In a Cajun Kitchen
Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou
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3.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
When most people think of Cajun cooking, they think of blackened redfish or, maybe, gumbo. When Terri Pischoff Wuerthner thinks of Cajun cooking, she thinks about Great-Grandfather Theodore's picnics on Lake Carenton, children gathering crawfish fresh from the bayou for supper, and Grandma Olympe's fricassee of beef, because Terri Pischoff Wuerthner is descended from an old Cajun family. Through a seamless blend of storytelling and recipes to live by, Wuerthner's In a Cajun Kitchen will remind people of the true flavors of Cajun cooking.
When her ancestors settled in Louisiana around 1760, her family grew into a memorable clan that understood the pleasures of the table and the bounty of the Louisiana forests, fields, and waters. Wuerthner spices her gumbo with memories of Cajun community dances, wild-duck hunts, and parties at the family farm. From the Civil War to today, Wuerthner brings her California-born Cajun family together to cook and share jambalaya, crawfish étoufée, shrimp boil, and more, while they cook, laugh, eat, and carry on the legacy of Louis Noel Labauve, one of the first French settlers in Acadia in the 1600s.
Along with the memories, In a Cajun Kitchen presents readers with a treasure trove of authentic Cajun recipes: roasted pork mufaletta sandwiches, creamy crab casserole, breakfast cornbread with sausage and apples, gumbo, shrimp fritters, black-eyed pea and andouille bake, coconut pralines, pecan pie, and much more. In a Cajun Kitchen is a great work of culinary history, destined to be an American cookbook classic that home cooks will cherish.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A Cajun cookbook in a post-Katrina world is a delicate undertaking, but Wuerthner (Food for Life: The Cancer Prevention Cookbook) finds the right approach. In a soothing roux of memoir, gentle humor and classic dishes, she comforts the reader even as she turns up the spice. Family comes first, literally, with an opening section that lays out the author's family tree and its roots in their 120-year-old Louisiana farmland. Next comes a handy glossary and an exploration of the Cajun style of cookery. Wuerthner's recipes are mostly hearty hand-me-downs: from her father's first cousin, Madge, there's Pork Jambalaya, and Great-uncle Adolphe adapts a recipe from Central Grocery in New Orleans Cayenne Roasted Pork Muffaletta, which employs the traditional olive salad. Her late Aunt Lorna, however, is the chief inspiration as well as the source for the majority of the concoctions. Her most intriguing choices include Chicken Maque Choux (a kind of stir-fry with corn and bell pepper). Wuerthner begins each recipe with a brief paragraph on what the dish means to her family and ends each with a lagniappe: for instance, readers learn that supposedly hush puppies got their name from outdoor cooks who offered fried batter "to keep the dogs from barking."
