Ms. Lucy's Classic Cajun Culture and Cooking

[Jason Perlow]

Why are they called the Florida Parishes?

[Mayhaw Man]

Why are they called the Florida Parishes?

Because Florida extended across what is now South Alabama and South Mississippi and into Louisiana as far as the Mississippi River/Lake Ponchatrain/The Rigolets (If you look on the map you will find that these are (mostly) the "St." Parishes. The Louisiana Purchase was all on the West Side of the River (sort of, it gets complicated considering New Orleans is on the East Bank and a bunch of exceptions like that ).

It was all one big hunk of beach front waiting to be developed. Walt Disney would have loved it.

[Jason Perlow]

It was all one big hunk of beach front waiting to be developed. Walt Disney would have loved it.

I can already think about what that alternate universe looks like right now...

[Mayhaw Man]

Oddly and sadly true, there is a story about Walt coming here, to St Tammany Parish-Strategically located right in the middle of the Gulf South, right on the 1-10/1-12 split(6 hours from Houston, 7 from Atlanta, 5 from Memphis, etc.)-where it never freezes and the weather is pretty good (albeit hot) year round and looking at a site in the lower half of the Parish for a new Disney East. So many politicians hit him up in his very short visit (once again, well documented by Disney's biographers and local political writers as well) that he got back on his plane shortly after his arrival and continued to a little town in Florida that had real estate that was just as plentiful and cheap and politicians that were a little less greedy.

And that, as Paul Harvey is so fond of saying, is the rest of the story.

[pyrguy]

Mayhaw's map is less restrictive and more accurate, IMO.

Mine too but I was just posting a general area for people NOT in La.

Anyone can find I-10 or the Intercoastal on a map.

I grew up in a Lafourche Parish town called Golden Meadow. Cajun born and bred. North of the Intercoastal was almost another country. :D

Now Cajun Country could be almost anywhere. We are spreading.

[patti]

Do you have to be of Acadian descent to call yourself "Cajun" ? Or does anyone that lives in Cajun Country have the right to call themselves that?

←

Interesting question, and one I'd have answered differently at different stages of my life. First of all, the word 'Cajun' wasn't in popular use in my childhood years. Growing up, the term was 'coonass' and it was more often than not a derogatory term used for people considered less than intelligent who spoke with a thick, sometimes unintelligble accent. Since I didn't have the accent and I didn't live on the wrong side of the tracks, I didn't consider myself Cajun, nor did most of my friends, despite last names like Chaisson, Breaux, Boudreaux, Thibodeaux, Hebert, Arceneaux, Savoy, and Daigle (sounds like a big group in denial ).

I was born in New Iberia and my father's ancestors were part of a group of six families from Malaga, Spain, who settled Nueva Iberia back in the late 1700s, at a time when Louisiana was ruled by Spain. The French Acadians had been exiled from Nova Scotia in 1755, but it was a number of years before the great migration to south Louisiana was complete. Eventually, many settled along the Bayou Teche in the New Iberia area. When I look through the records in my family tree, I can see the obvious intermingling of the Spanish and the French names. Eventually, New Iberia was much more French than Spanish, and my grandparents' first language was Cajun French. At family get togethers when I was a child, my grandparents and all of the old aunts and uncles would converse in French when they wanted to talk about things they didn't want us to hear. I'm not sure why my father didn't speak French, but I have a feeling it was because kids in school were physically punished for speaking it. I don't even know if he ever spoke it, but I know he claimed not to know it when questioned, because for many years, there was shame in being Cajun French.

Move forward a few years, and the popularity of Cajun food and Cajun music brought about a change in attitude in south Louisiana and it became more socially acceptable and less shameful to be considered a part of this previously looked down upon ethnic group.

I married a guy with not only a Cajun last name, but a bit of a Cajun accent. Despite my Spanish maiden name and my Texan mother (almost an ethnicity unto itself), I cook like a Cajun, I'm married to a Cajun, and I grew up in the heart of Acadiana. So you tell me, am I Cajun?

Edited November 17, 2004 by patti (log)

[Jason Perlow]

Has anyone been watching the new 2005 season of Ms. Lucy on RFD TV?

She's better than ever, with a re-done kitchen, and now with professional on-screen graphics too! With Riceland Foods as a sponsor!

[Mayhaw Man]

It comes on here at 1 in the afternoon on Saturdays. I will be standing by as I watch these briskets smoke and I make jambalaya.

It's pretty funny that Riceland is sponsoring it. They are in Stuttgart, in Southeast Arkansas and it's not like we have any shortage of rice companies here.

[Jason Perlow]

It comes on here at 1 in the afternoon on Saturdays. I will be standing by as I watch these briskets smoke and I make jambalaya.

