Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 - (Page 78)

Caribbean connections The kickoff lecture of a recent series accompanying the Historic New Orleans Collections’ “What’s Cooking” exhibit was given by Times-Picayune columnist Lolis Eric Elie and entitled “South of the South.” In it, he situates the food of New Orleans in a realm other than that of the American South. I heartily concur. Anyone who has spent time in the Caribbean, as I have, knows that the cultural South is something that begins mid-state and works north. Indeed, most residents of southern Louisiana — be they Cajun or Creole, black or white, or any admixture or variation — know that the the “South” is north. Historically and culturally, South Louisiana has much more in common with the island nations to its south. The region could arguably be called the northernmost point in the Caribbean. With the Caribbean basin it shares a Roman Catholic tradition, a three-class structure of society of black, white, and brown (as opposed to the South’s black and white), a range of Gallic and Hispanic cultural influences, a tradition of cane-growing, a history punctuated by devastating hurricanes, and a shared love of the exuberance of Carnival. Nowhere, though, are the connections more startling than in the cooking pots of both areas. I remember the flowers has not yet withered on Papa Doc’s grave the first time that I set foot in Haiti, and Castro was speaking in the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana when I first went to Cuba. For me, the connections between the foods of the Caribbean and South Louisiana are one of the most binding ties that they share. Consider that both regions revel in matters culinary, with a gastronomic delight that owes more to France than to the colder European climes. So too, Spain’s culinary Mediterranean brightness appears on the plate in the form of tomatoes, garlic, bell peppers and more. In Southern Louisiana, and in Haiti and in Cuba, African hands have marked the pots, adding soupy stews and gumbos, a love for foods fried in deep oil, a taste for hot sauces, the use of off cuts of pig, and a history of confections that make use of sugar cane, molasses and nuts such as pecans, peanuts, and coconut. In this column, though, I want to talk not about the gumbo train or the praline connection (those will be the subjects of future columns) but of the rice dishes that are a part of our common heritage. In Africans in Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth Century, historian Gwendolyn Midlo-Hall, informs us that first two slave ships arrived in Louisiana in 1719 from Africa, bringing not only enslaved Africans but also seed rice in an effort to introduce rice cultivation to the colony. By 1720, rice was growing along the Mississippi. The grain became so abundant that it was occasionally exported to the French Caribbean and to Spanish Pensacola. MidloHall and Judith Carney, geographer and author of Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, suggest that the rice in the case of both Louisiana and Haiti may have been Oryza glaberrima, a rice that is native to the rice-growing regions of West Africa. While it has long been acknowledged that Spain received its rice cuisine, and indeed the grain itself, from its North African conquerors, the Moors, many forget that the Moors were from an area that had been on a trade route and in close contact with ricegrowing regions on the West African coast for centuries. Still more are unaware that West Africa can boast its own variant of rice. Looking at the historic cookbooks of that other American rice-growing region, Charleston and the South Carolina Low Country, one is struck by the numbers of rice breads, pilaus (or purloos to use the Charleston term), croquettes, cookies and casseroles, but there are few of these in the first New Orleans cookbooks that appear a century later. In some cases those that do appear often acknowledge their link to the Spanish and French Caribbean in name or ingredients. Perhaps rice was so commonplace that recipes were not deemed necessary. Of the few that remain — red beans and rice, jambalaya, and congri — the connections are flagrant. My “ah-ha” moment came several 78 LOUISIANA ENDOWMENT FOR THE HUMANITIES\Winter 2007-08

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007 Contents Friends Editor’s Column Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Katrina: Days of Terror, Months of Anguish Paintings by Rolland Golden The Historic New Orleans Collection The Great Ouachita River Flood of 1932 Jazz Notes Louisiana Architecture Louisiana: Where Land Meets Water Louisiana State Museum Through A Lens Sharply: An Interview with Michael Lewis MR-GO: A “miracle” mired in controversy Louisiana Foodways Louisiana Association of Museums New Orleans: An Autopsy Bookstand Sound Advice Forum

Louisiana Cultural Vistas - Winter 2007

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