re: Why are tomatoes absent in Cajun cuisine?

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Great post,

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Not everyone agrees. Hungry One triggered some “Cajuns”. Haha!

Beautiful points @hungryone. A lot of influence came from what was simply available to you, where you lived. This is a big Catholic thing. They make pesto with pecans and basil etc.. Just used what they had. They didn’t have a Whole Foods.

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The French and Indians mixed.. and the Bayou and Prairie Cajuns mixed with the Indians and the blacks..

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Huh?

Re: Spanish vs French/Indian, we tend to forget that LA was a Spanish colony nearly as long as it was French. It goes over to the Spanish crown in 1763–which means that many Acadians arrived to a Spanish governed colony, not a French one. That LA was absolutely the frontier—a place of mixing, changing identifies, runaways and escapees, etc. By 1795, enslaved people outnumbered free people in LA; in some of the plantation pockets like along the German Coast, the enslaved vastly outnumbered the free.

Upper Bayou Lafourche (around Donaldsonville) was the site of concentrated settlement efforts by the Spaniards—it was called Valenzuela, and many SE LA Acadian descendants can trace their ancestry to people who “got off the boat” not in NOLA but at Valenzuela. Assumption & Ascension today have plenty of people who might consider themselves Cajuns, but have last names like Diaz, Rodrigue(z), Bermudez, etc. The early populations of LA intermarried pretty freely—most SE LA cajuns can count some Isleno or Spanish colonial ancestry alongside the Acadians.

But the Acadians get all the good press—-LOL. So there are few mass family reunions of LA people of Spanish descent, while the Acadian heritage mafia promotes the heck out of speaking French, being “cajun” and tracing your heritage to those people tossed out of Canada.

Back to the food: the arriving Acadians might not have been familiar with the tomato, but the Spanish certainly were. Spanish conquistadors brought tomatoes back to Spain from their Aztec adventures. I think some LA studies or food history grad student needs to research the tomato’s use in colonial LA.....and voila, a dissertation topic if someone’s been wondering what to study. Ha.

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By 1795, enslaved people outnumbered free people in LA

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There's a really good book that discusses this time period in detail. "The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square" by Ned Sublette.

very interesting, if you haven't read it.. LINK

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Boogalee

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You learn something new every day.. Never heard this term before. And I promise I won't repeat it.

While I’ve heard the term “bougalee” all my life, I’ve never heard it applied to someone of mixed race. In NOLA, older Yats use it to describe rural swamp dwellers.....and it was in fairly common use during my bayou childhood as a derogative term for an unsophisticated person, a rustic, a coarse or rough person. It wasn’t used as a racial descriptor, in my experience.

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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.

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Thank you. You perfectly illustrated my point.