#33 Catfish Courtbouillon

If you’re a regular reader, you might have the impression that I’m a tomato hater. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Fact is, I believe that there’s a place for everything, and the best place in the world for a tomato is in one of my favorite fish dishes…the catfish courtbouillon (pronounced coo-bee-yon).

Catfish courtbouillon is a simple dish consisting of tomato sauce, bellpepper, garlic, onions, and catfish. The ingredients, excluding the catfish, are simmered together in a black iron pot for at least an hour, until all the flavors blend together and the tomato taste mellows out a bit. The longer you let everything simmer, the better the final dish will be. Near the end of cooking, the catfish pieces are dropped in, starting the hands-off phase of cooking. Once the fish hits the pot, there’s to be absolutely no pot stirring. Stirring would break up the fish, so it’s replaced by the occasional twisting of the pot to make sure the fish doesn’t stick. I remember watching my mom-mom twisting her pot back and forth, her big grandma arms flapping as she did it. It’s like you get to cook AND exercise at the same time (mais, buy the Cajun Black Iron Pot Workout™ video today and watch the lard melt away chére!).

It’s really hard to mess up a courtbouillon, but there are three rules that should never be broken. First, always use freshly caught wild catfish instead of pond raised fish. I believe it’s the wild catfish’s scavenger diet that gives it its signature taste (coupled with a bit of good old Louisiana water pollution). It’s also a lot of fun to catch the ingredients. The second rule is to cut the fish into steaks, not filets. Leaving the bones in will keep the fish from falling apart in the pot, and if you use larger catfish, the bones will be large enough to pick out. There’s nothing worse than picking small fish bones out of your food. And last but no least, always toss the catfish head in the pot. There’s some good meat on the head that shouldn’t be ignored, and don’t worry ’bout having to look your catch in the eye, cause you pop dem eyeballs out first.

The final dish is served over rice with some moque choux corn on the side. Here are a couple of good recipes I found, if you want to try making some for yourself.

#32 Jambalaya

What the hell is jambalaya? This was a question posed years ago to the sixth grade version of myself by a distant pen pal, named Carlos. Since this pen pal was foisted upon me by my Kum Ba Yah singing Catholic school teacher in an idealistic attempt to expose me to the outside world, I didn’t feel a particular need to respond right away. I was much too busy playing Super Mario to write back to some stranger. Well, I might be a lot of things, but let it be known far and wide that I’m not a flake, just an overachieving procrastinator. So Carlos, if you’re out there, here’s your answer, some twenty odd years late.

Jambalaya is the ultimate in single pot Cajun cooking. A combination of rice, vegetables, stock and a mixture of meats all cooked together in a single pot (usually black iron), jambalaya is a deceptively simple meal that takes only minutes to learn, but years to master. Done right, it will bring tears to a Cajun man’s eyes, but done wrong, jambalaya a greasy mushy mess. Unlike gumbo, jambalaya is a great year round dish, whether served fireside at the camp, or at home by your mama.

The jambalaya was an attempt by New Orleanians of Spanish descent to make paella in the New World. Without ready access to saffron, tomatoes were substituted, and the resulting dish bore a red hue instead of the trademark yellow of paella. This new dish was dubbed jambalaya, from the Provencal word “jambalaia,” meaning a mish-mash or mixup. Eventually, the jambalaya made its way to Cajun country, lost those damn tomatoes, and became the more tasty brown jambalaya we know and love today.

Every year a jambalaya cookoff is held at the Jambalaya Festival in Gonzales Louisiana, located on the far eastern outskirts of Cajun Country. Here you can sample some of the best jambalaya you’ve ever tasted. Unfortunately, the festival finished last weekend, so you’ll have to wait a whole year to see what I’m talking about (damned procrastination reared its ugly head again).

If you’d like to try making your own jambalaya, here’s a good recipe I found for feeding 120 people, or as I like to call it, my immediate family. If you don’t have that many mouths to feed, you might try this recipe which won the 1978 Jambalaya World Championship title.

So Carlos, I hope this answers all your jambalaya related questions. If not, just write back, and I promise you an answer sometime in the next 20 years.

Jambalaya (On the Bayou):

#31 Hot Sauce

Some say that variety is the spice of life, well they’re wrong …hot sauce is the spice of life chére. Just ask any self respecting Coonass. Whether it’s breakfast, lunch, or dinner, a bottle of hot sauce is never far away from the kitchen table. When it comes to hot sauce, no food is safe. Some like a dash of hot sauce over their morning eggs, or add a few drops to their gumbo or jambalaya to give it a little kick. The most hardcore hot sauce aficionados even carry their own sauce around with them.

