By Marica Mackenroth

Typically the start of the work week brings things like morning traffic or football to mind.

In New Orleans, this is true, but it also makes our tummies growl, as Mondays in the Crescent City mean that it’s time for red beans and rice.

While it’s hard to get meals around here without a side of tradition, this Creole dish is welcomed in restaurants, diners and domestic homes alike for its simple spicy goodness. Commonly cooked slowly over time and served over rice, give yourself a splash of Tabasco sauce and a slice of buttered bread and you are set to give your taste buds a treat. You could also go a step farther, and throw in some smoked sausage and cornbread.

Like crawfish, “red beans” as we call it, is served at large gatherings like Super Bowl parties and Mardi Gras. You can also find it at almost any festival or fair in New Orleans, as it’s easy to make in large quantities while keeping its rich, flavorful integrity.

So why does this dish get its very own, designated day of the week? Well, legend has it that it’s because years ago, ham was the customary Sunday meal and Monday was typically washday. Put those two together, and you get a savory, ham-based concoction that could sit on the stove and cook while women were busy doing the laundry.

These days you don’t have to wait hours upon hours to feast on your beans. Modern day society has created “ready made” cans of red beans that you can simply heat up and serve over rice, with “Blue Runner” being the favorite brand amongst locals.

Be sure not to look over the option when you dine in the Big Easy, as many restaurants take tasty spins on the dish.

Remember, there has to be a reason Louis Armstrong signed autographs, “Red Beans and Ricely yours.”

By John DeMers & Rhonda Findley

RHONDA: Creole vs. Cajun? John, you make it sound like Ali vs. Frazier or something. Is it a championship bout at the Louisiana Superdome, or are we talking great New Orleans cooking here?

JOHN: Maybe a little bit of both, I’m afraid. The fact is, we New Orleanians don’t mind telling everybody about all our history. But we sometimes get tired of insisting that most of us aren’t Cajuns from down on some bayou – and that our local cuisine that everybody lines up to eat isn’t Cajun either. Hey folks, it’s called Creole!

RHONDA: So, the way I understand it — Creole and Cajun cuisines are the creation of two distinct French-speaking groups who called south Louisiana home. Actually, there are a lot of experts who proclaim Creole and Cajun food America’s best indigenous cuisines. Some even proclaim them America’s only indigenous cuisines. Creole cuisine is the cooking of New Orleans! No matter how many times you’ve heard this city described as the heart of Cajun Country, both groups will tell you … New Orleans is not.

JOHN: Creole cooking is based on elegant French cooking – a time-honored pampering of royalty and rich people. The glorious sauces of the Creole kitchen are at least built upon the glorious sauces of the French kitchen. And no one around here is about to complain.

RHONDA: Yet Creole also has that “melting pot” thing going on. Seems like it borrows from anybody who’s spent more than 15 minutes in New Orleans. This mingling goes back to Creole cooking’s earliest days. In other words, it’s been grabbing good ideas since the very beginning.

JOHN: That’s for
sure. Way back in 1722, they had what became known as the “Petticoat
Rebellion.” About fifty young wives marched on Governor Bienville’s
mansion in New Orleans, pounding their frying pans with metal spoons and protesting their dreary diet. I’d agree: cornmeal mush sounds pretty dreary!

Bright guy that he was, Bienville put the women in touch with his own housekeeper, a certain Madame Langlois. She’d picked up a few tricks from the local Choctaws. She calmed the angry wives by teaching them how to use powdered sassafras for flavor in gumbo, how to make hominy grits, how to get the most from this region’s fish and game. So French tradition got real friendly with native American pragmatism, and Creole cooking was born.

RHONDA: According to the dictionaries, Creole comes from the same Latin root as the work “create,” with the French creating their creole from the Spanish criollo. Over time, this went from denoting a person born here of Spanish parents to a person born here of French parents. But Creole, you have to remember, can also mean a mix of black and white parentage, or even undiluted black. It can get pretty confusing. And to these French, Spanish and African roots, successive waves of immigrants contributed touches from everywhere – especially Sicily, Germany, Ireland, Greece and even Croatia.

