Southeast Louisiana Food, An Interview

              A good meal takes you places. Stuffed bell peppers always remind me of Maman Peggy rubbing my arm and saying ‘sha monp ‘ti bebe’. Roast and rice and gravy make me think of the best storyteller I know, my daddy. These days, any etouffee’s I have eaten are sized up to what my wife can do in her cast iron skillet .

                The recipes in Addie and Jeremy Martin’s Southeast Louisiana Food taste like a summer in Grand Isle. Their shrimp fricassee is the pot stew your cousin put on the stove because you didn’t catch enough Specs that day. It’s the full, earthy flavor you can only get from someone like Addie; someone so immersed in the culture that cooking naturally evokes place and time.

                What’s more, I’ve been fooling my family into believing I’m a good cook by using modified versions of her recipes.

                But this book is more than a cookbook. It is an ambitious attempt to condense 300 years of Southeast Louisiana food culture into a palatable users-guide. Through interviews with everyone from crabbers to professors, politicians to oystermen, Addie and Jeremy capture a living history. What’s more, in the hospitability that Cajuns are famous for, they invite you to experience their journey with an appendix of recipes; most of them garnered from Addie’s family.

                Until recently, Addie and her husband Jeremy were staying in a shotgun house in Faubourg St. John in New Orleans. They received me in their front parlor stacked high with wide, heavy books written in our old French and Spanish. After a couple of beers we moved to the back kitchen, where -along with a few more beers- there sat a fricassee; it’s dark roux seasoned just right and a pot of rice on the table.

                Below are a few questions I had for them:

The Brochure: Now, in Louisiana, everyone says ‘we live to eat’, right? So, why do you think food is so important to Southeast Louisiana? What is it about fisheries in particular?

Addie: I like to tell the story through the lens of the fisheries because the fisheries play such a large role. You know, all the industries were tied up. You know, sugar is the industry, but-

Jeremy: It was always industrialized, it was always a commodity.

Addie: Yeah, the fisheries seem to tap into a more…way of life. Sugar and oil are top-down things. You need capital. It’s run by people with money, but the work being done on a day-to-day basis are everyday people. That allows them to keep their culture. They’re some of the first freelancers, so to speak.

Jeremy: Also, when we get to Cotton or Sugar, it’s often slave labor, historically. But when it comes to fishing, people can do it for themselves.

The Brochure: I notice a lot of the people you interview in the book are the old people. I notice that as well in my family, when you want to understand the culture, if you want to find out what it means to be Cajun, we go to our grandparents. Why do you think that is?

Addie: Well, because their parents were still 100% Cajun and French and in that way of life. Their parents were here before the Americanizing happened. Think about us now. Our parents were born in the 50s, but them and their parents, we are looking at the pre-information age. Things stay more isolated.

What’s more, in our families, sometimes it’s our grandparents who were the first to even graduate high school, so it was a lot different then. There weren’t as many outside influences. It wasn’t something people did on a conscious level. They weren’t thinking ‘well this is my culture, so I’d better do it this way; they were thinking ‘I need to eat tomorrow.’

The Brochure: What does the recent influx of Anglo, nonLouisianians post-Katrina mean for New Orleans?

Jeremy: Look, everyone wants to say it’s a bad thing, but it’s not. A static culture will die and become a museum piece. Now, we’re talking about New Orleans here which is different than what we were talking about in our book, but the same principles apply. But it’s actually great for New Orleans, because they bring new ideas. What we need to try to do is educate and integrate them into the culture.  The mistakes we made in Louisiana has been to isolate them, but guess what? They innovate, they take the culture.

Addie: Yeah, it’s our responsibility to take them into the fold, and show them. For a culture to thrive, it has to change and grow and remain relevant. It’s not up to some board or nonprofit to dictate what the culture is. People have to decide to do it. Crawfish boils, for example, that came in the last 50 yeasr. 60 years ago, eating crawfish meant you were poor, but then the state (LSU Ag department) invested in crawfish fisheries. The tighter you hold on (to a culture) the less control you have.

The Brochure: How critical to our culture is it to speak French, and do you think there is any incentive to speak French?

Jeremy: It’s gone. It’s dead and gone but it lives on in slang. But as a spoken language it’s gone. Why would a child speak Cajun French with his friends when he’d just speak English? However, there is an extensive patois. So when someone says a word with Cajun origin, we can educate people where it comes from...I think, academically, it’s incredibly important. It’s something that’s going to be gone in twenty-five years, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

The Brochure: Damn, Jeremy, you just swallow dark truths. Don’t even flinch.

Addie: When you have a whole generation not learning a language, even if they’re well intentioned…when you’re not taught a language from childhood…it’d be hard to bring it back.

*This book can be found at:

http://www.amazon.com/Southeast-Louisiana-Food-Seasoned-Tradition/dp/1626195498