While Tabasco may be the undisputed king of the hot sauces in terms of sales, there are many other popular Louisiana hot sauces, like Louisiana and Crystal. And let’s not forget the thousands of different homemade chow chows floating around Acadiana. Each sauce has it’s own personality and area of strength. Tabasco is great when you want to add some pure heat to your dish, but it tends to overwhelm a dish with its vinegary flavor (a taste that millions of people apparently like). Both Louisiana and Crystal are milder than Tabasco and are great for adding a little spice to your dish without have to face the morning after repercussions (hey, I not above making a poo joke). If you want to start a fight with a Coonass, just tell him that your favorite hot sauce is better than his.

I don’t want to hear about this hot sauce that’s a million times hotter than the ones here. It’s no big trick to make a novelty hot sauce that’s too hot to taste. What’s hard is to make a hot sauce that people actually want to add to their foods, that people actually crave. Cajun food has been stereotyped as anything that’s either blackened or super spicy. Major restaurant chains regularly pull “Cajun” versions of dishes out of their bag of marketing tricks. Most of these dishes are made by simply adding tons of spice to the original dish, and hope their customers don’t know the difference. Any true Coonass knows that while out food is well seasoned, it’s seldom too spicy to eat.

When it comes to hot sauce, there’s no right answer. You just have to go with your gut…or butt (see, I did it twice).

#30 High School Football

On Friday nights between August and December, small town Cajuns can be found enjoying the local high school football game all around Acadiana. They go for different reasons, but whether it’s to root for a relative’s son, or support their home town, high school football is cheap, fun entertainment for the whole family. It’s like a Saint’s game, but sometimes your home team actually wins one. (Ok, I know the Saints have been very good the past few seasons, but they’ll forever be frozen in my memory as the loveable never-won-a-playoff-game Saints of my youth.)

Sitting amongst the crowd, you can hear the locals yelling out plays from the bleachers. Pick up dat ball couyon! Block dat kick! Pass de ball to T-Boy over dere! The stands are filled with old timers reliving the football glory of their youth, with only a pair of busted knees and a worn out letterman jacket to show for it.

Louisiana football players have been well represented in the NFL. Hall of Famer Terry Bradshaw was born in Shreveport Louisiana (I know Shreveport is barely part of Louisiana, but I’m still counting him). In recent years, Jake Delhomme, Peyton and Eli Manning, Kevin Faulk, Marshall Faulk, Bobby Boucher, and many others have proudly represented our state. In terms of population, only Washington DC and Mississippi have more NFL players. Not bad for a bunch of Louisiana boys.

Most high school football games are a blast, but nothing beats the excitement of playing a rival team, usually from the neighboring town. This is a game of high stakes, since the losing town has to endure a year of taunts and humiliation from the winning side. The big game for me was the Cecilia Bulldogs vs the Breaux Bridge Tigers. Readers of The Daily Advertiser voted this game the largest high school rivalry in Louisiana. In the week leading up to the game, trash talking ramps up, houses are toilet papered, and fights break out between students as tensions rise. On the night of the big game, the whole town practically shuts down as just about everyone goes to the game. This is the loudest game of the season with chants of De-Fense and the thunder of synchronized bleacher stomping filling the air. Even in a losing season, we Cecilia locals can hold our head up high as long as we manage to whup Breaux Bridge. What’s your towns big rivalry?

Cecilia Bulldog Fight Song

Fight for our colors, green and gold
Fight for our honour, heart and soul
Lift up her glory, lift up her name
Shake down the thunder with her fame

Win or lose, we’ll never be blue
We stand together, loyal and true
We’re from Cecilia, this is our song
Cecilia, right or wrong, Hey!

#29 Squirrel Hunting

If it’s got four legs, a Coonass will shoot it, clean it, throw it in a pot and make a gravy out of it. This saying even holds true for the tastiest member of the rodent family, the squirrel. And while these critters are scrumptious, they’re even more fun to hunt.

Squirrel hunting is a favorite pastime of Acadiana natives, and nowhere is it more popular than in the small town of Ville Platte. In fact, it is so popular in Ville Platte that the opening day of squirrel hunting season is a town holiday and schools shut down early. The holiday was a no-brainer, considering it was a choice between giving students the day off or having the whole town play hooky for the day. It come as no surprise that Ville Platte was crowned Squirrel Town U.S.A. by Field and Stream magazine.