It's pretty funny that Riceland is sponsoring it. They are in Stuttgart, in Southeast Arkansas and it's not like we have any shortage of rice companies here.

←

I wonder if RFD-TV is now involved with producing the show in conjunction with LPB and is seeking sponsors on a more national level now.

[Jason Perlow]

This just in from Ms. Lucy's contact at LPB, Bob Neese:

We hope to start working on a new series in the next month or so that will feature Lucy taking you from selecting the products in the store or market to the end of preparation.  We hope to have it completed by the end of the summer but we are not sure when it will hit RFD.

Now that should be a hoot...

[racheld]

I'd almost forgotten Miss Lucy---she comes on here on RFD-TV on Saturdays. An Arkansas friend suggested that I try watching, and I did. I promise I did. It was just too painful, and I swore off after the third or fourth show and the twelfth pound of cream cheese.

I could probably have chosen a better episode for my first watching experience, but I tuned in and was bombarded (very S L O W L Y, like being stoned to death with popcorn) with every Southern cooking cliche since BJ--before Justin--and he did it much better and tastier and more interestingly. By a mile.

The first recipe was for Crawfish Corn Soup. Two sticks of butter and a clump of Trinity into a Teflon-lined pan. Much scraping with a big metal spoon, as the dialogue oozed like molasses. Scraping and stirring, then a clop of cream cheese, to melt into goo in the pot. She SAID a block, but the recipe onscreen said a pound. So much for measurements. And it HAD to be a pound...the pot was filling with an oozy, gray-green mixture that was frightening to behold.

More SCRAAAAAAPE and scratch inside that black-lined pot, as two cans of mushroom soup joined the glop---I'm of the Campbell's generation, and there's a magic below the M/D line that can turn the stuff into bechamel, veloute' or Mornay at the stir of a whisk, but that pot was getting gloppier and gooier by the minute. Not to mention the imaginary flecks of Teflon my brain was conjuring with every scritch of that spoon. Then went a couple of cans of whole kernel corn, and my brain has blocked out whatever other cholesterol entered that pot, but last was a couple of pounds of lovely, pinkly clean crawfish tails. Just the thought of those lovely sweet morsels entering that mass of bubbling goo would make any Cajun cringe, but she just kept scraping that pot and throwing in stuff.

I think that was it. Soup in a pot. I hope she served it hot---fifteen minutes off the heat and it would have congealed into one of those stepping stones seen in the concrete section of garden centers: Here Lies Spot, Gone But Not Forgotten.

Why not just leave out the lumpy crawfish and MAINLINE the cholesterol.

Edited May 18, 2005 by racheld (log)

[Jason Perlow]

Yeah I saw that one too.. I don't think there was any trace of stock in that "soup" ...

[Mayhaw Man]

What is RFD-TV

Rural Free Delivery Television?

The Hayseed Network?

We probably don't get it because we live it.

[Jason Perlow]

Its a satellite channel we get on DirecTV and I think Dish.

http://www.rfd-tv.com/

[Mayhaw Man]

See!

I told you!

It's "rural America's most important network". I, of course, am a long time resident of rural America and feel somehow cheated than I am being deprived of this.

Damn city slickers.

[racheld]

I ain't no such of a thing.

I made a three-acre garden, had a chickenhouse, raised watermelons and pumpkins and cantaloupes, put up pickles and preserves and home-canned stuff to the tune of 400+ jars a year---why, we had to stick cartons under the BEDS!!

I've been to hog-killins, goat-ropins (My brother-in-law has his own RODEO, for landsakes, right there in his YARD), and barn raisings and even a quilting bee or two. The first house we moved into had a little pulley-rigged rack in the ceiling of the spare bedroom, for rolling down over the laps of several keen-eyed quilters.

Now our life is a little quieter, a little more serene, a little less of the land and more of the library and strolls in a lovely little park than across 2000 acres. But I can still whistle a crew in for supper from the South 100, and cook it for 'em too.

I still have my big old Franklin stove, and can turn out eight pies before you can say Pillsbury, with a big pot of pintos a-simmering the while. And I could have had that pile of shrimp peeled for the jambalaya before you could say Jack Rabbit.

Lord, I sound like Granny Clampett--but I could put a meal on that table that she and Jed and Jethro would sit right down to, and have cooked for Captain Kirk, besides. Haven't thought of that one in years.

I LOVE the country, still speak in all the phrases of my raising, and will be a GRITS girl til they are bringing in the piminna cheese and devilled eggs to comfort my family at my funeral.

So you take that back.

rachel

Edited May 18, 2005 by racheld (log)