Jambalaya
One of the more interesting places in the U.S. is New Orleans. I find it so interesting because it represents the confluence of cultures ranging from the French, who originally owned the area to the Spanish, who controlled the land to the west. The American continent is divided by the mighty Mississippi River and New Orleans is the place where the Mississippi spreads its wings across a large swath of delta as it flows into the Gulf of Mexico. New Orleans and all of Louisiana sit somewhere between the gentility of the Deep South, where the Natchez Trace ends nearby and the the Wild West where the independence of Texas and its struggles with Mexico persist to this day. Cover all of that with a cloak of Francophone heritage and you have taken on the designation as Cajuns, which is a linguistic modification of their Acadian background from when they emigrated from the French Eastern Provinces of Canada. Whether they came by sea or with the French-Canadian trappers through the Great Lakes and down the rivers to Louisiana, they somehow found the swampy climate of the delta to their liking.
The other heritage that blends with the Cajun is the Creole, which is a pejorative term used to describe the immigrants that came to the delta mostly from the Caribbean. These Cajun/Creole people formed their own local culture that is different and distinct from anything you find anywhere else in the U.S. There are many things about this culture that jump out at us, but none more than the spicy food with its pepper-based seasoning that highlights the tropical warmth of the area. Like so many of the warmer climate area of the world, the area has gravitated to spicy foods, most likely to do two things of value for its consumers. The first is that strong spices help preserve food in the heat and humidity. The second is that spicy food brings out perspiration, which has a cooling effect on the body, something much needed in the tropics.
One of the foods that comes from this Cajun/Creole tradition is Jambalaya, which is a rice-based dish with chopped vegetables and meat (most often sausage like Andouille and pieces of chicken, but also sometimes shellfish like shrimp). Jambalaya is very much akin to a gumbo or paella dish, which might explain why I am writing about it today. While gumbo is the essence of Jambalaya with all its vegetables and meats, but without its rice base, paella is fundamentally a rice dish from Spain, specifically from the Catalan region around Valencia. We had a great motorcycle tour through Spain a few months ago and, indeed, started in the Catalan region, but I don’t recall ever eating or even discussing much about paella. But, last Friday we were invited, along with all of our nearby neighbors, to our next door neighbors’, the Mooneys. They served a lovely paella for dinner, complete with a spiced rice base into which Andouille sausage, chicken, shrimp and other shellfish were imbedded. Andouille sausage is worth a mention at this point. It is a coarse-grained smoked sausage that originated in the Normandy region of France and is made of pork with plenty of garlic, peppers, onions and various seasonings. It found its way at the turn of the Eighteenth Century into Louisiana with other things French and rooted itself in the local Cajun and Creole menu in a manner that only a good pork sausage can do. This sausage had wandered its way into Catalonia and then to Louisiana.
In 1803, the Emperor Napoleon, while seeking global domination for France chose to thwart the British in the New World in the most economic way he could manage. He sold the Louisiana Territory, a land mass that nearly doubled the size of the then fledgling United States of America, for a princely sum of $15 million ($0.03 per acre). Despite the transaction, in the same way that Quebec with its main city of Montreal in Canada has retained its Francophile ways, Louisiana and New Orleans did likewise. This heritage was enhanced by the Caribbean Creole addition which brought the spicy tropical ways of the islands to the swampy delta and thus was born the Cajun ways and flavors. Where the Beignets of New Orleans are a strictly French culinary import, Jambalaya is distinctly Cajun/Creole and seems to almost exude an air of the Caribbean in its spice.
While we were at the Mooneys home, my friend Mike happened to mention how much he liked Jambalaya. It was a random comment that was probably inspired by the paella on our plates. I thought nothing of it at the time. Then, out of the blue several nights later, Kim mentioned that she was thinking of making Jambalaya for dinner this week. She regularly makes sausage in a balsamic glaze on rice for me, but I don’t recall her ever mentioning Jambalaya. I always felt like I liked Jambalaya even though I prefer to avoid the shellfish. I can deal with shrimp, but not many other shellfish like clams or mussels. I said I would like her to try her hand at Jambalaya, preferably without the seafood. Unlike paella, which cannot be called paella without shellfish, Jambalaya s more often made without shellfish than with it, so she readily agreed.
It occurred to me that the coincidence of Mike’s comment must have been the cause for the suggestion, so I said we should invite Mike and Melisa over for the event. Since it was a Tuesday night, I knew that was the night they had Melisa’s mother Judith over, so I called and extended the invitation to the three of them. It them occurred to us that Jambalaya is a volume-based dish which could just as easily accommodate more people, so we invited Faraj and Yasuko to join us. We were now officially having a Jambalaya party. Had I thought more about it, I would have thought to make it more of Cajun/Creole party, complete with Beignets, but alas, Kim had already planned on serving homemade chocolate pudding for dessert, so that was that. We did put out some spicy cheese, some caramelized onion dip and some Cajun Mix snacks as an appetizer, but other than that, we downplayed the New Orleans connection.
2022 has been a community-based year for us here on the hilltop. With Kim joining the Women’s Group and both of us joining the Hidden Meadows Garden Club, we have expanded our friendships across the hilltop and established particularly strong friendships on our street (McColls, Pandey’s and Mooneys) around the hilltop (Mike & Melisa, Faraj & Yasuko, Anderson’s, Brooks, Kellerman’s, Henderson’s and Munks) and beyond into the Meadows themselves (Sam & Chris and Linda Collins). A week hardly goes by without us planning or engaging in some sort of gathering at someone’s home. We’ve even got a poker game started and what could be more all-American suburban than that? Last week, Kim and Melisa even took on the roles as co-presidents of the Garden Club, ao its safe to say that we are now throughly entrenched in the community, perhaps less so than some, but much more than either of us has ever been before. I can’t say whether Jambalaya will play a central role in this new social order, but its just the sort of mixed stew that symbolizes the diversity our new hilltop friends represent.