Throughout the hunting season, boys (and some girls) as young as 5 head out into the woods with their fathers, shotguns in hand and clothed in a bright orange safety vests. Hunters walk silently through the woods scanning their surroundings for telltale signs of gray or fox squirrels like chewed up acorns or pine comb stems falling to the ground in a helicopter pattern. Sometimes they’ll use a bark call to fool the squirrels into responding with barks of their own. Together, father and son will stay in the woods until they shoot their daily limit, or the sunset forces them to call it a day.

On opening day, and throughout squirrel season, you can hear shotgun blasts ringing out in the distance, so much so that after a while you stop noticing them. A big part of squirrel hunting’s appeal is the amount of action a squirrel hunter gets (not dat kind of action couyon!). Compared to the sit-and-wait style of deer hunting, squirrel hunters get to shoot their guns a lot more and are more likely to bring home a kill than their deer hunting counterparts (though the payoff for a deer hunter is a lot better). It’s a lot more fun for a young boy to hunt squirrels than it is to get them to sit still for 5 hours in a deer stand.

For the uninitiated, eating a rodent might sound unappetizing, but trust me, squirrel is delicious. Cooked properly, squirrel meat is more tender than chicken. My favorite squirrel meal is in a brown sauce over rice, but some people prefer it in a gumbo. Squirrel brain is considered a delicacy by some (not by dis Cajun boy). My uncle used to make the little cooked squirrel heads talk before cracking them open and getting at their juicy brains. With the recent linking of squirrel brain eating to a form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob, or mad cow disease, I have one more reason to stay away.

The 2008 squirrel season was something special. For only the second year in history, Louisiana state officials have declared a second squirrel season from May 3 through May 25 on private land and from May 3 through May 11 on public land. This is like having a second Christmas. I don’t know if Ville Platte declared a second squirrel holiday for this one, but I suspect there were a lot of absences that day.

#28 Grattons (Cracklins)

Crunchy, salty, and almost 100% pure fat, cracklins are the original Cajun snack food. Cracklins, also known as grattons (grah-tawns), are the result of a poor people’s desire to use every part of the pig. Years ago, Cajun families and neighbors regularly got together for boucheries, or community hog butcherings. Every family pitched in to help butcher and clean the hog and left with their share of the animal. No part of the hog was wasted. In addition to meat, the hog also provided tripe, hogs head cheese, organs, pigs feet, ears, and the tail. Fat was scraped off of the remaining skin to produce lard for cooking, and finally, the remaining skin and attached fat was shaved (hogs are hairy), cut into bite sized cubes and fried to produce grattons. After being removed from the fryer, the grattons were seasoned and served. I’ll bet your favorite snack food doesn’t require shaving.

Made of almost pure saturated fat and heavily salted, these delicious treats have no doubt contributed to Louisiana’s high rate of diabetes and heart disease. While most Cajuns don’t eat cracklins as often as their parents once did, grattons remain a guilty pleasure amongst Acadians. Best Stop alone sells over 2500 lbs of these treats daily.

Nowadays, a community boucherie is a rare event. If you want your gratton fix, you can usually find them wherever boudin is sold. If you’re feeling really adventurous, you can try making them yourself, but be prepared to scrub the resulting oil slick off of your kitchen floor and have your house smell like fried pork for a week (not a bad thing in this Coonass’s opinion).

#27 Deep Fried Turkey

Cajun people loved fried food. Name a food, and it can probably be made ten times tastier by dropping it in a vat of hot oil, at least that’s the Cajun culinary philosophy. Okra, eggplant, boudin and pig skin all benefit from deep frying, so it was just a matter of time until a Cajun figured out how to fry a turkey. Why a turkey you ask…well why not? Cajuns are always trying to top themselves, and a turkey is the largest critter that’s practical to fry. The peanut oil required to fry a whole cow is cost prohibitive (I already looked into it), not to mention the damage it would do to the above ground swimming pool!

The first reaction people have when they hear about fried turkey is that it’ll be too greasy, something that couldn’t be further from the truth. For one thing, the turkey isn’t battered, so there’s not much for the fat to hang onto in the finished turkey. Secondly, a turkey is a big bird, with a lower surface area to volume ratio than chicken. This reduces the overall fat content per serving. The frying process actually seals in juices, and the high heat cooks the bird with little loss of moisture. The simple fact is that there’s no better way to cook a turkey than deep frying it.

Here’s how turkey frying works. First, you thaw a medium sized turkey, about 8-12 pounds. Then you inject or stuff the bird with seasoning (Cajun injector works best). Next, you lower the turkey into a large pot of hot peanut oil, and after about 45 minutes to an hour, depending on size, you’re done. Remove the turkey from the oil, let cool, carve up and dig in. If done right, you get a nice crispy outside, and the meat inside is the juiciest you’ve ever tasted (yes, it’s even better than your mama’s baked turkey).