JOHN: Okay, that’s some serious Creole. But what about the Cajuns people keep thinking we are? Well, they were a different French-speaking group living along the bayous – outside New Orleans. After all these years, the result is a Cajun cuisine that looks French in sophistication yet packs more punch and, on many tables, carries more surprises. Cajun cooking left the Mother Country earlier than the roots of Creole, so it’s simpler and more rustic than the food found in fabled New Orleans restaurants. In some country Cajun eateries, you feel yourself eating as the Three Musketeers must have eaten. Maybe: One for all, but all for me!

RHONDA: Come now, John. Didn’t you’re mother ever teach you to share? And really, that’s only the beginning of Cajun cooking. Not its current state. The international spotlight has convinced Cajun chefs they are no longer second-class citizens. In truth, they never were. Today they are some of the superstars in a city long dominated by Creole taste buds and chefs imported from France.

JOHN: I guess it just had to happen. Quite a few restaurants in New Orleans now bill themselves as Cajun, and almost every restaurant serves some dishes that are Cajun along with the New Orleans classics that are Creole. Some great dishes are cooked by both – and claimed by both, so it gets kind of like that Ali-Frazier bout again. Truth is, both Creole and Cajun cuisines appeal to New Orleans’ flair for food, for experience, for life.

RHONDA: And both of our two great local cuisines love nothing better than to reach out – and
feed someone!

By John DeMers

If you’re eating right now, you might be seeing us that way already. Gazing down hungrily into a bowl of dark brown seafood or chicken gumbo, butter-lush crawfish or shrimp etouffee, scarlet shrimp or chicken Creole, a heaping helping of jambalaya made from everything in the kitchen. You might like experiencing New Orleans by the bowl, as long as the bowls keep coming.

But as the author of a new cookbook titled New Orleans by the Bowl, I invite you to look a little deeper than what’s in front of you now. For New Orleans cuisine is, by many accounts, the world’s ultimate bowl cuisine. In more ways than one.

For starters, New Orleans cooking is “bowl cuisine” because it shows up at our tables so readily and dramatically in a bowl. As parts of that global tradition also called “pot cooking,” both the Creole and Cajun styles beloved in the Crescent City find their happiest expression in something other than a flat dinner plate. The best foods New Orleans has to offer are slow-cooked in plenty of liquid that becomes sauce or, better still, gravy, lovingly watched and stirred by people who probably learned more from their mothers, grandmothers and aunts than they ever learned in culinary school. The result, as I learned researching my book with chef Andrew Jaeger, is a collection of gumbos, jambalayas, soups and stews second to none found on the face of this earth.

In other words, dishes cooked in deep pots are best served in deep bowls. If you were born in New Orleans, as I was, you know this intuitively. If you are among our millions of visitors you learn it quickly, completely and forever. We’ll go with you to learn it, if you like. We’ll eat with you and drink with you. Every so often, we might even pick up the check.

Still, for true New Orleanians who have lived through the evolutions and profound social shifts of the past 50 years, the very words “bowl cuisine” can and do take on a meaning deeper than our next meal. The greatest truth of bowl cooking is that many old things go into the pot – and one new thing comes out. It’s a thing that seldom is perfect, a ragtag blend of effort, meaning, fallibility and passion, ever dreaming farther than its reach. But what comes out of this pot in New Orleans is something new. Something soul-satisfying. Something we might dare call admirable.

Into the pot that fills the bowls we enjoy here, the lives French, Spanish, African, Sicilian, Irish, German, Greek, Croatian and others are poured, in a real slow recipe requiring… oh, a little over 300 years. Out of the pot, and into our expectant bowls, comes a dish as full of flavor as it is of our deepest shared truths.