The difference between Cajun food and what passes for Cajun food in New Orleans

One of the more common questions I get asked related to my being from Louisiana is usually some variation of "where do I go in New Orleans to get the best Cajun food?" At that point I'm usually forced to launch into a lengthy explanation about how true Cajun food and what passes for Cajun food in New Orleans are not the same. Don't get me wrong, New Orleans has some of the best restaurants serving some of the best food in the world, but it's vastly different from the food I grew up eating in my family's kitchen, due largely to the heavy influence of Creole cooking traditions inherent in New Orleans food. The advice I often give to someone who wants to experience the best real Cajun food when traveling to New Orleans, and I know I've said as much on this here blog previously but am too lazy to dig for it, is to rent a car and drive out of town, to explore some of the small towns and villages like the one I grew up in in rural south-central and southwest Louisiana, and to just stop off for a "plate lunch" at any of the numerous "mom and pop" gas stations and grocery stores that litter the highways down there. It's places like that that you'll find the best Cajun food, hands down. That's definitely where you'll find the best, in my opinion anyway, gumbo, etouffee, and boudin, for sure. (Speaking of...I'd murder for some boudin from the Best Stop Grocery in Scott, La. right about now!) This has always been what I regard as a well-kept secret about Louisiana's culinary acclaim...That the simple stuff you can get for five bucks on a to-go plate in some back-water Cajun town is better tasting than the "fancy" stuff you get for 50 bucks a plate in the French Quarter.



So imagine my surprise when I ran across an article in the New York Times yesterday by Mimi Read titled "Real Cajun Food, From Swamp to City" that featured Chef Donald Link's efforts to bring some of that "real" Cajun flavor to New Orleans with his new restaurant, Cochon Butcher. It's probably the first article I've seen in a major media publication that actually gets it right and accurately articulates the differences between Cajun food and New Orleans food. An excerpt...

Mr. Link, 39, wants Cochon Butcher to be “like all the little specialized markets in Cajun country, where everybody goes to get their Cajun meats and sausages — things you can’t get at the regular grocery store.” Though a sprinkling of mostly mass-produced Cajun meats has long been available in New Orleans supermarkets, this is the first time the city has seen all the iconic Louisiana-style charcuterie items house-made by a notable chef and under one roof: the thick smoked sausage known as andouille, the garlicky fresh links called chaurice and the smoked seasoned ham known as tasso.

Transplanting Cajun cuisine into the kitchens of sophisticated American restaurants from the rural communities of Southwest Louisiana where it lives has always been tricky. Most urban chefs get Cajun food right to roughly the same degree that Hollywood actors manage to reproduce faithful Southern regional accents — which is to say, almost never. Most people outside Louisiana, meanwhile, are burdened with wild misconceptions of the cuisine that were formed in the days when anything from fish to popcorn could be rendered “Cajun” with the application of a spice mix.

But Mr. Link has a leg up on many. He grew up in and near Lake Charles, La., in a sprawling family of cooks who answer to names like J. W., Bubba and Billy Boy. Mr. Link has 35 aunts and uncles, and many more cousins, most of whom make their own deer and pork sausages, farm their own crayfish or grow their own rice. A few of them open their back doors and shoot dinner as casually as other Americans stop for packages of boneless chicken breasts.

“They live in their own world out there,” said Mr. Link, sipping a double espresso one recent morning as the roar of blenders drilled through Herbsaint’s dining room — a batch of tomato and shrimp bisque in the making.

Authentic Cajun food has always been basic fare, flavored with plenty of salt and a mirepoix of bell pepper, onion, garlic, celery and parsley. Main courses are mostly one-pot dishes, like chicken and sausage gumbo, shrimp or crayfish stew or pork roast au jus over rice.

“Cochon is the only restaurant I have been in anywhere that approaches the true flavors of Southwest Louisiana cooking,” said Gene Bourg, a former restaurant critic for The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. “I can’t think of another restaurant that comes as close.”

It may come as a surprise to tourists here, but the Cajun food of the Louisiana bayous has always been slim pickings in New Orleans. “It’s under-represented because this was never a Cajun city,” Mr. Bourg said. “There’s a significant segment of the population that’s Cajun-descended, but the Creole style of cooking has always been predominant.”

Like all people who are forced to watch a subject they know in great detail get tarted up and dumbed down, Mr. Link is driven crazy by popular notions of Cajun food. Blackened chicken pasta and Cajun pizza are not and have never been what Cajuns eat.

They’re often dubious knockoffs of recipes invented by the world’s most famous Cajun, Paul Prudhomme, who in the 1980s began serving dazzling, highly innovative renditions of Cajun dishes at his French Quarter hole-in-the-wall, K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen. Mr. Prudhomme’s food was considered startlingly flavorful and spicy at the time, but what many didn’t understand was that it really was his food. Cajun cuisine was merely the framework.

John Folse calls it “the blackened redfish moment” — that tipping point when a distorted perception of Cajun food started spreading around the globe. “Customers were beating down doors, wanting more hot and spicy food,” said Mr. Folse, chef and owner of Lafitte’s Landing in Donaldsonville, La., and author of “The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine.”

Chefs, in turn, gave diners what they wanted. “Everybody played the game,” Mr. Folse said. “Not realizing what we were doing, we changed the taste profile of our cuisine when we should have been protecting our rich traditions.”

Meanwhile, the authentic food stayed in the swamp-rimmed places where it always was, seasoned with the occasional kiss of heat rather than bushels of hot peppers and served at festivals, funerals and family celebrations. At virtually all the meat markets in Cajun country that Mr. Link modeled his market on, chances are you’ll find boudin steaming in a rice cooker behind the cash register. Not widely known outside Louisiana, this soft pork-and-rice sausage is often eaten on the go — a pickup truck is ideal — and without cutlery.

It is his favorite snack food, and at Cochon Butcher, he resisted overthinking it. “No quail boudin or foie gras boudin,” said Mr. Link, whose first cookbook, “Real Cajun: Rustic Home Cooking From Donald Link’s Louisiana,” comes out in April from Clarkson Potter. “I’m just doing what, in my mind, a good boudin should taste like based on all the boudin I’ve eaten my whole life.”

Tourists in New Orleans have long questioned Mr. Link about where to go to eat real Cajun food. His standard answer is a shrug, along with instructions to rent a car and drive three hours west.

“To be completely honest,” Mr. Link said, “I don’t think it’s something you’re going to find in a restaurant — unless maybe it’s my cousin Bubba Frey’s place in Mowata, and he’s serving smothered tongue over rice with white bread for lunch.”

EXACTLY! Nailed it. Tip of the hat to Mr. Link for his efforts. I look forward to trying out Cochon Butcher next time I'm in New Orleans. Read the entire piece here...

Real Cajun Food, from Swamp to City