I’d like to claim that the Cajuns invented the fried turkey, but I just don’t have any hard evidence to back that up. Famed Cajun Justin Wilson said he observed the practice of turkey frying in Louisiana as early as the 1930s. One thing that is certain, is that this tradition came out of the South, and in recent years, has become quite the rage across the country. This popularity has also led to an increase in the number of accidents, which has given turkey frying a bad name. Usually, it’s some fool that’s drinking and fryin’, or drops a partially thawed turkey into the grease. You’re messin with hot grease couyon, be careful you! If done correctly, turkey frying is perfectly safe. Like most other things, there’s a right way and a wrong way wrong way to do it.

So next time one of the major turkey holidays rolls around, give fried turkey a try. I guarantee you’ll never want to go back to the old way again.

#26 The Atchafalaya Basin

Cajuns love the outdoors, the fresh air, being surrounded by wilderness, and there’s no better place for this in south Louisiana than in the Atchafalaya Basin. The Basin’s our backyard, a place we can get away to on the weekends and wind down with a little camping, fishing, and beer drinking — everything a modern Coonass needs.

When I was young, my grandfathers would take me to the Basin every few weeks. We’d drive on top of the Henderson or Butte La Rose levees and choose a good place to launch our boat. We’d ride out to our secret spot, moving past house boats and navigating a maze of cypress knees, careful not to hit any underwater stumps. Sometimes we’d fish, other times we’d pick up nets that my grandfather had set out earlier. Sometimes my grandfather would hand me a shotgun with instructions to shoot pretty much anything that flew over my head, endangered or not. To my grandfathers, hunting and fishing laws were more suggestions than anything else. Nobody was going to tell an old school Cajun what he could or couldn’t shoot. Luckily for the birds, I was a pretty bad shot.

South Louisiana contains 40-45% of the wetlands of the lower 48 states, and the Atchafalaya Basin makes up a huge part of that. With 865,000 acres, the Atchafalaya Basin is the largest swamp in the United States. The Basin is over 15 miles wide running east to west, and 150 miles long. The word Atchafalaya comes from its Choctaw name “hacha falaia” which means “long river”. The Choctaws used this word to describe the Atchafalaya River that feeds the Basin. For those that don’t want to get their hands dirty, the Basin can most easily be seen while driving the 18.2 mile stretch of I-10 that runs between Henderson and Marigouin.

The Atchafalaya is home to a wide array of wildlife, including over 300 species of birds and the largest population of bald eagles in the south central United States. It also hosts a large population of American alligator along over 54 types of reptiles and amphibians. In addition, over 90 species of fish, crawfish, crabs, and shrimp also call the Atchafalaya home, and provide a livelihood to many Louisiana fisherman. The fishing industry brings 300 million dollars into Louisiana each year, and the Atchafalaya is part of that.

The Atchafalaya Basin serves an important role as a buffer marsh. As a wetland, the Basin performs many vital functions, including flood control, water purification, and storm buffering. It is home to endangered species such as the Louisiana black bear and the bald eagle, and native wildlife like grobecs (delicious), osprey, herons, egrets, beavers, and alligators.

In the early 20th century, it became quite evident that the Mississippi River, seeking a more direct route to the Gulf of Mexico, was attempting to reroute itself over the Atchafalaya River. The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 triggered a max exodus from communities like Bayou Chene, Sherburne, Atchafalaya, and Pelba as these towns were ravaged by Mississippi floodwaters. To prevent future flooding due to the Mississippi’s repeated attempts to redirect itself, the US Corps of Engineers erected huge floodgates at the intersection of the Atchafalaya and Mississippi Rivers. An extensive system of levees and channels was also built to help control future flooding.

In recent years, control of the Mississippi’s flood waters has become a controversial issue as many point to it as a major reason for land loss in Louisiana. Much of the Mississippi’s valuable silt is now being deposited over the continental shelf, rather than into surrounding buffer marshes, which depend on this silt for replenishment. These marshes play an important role as buffers against storms and hurricanes. It is estimated that over 29 square miles of Louisiana land is lost each year to erosion. I’m no scientist or tree hugger, but I love the Basin, and want it to be around for future generations to enjoy. If that means I have to make a few sacrifices in the short term, than so be it.

#25 The Crawfish Festival

Louisiana has more festivals than you can shake a stick at, but having grown up in the neighboring town of Cecilia, I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival. Since being crowned in 1959 la capitale Mondiale de l’ecrevisse, or the Crawfish Capital of the World, by the Louisiana State Legislature, Breaux Bridge has hosted the king of all Cajun festivals, the Crawfish Festival.

