garlic

In a food processor, Pulse the shrimp and crawfish tails to slightly chop and blend.
Reserve a handful of the chopped crawfish and shrimp mixture and set aside.

Put remaining chopped shrimp and crawfish in a mixing bowl.

Add:
2 tbsp chopped Fresh Parsley
1 Small-Med Onion
4 pods Garlic
1 stalk Celery
1/2 Bell pepper
1 egg beaten
Salt
Black pepper
Red pepper
Garlic powder
Homemade Breadcrumbs

For the Homemade Breadcrumbs:
3 slices of honey wheat bread
1 Tbsp. of Parmesan cheese
In a food processor, chop into breadcrumbs

Form the crawfish and shrimp mixture into meatballs.
Dust meatballs with a little flour.
Bake at 350 for 15 minutes

For the Gravy:
3/4 stick of butter
Heaping Tbsp of flour
1/2 Chopped onion
Garlic
Parsley
3 Bay leaves
Thyme
Sauté til al dente
Add the reserved, chopped crawfish and shrimp mixture
1 Small bottle of Hunts ketchup
1 Tbsp. tomato paste
Slowly add your prepared shrimp stock
Cook about 30 mins on low

Add meatballs and reserved raw shrimp into gravy Cook on low for 10 more minutes until whole shrimp are cooked

Serve on top of Linguine or Angel Hair Pasta

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People are too hung up on food rules.

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Truer words have never been spoken. I don't put tomatoes in gumbo, but I have had very good gumbo with them. I think jambalaya with tomatoes is much more vibrant and tasty.

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People are too hung up on food rules.


Truer words have never been spoken.

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Without food rules, how will anyone know who to make fun of for what they like and where they eat?

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I don't doubt that as the Cajuns became assimilated and bred with other ethnicities in LA that their food and crops became more diverse. But when they first arrived, the Acadians were understandably poor as shite and likely new to some staples like tomatoes, etc. The foods they cooked in those early days, many recipes still probably around today, were much simpler and less exotic than the more established and urban Creole population in and around NOLA and its ports.

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Very, very little of “early” style cajun cooking survives—those early settlers did not cling to the foodways of the Canadian Maritimes or of Brittany (where many of them either originally emigrated from, or where they went for a generation or two after leaving Nova Scotia before then emigrating to Louisiana. They found themselves in a completely new place: different seasons, different plants, different animals & fish. They found a place with pretty rich food resources, and they (like poor people everywhere) starting cooking and eating what they found nearby, and they’re hugely influenced by the Native American and West African foodways being practiced by their native & enslaved neighbors.

Frankly, we give short shrift to the immense African influences in Cajun food. The idea of “something soupy/stewy served over rice” (or other bland staple starch) is a basic idea of West African food. It’s not French, it’s not Spanish. Go scour cookbooks for stuff over rice in those cultures—recipes will be few & far between, while it’s an everyday thing to eat stuff over rice all over West Africa....which has an ancient rice growing culture. West Africa also has a still-flourishing and well documented historical deep frying tradition (far more pronounced than France or Spain in the colonial period).

Something else to ponder is that many (most?) of the people today who consider themselves “Cajun” are not genealogically descended from Acadian settlers. Plenty of people in Lafayette area & lots who settled the Cajun prairies were French colonials, not actual Acadians. And the self-identification as Cajun is largely an outgrowth of ethnic pride movements that proliferated during the 1960s—before that, many in south LA did not self-identify using the term Cajun.

South LA’s foodways are deeply creolized (note the small c)....ie, a blend of several cutlures, derived from colonial and colonized, enslaved and native, with lots of borrowing, exchange, and recombination. It’s not a codified system of haute cuisine, with published dictionaries of recipes and rules about cuisine....it’s a folk practice, alive and changing, absorbing and shifting to adapt to new influences (like deep fried boudin balls stuffed with pepper jack cheese, or pastalaya, or Viet-Cajun boiled crawfish).

It’s a living tradition, in the hands of the people who cook the food....not in a book, not in rules found on a message board. It’s only a thing as long as we keep DOING it.

Cook on.

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hungryone

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Great post, man. Appreciate you digging in. Totally agree that African influences are underappreciated and unacknowledged...and that goes for more cuisines than just Creole and Cajun.

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the Cajuns in Des Allemands, who are German heritage

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Depends.. Did the Acadians in Des Allemands assimilate and marry into an existing German community, or do they claim a German ethnicity prior to the expulsion? Because to my knowledge, the Acadian immigrants who were expelled from Nova Scotia were French.

eta:
Found the answer to my own question: From the time of their arrival, the German immigrants began speaking French and intermarried with the early French settlers. Over the subsequent decades they intermarried with the descendants of the latter as well as the Acadians. Together with other settlers, they helped create Cajun culture.

So.. I would suppose that the Cajun culture in Des Allemands more closely resembles the Cajun culture in the area, which would be the Bayou Cajuns.

Okra actually comes from Africa. The seeds were sewn into the children's clothes so that if they were captured, they would have it wherever they were taken.

You can’t make exclusive lists of cajun vs creole. There is beaucoup crossover, and you can’t even get agreement in who Creoles are: there are white city Creoles in NOLA who are descended from French & Spanish colonials, rural French speaking folks of African descent who don’t feel comfortable being called Cajun (or who were denied the “cajun” label because of their skin color), a whole separate pocket of mixed race “Cane River Creoles”.......

You can speak broadly of Creole as a city style versus Cajun as a country style....and then you can add Italian Creole as a subset of New Orleans cuisine. But in contemporary cooking, there is so much cross pollination, sharing, and borrowing that the labels aren’t terribly useful.