The Native-American Origins of Gumbo

Here's a list of current cooking schools in New Orleans:

https://gonola.com/food-drink-in-new-orleans/new-orleans-coo...

Might be a great idea for a Masterclass series online.

Link's known as a New Orleans chef and James Beard Award winner, but he's Cajun as hell and his recipes are largely no-nonsense, easy to make, and stay away from unusual ingredients.

Start with jambalaya, which is delicious and not as difficult to learn as making a roux for gumbo.

More philosophically, understand two things:

- Traditional Cajun food is farm food. These are dishes meant to be cooked slow while you're working, and in servings that load up a large family (or whole neighborhood) to prep for another day of it.

- Favor freshness, flavor, improvisation, and community over any concept of canonical accuracy.

There's no ideal "Cajun seasoning" (although I will swear to my grave on smoked and hot paprika being key components), and no foolproof roux-making method. No one single way to go about any of it. French concepts divorced from their European pretense -- compare Cajun boudin to continental French boudin, for instance -- then spun with Choctaw, Coushatta, and Caddo techniques (fry breads, native herbs, and steaming shellfish and gulf seafood), German immigrants making sausages out of pork but also game duck and deer (and beer), West African and Caribbean stews, vegetables, and barbecue, Spanish rice dishes and tamales, and a willingness to cook and eat any animal slow or stupid enough to get caught.

In the end it all comes down to how to stretch one chicken/pig/deer/duck/rabbit/turtle/catfish/basket of crawfish/whatever into a week of food when all you really have to eat is a huge pot of long-grain rice that you don't have time to fuss over. It's culinary alchemy.

That's why I suggest learning jambalaya first, because it embodies this concept: you cut and fry up one chicken and cook it in a stock pot with enough rice to serve a dozen people, and your goal is to make the entire pot taste like it's all chicken.

If you can do that, and wrap your head around how it happens, the rest of it just sort of falls into place.

I thought culinary use was technically not legal due to cancer concerns. The leaves can also be psychoactive.

The River Parishes (St. Charles, St. John, St. James) are pretty much their own region too. It's a mixture of New Orleans and Cajun plus a healthy dose of German.

Baton Rouge and New Orleans are most definitely not Cajun. Sure, you'll find pockets of authenticity, but generally speaking they're not. New Orleans is Creole, a mixture of various influences but primarily French, Spanish, and Native American. There are other parts of the state that have a fairly pure French heritage that are not Cajun nor Creole (towns in the central part of the state like New Roads and Ville Platte).

'Cajun' is the one that is most well known, but Creole and non-Acadian French (ancestors came directly from France, not exiled from Nova Scotia) also have outstanding cuisine. Some of this may feel like splitting hairs, but the distinctions are important for some of the Louisiana natives.