Held on the first full weekend in May, the Crawfish Festival hosts over 25,000 visitors annually, serving up thousands of pounds of crawfish over the festival weekend. There is perhaps no better time and place to satisfy your crawfish envie (that’s craving for you non-Cajuns) than at the Crawfish Festival, where you can try every crawfish-centric dish your heart desires, from the conventional boiled (bawled) crawfish, stuffed crawfish, crawfish etoufée, fried crawfish, and crawfish bisque to less conventional entrees such as crawfish boudin and crawfish enchiladas. If it exists and it’s made of crawfish, you’ll probably find it at the Breaux Bridge Crawfish Festival. There are no individual meals at the Crawfish Festival as breakfast, lunch, and dinner meld together into a hazy crawfish nirvana. Over the three days of the Crawfish Festival, Breaux Bridge is perhaps the happiest place on earth. You can see it on the smiling faces of festival-goers as crawfish juices run down their arms.

The Crawfish Festival kicks off with a celebrity crawfish eating contest, where local media celebrities and big shots compete for the title of the biggest crawfish gourmand (as if Coonasses ever needed a reason to gorge themselves). A highlight of the second day is the crawfish race, where festival-goers compete to find out who’s got the fastest crawfish (before eating it). On the final day, both the crawfish etoufée cook off (no Chinese crawfish allowed!), and the Crawfish Festival Parade are real crowd pleasers.

Now there’s more to the Crawfish Festival than just eating. Arts and crafts booths sell souvenirs and show off the best that Cajun culture has to offer. The festival also hosts over 30 Cajun and Zydeco bands over the span of three days. If you can’t dance, there are Cajun and Zydeco dance clinics to teach you how. If you still can’t dance after that, then keep throwing back beers until you just don’t care anymore. The festival is open to Cajuns and non-Cajuns alike, with the local attitude being one of inclusiveness. We Cajuns are proud to share our culture with outsiders, but don’t worry, we’re pretty humble about it (we’re not Texas proud, after all).

Other towns may claim that they are more deserving of the Crawfish Capital honor, but it’s a title that Breaux Bridge has more than earned. Breaux Bridge was the first town to openly serve crawfish in its local restaurants, and if that wasn’t enough, Breaux Bridge eateries gave birth to the crawfish etoufée was born, a dish which is now synonymous with Cajun cuisine around the world.

The modern Crawfish Festival is a family-friendly festival, held in the relatively small Parc Hardy, but that wasn’t always the case. Back in the 1980s and 90s, the festival was closer to a New Orleans style Mardis Gras than to a local fair. Motorcycle gangs showed up in droves, and the entire city of Breaux Bridge practically shut down for three days of uncontrollable drunken crowds, crime, underage drinking, and an anything goes atmosphere. Finally, there came a breaking point in the mid 90s when the citizens of Breaux Bridge decided to scale thing back, and get the Crawfish Festival back under control.  The festival’s been held in Parc Hardy ever since.

You can always tell a person who’s been to the Crawfish Festival. They’re the one who’s hung over the following Monday morning with a stupid grin on their face that they can’t wipe off, because they’re already counting down the days to next year’s Crawfish Festival.

#24 Evangeline Maid Bread

Growing up in Louisiana, there was only one brand of sliced bread that graced my mama’s counter top, and that was Evangeline Maid Bread. On every trip to town, I remember looking out the car window for the giant spinning Evangeline Maid sign, a fixture that’s been a constant part of the Lafayette landscape for as long as I can remember.

Cajuns and carbohydrates go together like white on rice (we like dat too), and there’s no better source of highly refined carbs than Evangeline Maid Bread. It’s some of the softest, fluffiest white bread you’ll ever taste – it’s the crack rock of the bread world. If you haven’t tried Evangeline Maid Bread before, I’d like to recommend that all you non Cajuns run out buy a loaf, but unfortunately it’s an exclusive product of south Louisiana, so you gotta come down to Acadiana to try some.

Now French bread may be perfect for po’boys, but there’s no better way to soak up gravy than with a slice of Evangeline Maid Bread. Sometimes I like to stuff it full of rice and gravy or potato salad for some hot carb on carb action (now we’re talkin’). When I’m down home, I don’t need no whole grain bread, bring on the refined white flour goodness, digestive system be damned.

One anonymous Evangeline Maid Bread enthusiast said it best, “It’s white bread, but it is the stuff dreams are made of, and it’s unavailable anywhere outside of south Louisiana. Some claim to be close, but a fresh loaf of Evangeline Maid is simply dreamy.” Now I couldn’t have said it better myself.