Photo by Denise Harding
Harding makes anise cookies like those her grandmother made using anise from her yard. They are similar to the popular cookies found in Italian cuisine.
“I knew that I’d be the only one that would have a brown pie,” recalled Denise Harding, about her entry in the Sweet Dough Festival. Her strategy was to stand out a bit from the other entries, and it apparently worked. The Syrup Sweet Dough Pie with Fig Filling she made from her grandmother’s century-old recipe took second place in the professional division.
“It’s more cakelike,” Harding explained of the crust surrounding the pies celebrated during the festival each October in Grand Coteau. Her winning heirloom recipe is just one of many in her cookbook Memoire Doux (“Sweet Memories”). “These are all the old Cajun and Creole pastries and breads you won’t find a lot. A lot of these are hundred-year-old recipes.”
For thirty years, Harding has been demonstrating and baking these recipes across South Louisiana. She learned them during hours sitting quietly in the kitchen watching her grandmother as a child. “I was very shy,” she explained, so she would slip away from family gatherings into the kitchen with her grandmother—a unique privilege.
“I would just watch her weave her magic with yard eggs and milk from the cows,” said Harding, noting that this was the original slow food and organic food movement. “I’m just trying to take all these old recipes that I learned from my grandmother and pass them on.”
It’s a calling that includes a bit of history folded into the dough of each pastry, and Harding is passionate about recreating these old recipes as authentically as possible. “I’m still using organics. I’m doing the same thing she was.”
Just like her grandmother’s, the ingredients for Harding’s pastries include yard eggs from local farmers and raw sugar from a nearby mill. And there is clear evidence that she’s getting it right. “All these old Cajuns would come to my booth and say, ‘I haven’t tasted these since I was little.’”
Last year Harding conducted open-hearth cooking demonstrations at Vermilionville, Lafayette’s living history museum, where visitors were intrigued by another legacy she carries from her grandmother Anais Mouton Martin. “She was the great-great-great-granddaughter of the founder of Lafayette. I’m the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Jean Mouton.”
Among the other heritage recipes in Harding’s cookbooks are anise cookies, like those her grandmother made with anise harvested from the garden. A bread recipe from her husband’s grandmother—another old-school baker who Harding watched ply her craft while carefully taking notes—is presented too. “She baked it in a roasting pan after she formed the rolls, which produces very high, crusty rolls, but soft interiors,” said Harding.
There is also a recipe for bené pralines, an old Cajun version made with sesame seeds rather than pecans. Harding makes these for sale in decorative tins, and they sell out as fast as she can make them.
“All these recipes my grandmother made were passed down to my mother and her siblings,” explained Harding. “Some were written; but, as with most natural cooks, it was just known.” And so Harding would watch carefully as each recipe was prepared and would make notes in order to translate them for her cookbook.
While her family ties run deep in Lafayette, Harding actually spent her childhood in Morocco (where her Cajun mother’s French came in handy) and in Napa, California, before moving to Acadiana during grade school when her father retired from the navy. Now, she and her husband, Dale Pierrottie, live right behind the two-hundred-year-old bousillage home where her mother was born, one of Lafayette’s most historic. Pierrottie is an expert in bousillage, the clay-and-Spanish-moss mixture that was used in French Louisiana as a building material in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Between Harding’s baking and Pierrottie’s bousillage (which was profiled in the November 2013 issue of Country Roads), the couple is ensuring that centuries of tradition will be carried on.
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In addition to the business that uses her middle name—Colette’s Pastries—Harding is the author of two cookbooks: Memoire Doux: Cajun and Creole Pastries and Cajun and Creole Cooking.
Find more information and a link to purchase them at the Collette’s Pastries page on Facebook or at CajunCookBooks on Etsy.com.
