When Pecans Became French

Exploring French influence in Louisiana cuisine

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“French is in people’s blood here.” 

Chef Will Baxter told me this, sitting in the dining room of his restaurant, Jane’s French Cuisine, in Lafayette. Indeed, Baxter’s grandmother, the antiquarian Jane Fleniken, designed the very building Jane’s occupies in the style of a rural French cottage, adorning its interior with French art and cabinetry. Jane’s, with its coursed menu featuring foie gras and rabbit loin, might be described as a testament to America’s long-held infatuation with French culinary culture. But in Louisiana, of course, it’s more than infatuation. 

For this year’s Cuisine Issue, we are featuring three Parisian-style French restaurants here in Louisiana, each operating beyond the culinary epicenter of New Orleans. The Crescent City, of course, is home to some of the oldest, most important, and most innovative French-influenced restaurants in the world (Antoine’s, Arnaud’s, Dooky Chase’s, Justine, N7 to name a few). And across Louisiana, one encounters the Francophone Cajun and Creole cultures’ culinary delights—often with French accents in their names. But in Baton Rouge, Lafayette, and even Marksville—some Louisiana chefs have reached back deep into our culinary DNA to present something simultaneously familiar and foreign: Parisian-style cuisine. 

[Read our 2024 Cuisine Issue Features, here: 

So before sending you to sup in these outposts of the City of Light, let’s take a moment to explore the integral relationship between Louisiana cuisine and French cuisine, a long and entangled history that goes back to the day in 1682 when LaSalle dubbed the Mississippi River Basin La Louisiane for King Louis XIV. This was to be the “New France”. 

The first European settlers of the region, who arrived in the early eighteenth century from France and French Canada, brought with them the ideals of the Enlightenment. “There, people were starting to see food as an art form,” said Liz Williams, founder of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum and the National Food & Beverage Foundation. “The French are the ones who created ‘cuisine’,” explained Zella Palmer, food historian and Chair/Director of the Dillard University Ray Charles Program in African American Material Culture. “The techniques, the rigor, the kind of putting food on a pedestal. The idea that food could be made into an exclusive experience for the elite, for King Louis and his court at Versailles.” 

The French sense of identity is powerful, evident in the continued efforts of Louisiana’s Francophone cultures to preserve their language and lifeways, all these centuries later. The French settlers in the New World, especially of the elite classes, strove to hold fast to their values and traditions here—to “make a Versailles” in Louisiana. 

The lower-class settlers, mostly farmers, likewise tried to recreate the French dishes of their homeland, adapting to the challenges of this strange new climate, with its host of foreign ingredients. The French peoples’ acceptance of these new conditions, according to Williams, distinguished them from English settlers in the original thirteen colonies, who struggled to survive in the New World because of their resistance to any ingredient or lifestyle that was not “English”. “The French perspective did not believe this was not France,” she explained. “Louisiana was an extension of France. So, if you have to eat an alligator, it is now a ‘French’ alligator.”  Depending upon the knowledge of the Native peoples in the region, the French learned how to harvest the riches of this new land—the game, the oysters, the pecans. “And now, it’s a ‘French’ pecan.” 

[Read Chris Turner-Neal's review of N7 in New Orleans, here.]

In this way, the Indigenous people’s centuries-old culinary traditions—which were crucial to the early settlers’ survival—became absorbed into the food culture of the colonizers. Today, many Native dishes and techniques are culturally perceived as Cajun or Creole dishes, with French-sounding names. “Think about maque-choux,” said Williams. “It’s made with corn. I mean, this is something the Native people ate. And the French see what they’re making, and they add cream to it. And if you look at maque-choux, it’s spelled in a French way. But ‘maque-choux’ doesn’t mean anything in French.” Most likely, the name came from the French interpretation, and phonetic spelling, of the words the Natives used to describe the dish. “The French were good at branding,” said Palmer. 

After the original French settlers arrived in Louisiana, the state became a destination for immigrants from across the French diaspora. The Germans (mostly from French-speaking regions on France’s border) arrived in the early eighteenth century, followed some decades later by the Acadian refugees of the Grand Dérangement in Nova Scotia, who would come to be called the Cajuns. Both of these groups would bring distinct culinary traditions, interpreted through Louisiana’s resources and already influenced in some part by France, to the cultural landscape of the region. 

At the same time, the new colonists’ demand for free labor resulted in a population of enslaved Africans that eventually outnumbered the European settlers. Most of the African people forcibly brought to Louisiana came from the Senegambia region of West Africa, which had been colonized by the French beginning in 1659. “French Creolization happened even way before Louisiana,” said Palmer. “It started in Africa in places like Senegal, before Africans were brought in bondage to the New World. The mixing of cultures had already happened in Africa at its port cities.” Most of the food prepared for European settlers in early Louisiana were prepared by African cooks, whose hands held layers of influence from traditional African cuisines and French-influenced African cuisines, now using Louisiana’s Indigenous ingredients and techniques to prepare food that reminded French settlers of their European home.   

I spoke with Palmer a few days after she attended the June 10 announcement of this year’s James Beard Foundation Awards, which dubbed New Orleans’s Chef Serigne Mbaye and Effie Richardson’s Senegalese restaurant Dakar NOLA as Best New Restaurant. During the ceremony, Mbaye had said, “Think about Southern food without West African influence. What would you really have?” His win and the success of Dakar NOLA, Palmer said, are indicative of a current renaissance of Creole cuisine reflecting on, and celebrating, its Senegalese origins. “When you think about Senegal, it is the foundation of so many dishes—jollof rice, you think about jambalaya,” said Palmer. “So many ‘French’ dishes we love so much, they came from Senegal.” 

By the end of the eighteenth century, France had debuted the concept of the ‘restaurant’ for the first time—evolving out of establishments that served bouillon, calling themselves “bouillon restaurants,” which translates to “restorative broth”. When these Enlightenment-era shops started using menus, more offerings joined the broth—offering diners a selection, rather than the take-what-we’ve-got approach of taverns at the time. This led directly to the creation of the first fine dining restaurants in Paris such as La Grande Taverne de Londres and Trois Frères. “The restaurant became where you wanted to be seen, where you had your own Versailles,” said Palmer. “It was still for the upper class, but now you didn’t have to wait for the king or queen to invite you to the palace.” 

The trend quickly caught on in America, and especially in Louisiana where the pulse of French culture beat strongly. “We’re still thinking French, speaking French at this time,” said Williams. “People are buying journals and newspapers and books being sent over from Paris. When absinthe became all the rage there, it became all the rage in New Orleans, as [eventually] did the restaurant.” In 1840, the Italian Antoine Alciatore—who had spent his childhood in France, and received culinary training with premier French chefs (it is believed that he was present when soufflé potatoes were created)—came to New Orleans to open one of the city’s first restaurants, Antoine’s. Still in business today, Antoine's set the standard for French-Creole fine dining, which would come to define the city’s now internationally-renowned restaurant scene. 

Across Louisiana today, the layers of these many influences present themselves in our fine dining establishments, our grandmother’s kitchens, and our diners and gas stations, too. The ingredients of this ecosystem we call home come together in combinations shaped by the traditions of its native peoples, the cultural memory of the African diaspora, the artistry of the French and their vice-like grip on their identity, and the influence of the dozens more cultures who came to call this place home—as well as the innovative evolutions of time itself. “That’s the beauty of our culture,” said Palmer. “It’s all the people that built this amazing cuisine.”