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To: Zavien Doombringer
[conservlib] New Orleans is French cuisine

How about Cajun?

Orleanian cookery is "creole" -- French, but New World. Cajun is the country French cooking of the Acadians, with lots of New World and African contributions thrown in. Crawfish is essentially Cajun (ecrevisse in French).

Likewise, Cajun French, as a French priest listening to a Louisiana fellow named Thibodeaux talking to a French saloonkeeper told my father (this was 1944), Acadian French is essentially country French of the 17th century, the time of Louis XIV. Linguists are familiar with the linguistic conservatism of rural speakers, the more remote the better philologically speaking, and so in some respects Cajun French is 'purer' than Parisian French, which is very cosmopolitan, howbeit that it is a world language and very classicizing itself these days.

H.L. Mencken made the same point about American speech. What we tend to deride as "country" speech from the hills and hollows of Appalachia and the Ozarks is actually Elizabethan English, and it preserves a great deal of what Shakespeare sounded like when recited from the boards of the Rose Theater, before England was swept by the stage-affectation accent of an actor named Beaumont in the middle of the 18th century.

476 posted on 04/22/2005 4:53:00 PM PDT by lentulusgracchus ("Whatever." -- sinkspur)
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To: lentulusgracchus
Likewise, Cajun French, as a French priest listening to a Louisiana fellow named Thibodeaux talking to a French saloonkeeper told my father (this was 1944), Acadian French is essentially country French of the 17th century, the time of Louis XIV.

A girl from France stayed with us a few days once visiting one of our sons who had met her in Paris. We took her to a Cajun restaurant. She said the Cajun music sounded to her like old time French country music.

477 posted on 04/22/2005 6:33:43 PM PDT by rustbucket
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