Made Coush-Coush this weekend

[patsher]

I made Coush-Coush this weekend -- WOW! I had no idea something so simple could be so good. Got all excited and ordered some Steen's, too. Wyoming is along way from Louisiana, but there are a lot of Louisiana folks up here in the oil fields, and man, can they COOK!

Got invited to several crawfish feasts, too, over the last few years. One of the company hands built a couple of huge cookers-- must hold 40 gallons or more. Then they fly in about 400 pounds of crawdads. The Louisiana guys do all the cooking, they know how to season everything. Don't know what all is in it, but lots of hot peppers for sure. Corn on the cob, potatoes, onions -- my gosh, what a feast. Lots of cold beer too, of course!

I've only been in Louisiana once in my life, and that was going through on the highway. We ate there someplace, but I think it was tourist food, nothing memorable. I think it's funny that I had to come back home to Wyoming to taste the real stuff!

Pat

[gwpercle]

Pat, coush-coush was a dish the frugal cajun housewife came up with to use up leftover grits. Kinda like making bread pudding to use up leftover stale french bread. You really need to come back and experience some dishes like Creole Gumbo, boudin, stuffed crabs, oyster po-boys, I swear some of the things prepared around here are a near religious experience and will have you throwing rocks at coush-coush.
Any one who likes Steens has to have the makings of a cajun in them. You can become a Cajun three ways, by birth, by marriage and by the back door. It is allways open and we will adopt anyone. Come back if you ever get the opprotunity.
Gary

[Dale in Louisiana]

My own coush-coush (couche-couche) recipe is made from scratch and is made from corn meal. Great grandmother, a LeBleu, made it this way when I was a kid. There were no leftovers in her house, ever. Her roots wouldn't allow such a thing. She was raised without refrigeration, way too far out of town for even an ice-box, and when they did get electricity, the idea of leftovers just never occurred to her. When I was really young, she was still cooking on a coal-oil (kerosene) stove. Wood is scarce on the South Louisiana prairies. Her contemporary, my other great-grandmother, lived in the town and she had a wood stove that produced cookies into the mid 1950's.

Steen's Cane Syrup is still available and is good, but as a kid everybody knew somebody who had a field of ribbon cane and a syrup mill. I remember Dad buying those unlabelled half-gallon cans of cane syrup. It was cheaper than 'store-bought' syrups. It's hard to beat home-made biscuits and a bowl with cane syrup with butter mixed into it. Dip and eat!

dale in Louisiana

[Junior1942]

The mention of oyster poboys brought back a wonderful memory--an oyster poboy at Acme Oyster House in New Orleans circa 1983. My god it was great!

[gwpercle]

Junior has had one of them near religious experiences I was talking about, a good oyster po-boy will do it. There is a place in Lafayette that has a smoked duck and andouille sausage gumbo that makes me religious everytime I eat it. I'm drooling on the keyboard.

Junior is Tullos just southeast of Olla, near the intersection of Hwy 164 and Hwy 84? If so I passed through there on last trip to Minden! small world.
Gary

[patsher]

Could one of you fellows explain the difference between "cajun" and "creole" to me?

[gwpercle]

I'll try , but it's kinda hard to explain.
In simple terms Creole cooking is city cooking, based on French traditions but with influences from Spain, Africa, West Indies, with a little Itailian and German thrown in. New Orleans is the first city that pops into my mind for creole cooking.
Cajun cooking is simpler, country cooking, the Acadians ( later called Cajuns) developed, around the south central, Louisiana area. They were exiled from Nova Scotia and then Canada . Here they cooked what was hunted, caught and gathered around the swamps and bayou's and adapted thier cooking on what was available. I guess Lafayette would be the center of cajun cooking.
There is a lot of overlapping in the dishes. An example of Creole Jambalaya, cotains -rice , shrimp, ham , tomatoes ( after preperation it is reddish in color ) onion, celery and bellpepper. Cajun Jumbalaya - contains rice, chicken, smoked pork sausage, onion, celery and bellpepper (it is brown in color). They taste very different but both are jambalaya. Creole cooking tends to use a lot of seafood and tomatoes. Cajuns around the coast had fresh seafood too and used but the farther north you traveled the less fresh seafood and more pork and beef were used.
My wife, from New Orleans , had never had "brown" Jambala. I , raised on the edge of Cajun Country, had never had "red" jambala. My Daddy taught her to make Cajun and she taught him how to make Creole. We only lived 90 miles from New Orleans, but 45 years ago that distance seperated creole from cajun. Baton Rouge is about halfway between N.O. and Lafayette, my descendants were cajun.
The differences are minor and you have to look closely to recognize them and a lot of overlapping, melding and blending has taken place in the last 25 years.
Trying to explain this is tough, Dale in Louisiana can proably shed some more light on this, southwest La. puts him in the middle of Cajun Country.

[Dale in Louisiana]

GW has it right.

'Creole' is the 'city food' from New Orleans where privileged French colonists had their food prepared by slaves and imported indentured servants. they tried to replicate fare from France and naturally the servants added a little from THEIR own cuisines. Creole cooking tends to have more ingredients, more complex preparation. After all, if you have a servant doing the work for you...

