ROUSES_MayJun2019_Magazine-Print

The Creole is among the most revered of tomatoes. Most of the ones we have in our stores now come from Plaquemines and St. Bernard parishes, just downriver from New Orleans. Our farmer partners like Matt Ranatza and Ben & Ben Becnel

grow entire fields of these knobby, “ugly” tomatoes just for you. The rich river soil and weather conditions — what winemakers refer to as the terroir of a region — south of Lake Pontchartrain contribute to the Creole tomatoes’ unique, super-sweet flavor.

les creol es by Lolis Eric Elie Who called whom “Creole” first? Folks in South Louisiana tend to take ownership of the word “Creole.” We tend to assume that all things Creole, including the word itself, were born of this soil and the people who tilled it. We are not entirely wrong to take such a proprietary view. No other place in the continental United States can rightly claim to have done so much to define and refine the term and the culture for which it stands. But what happens when we travel south, and I don’t just mean south to the wet- lands of Plaquemines and Terrebonne par- ishes. I mean south to Cuba and Haiti and Colombia — even to that most “American” part of LatinAmerica, PuertoRico. Travelers to these places will often encounter menu items

described as “Creole.” These meats and seafood tend to be stewed in rich tomato sauces.Which is to say, they sound verymuch like that emblematic Louisiana dish shrimp Creole. While shrimp swim in waters around the world, only the American hemisphere can claim to have birthed the tomato. So it’s fitting that the tomato figures so prominently in cooking here. But the word “Creole” is far larger and richer than mere tomato-based sauces. A closer look into its history and usage reveals that Louisiana Creoles have far-flung cultural cousins. The simplistic definition of Creole is that it is a mixing of old world and new, a mix of people’s cultures from Europe and/or Africa in the Americas. The one consistent feature of all definitions of Creole is that the term

and the culture developed, not in Europe, but in the places Europeans conquered and settled. While we tend to think of Creoles as creatures only of this hemisphere, there are people as far away as the Seychelles Islands who are very much Creole and boast a similar mix to the Creoles of the Americas. But the question of “Which people mixed with which others?” is a fraught one. Are Creole people white, black or, as some Afro- Creoles argued more than a century ago, an entirely new and separate race? The book Creole Cooking (Step-By-Step Cookbooks) , published in 1990, contends that, “To be considered a Creole in the strictest sense, you would have to have descended from a French or Spanish fam- ily who came to the area before 1803.”

68 MAY•JUNE 2019