Cajuns had left France for a chance at the New World. After the French and Indian War (which was our version of yet another European war) and the French lost Canadian holdings, the Brits forced the Acadians out of what was 'Acadia' (now Nova Scotia). Some of those people landed on the coast of the British colonies, took the overland trek to the French colony in Louisiana. When they got to New Orleans, they found the same French that they'd thought they left when the left France for the New World. The Cajuns kept on going, settling on the west bank of the Mississippi (New Orleans being on the east bank) and parts west, where they developed a culture quite separate from the French in New Orleans.

Our food tends toward simple, hardy fare using ingredients that are either wrested from the soil, the Gulf or the bayous, or things that can be bought in bulk and kept without refrigeration. Since then, we've added the traditions of French charcuterie in sausage making, adding a strong German influence because for some reason we got a lot of Germans. They didn't like New Orleans either. Cajun recipes tend strongly toward one or two pots, dump everything in, and stir every now and then while you're out working on something else.

Hope this helps
dale in Louisiana
(75% Cajun 25% Swiss)

[patsher]

Great explanations, guys! That really helps a lot.

Two more questions: first one is regarding "heat", as in from hot peppers. Is one, in general, "hotter" than the other?

And second, when the guys from Louisiana do the crawfish boils up here, is that Cajun, or Creole? (I'm going to guess Cajun, based on it all being cooked in one pot: crawfish, whole potatoes, whole onions, whole ears of corn, salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper, and I don't know whether they cooked the sausage in there too, or it was cooked separately.

[Dale in Louisiana]

Heat! Some people think that dumping pepper into a dish makes it Cajun. Nothing is further from the truth. Proper Cajun cooking balances flavors. The pepper is definitely there, but it should not overwhelm the dish. As one of my techs used to say, "Food shouldn't hurt." For instance, there's a class of Cajun dishes called "Sauce Piquant". That's pronounced "pee-cawnt" and you can probably figure that 'piquant in Cajun equates to 'spicy'. It should be, too. Just enough pepper to tingle the tongue. Most Cajun tables have bottled hot sauces for the diner to add heat to suit himself. I know what my audience can stand and I cook to the most sensitive and add hot sauce to my plate.

"Hot" comes in two varieties in Cajun cooking. Black pepper (remember, keeps without refrigeration. Grandma used to buy it from the Watkins salesman) is a fast heat. As soon as the food is in your mouth, you can feel black pepper heat. Red pepper, cayenne or some variety, is a slower heat. If you add red pepper, and you should, taste a bit, walk around, feel the heat build in your mouth. Add more, a small amount at a time, and resample. Red pepper added early in the cooking will mellow out, leaving flavor but little heat. We're talking an hour here. Red pepper added late in the cooking is going to provide heat. If you get too much pepper, milk or beer will cut the heat. Water won't.

Peppers were part of every Cajun garden. They were put up as 'vinegar and peppers', if fresh, chopped fine into the dish, or at the end of the growing season, threaded on string and hung up to dry. The dried peppers could be crushed into the dish as needed. Alternatively, they could be dried very well, crushed fine, and then kept in bottles. Cajun gardens often contained a variety of peppers, from tiny bird's eyes to the longer cayennes and tabascos. Believe me, the bird's eyes were potent, maybe not ghost pepper hot, but still plenty hot.

Here's another blog post that offers some more insight into the whole 'hot' thing.

Hope this helps-
dale in Louisiana

[gwpercle]

Crawfish boils - Cajun. Eating boiled crawfish didn't become popular untill somewhat recently. Cajuns ate crawfish because they could catch them easily and they are tasty. They didn't start showing up in crawfish boils ,restaurants and seafood markets untill the rice farmers started raising crawfish in thier rice fields along with growing rice. They now had two cash crops from the same field , the crawfish became greatly available and cheaper in price. A big marketing push helped sell them to the public and restaurants now had a steady supply so they started showing up on menu's. Peeled tailes were available frozen for dishes in restaurants all year round and between the wild harvest and pond raised crawfish a good supply of live crawfish is available for boiling ( they have to be alive when you boil them). A lot of the rice farmers and most of the fishermen who ply the swamps and catch them are cajun.
So I'm going to give cajuns the credit for the crawfish boil . But don't forget that overlap between cajun and creole. My New orleans wife had grown up with shrimp and crab boils, never had a boiled crawfish untill she married me and moved to Baton Rouge. And creoles do cook a lot of dishes with crawfish, like crawfish bisque... this is a complicated dish. A crawfish etouffee, this is a simple cajun dish...so the water gets muddy again. But it's all good.
You might be a cajun if at a crawfish boil someone says " don't eat the dead ones" and you know exactly what they mean.

Gary

[patsher]

Guess I must be at least part cajun, then!

[Gliden07]

I went to New Orleans for 5 days back in 2001. What a fantastic time!! To this day the friends and I that went get together and by the end of the night were talking about that trip!! Couple of my favorite memories of that trip were Cafe' Du Monde (Beignets), Mothers (Famous Ferdi Special and Oyster Po Boy) and the Oysters right out of the Gulf!! Commanders Palace was awesome too!! I will say though I have never drank so much before or since then!! I wanna go back one of these days!!