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Similarly, Virginia Cooper wrote in her 1941 book, The Creole Kitchen Cook Book: Fa- mous New Orleans Recipes , that “‘Creole’ is a name applied to the descendants of the French and the Spaniards who explored Louisiana and settled in the state.” Lafcadio Hearn, the 19th-century writer who did much to create the popular notion of New Orleans and its culture, extended the ethnicity of Creoles to many other European immigrants. In their book, French Cooking in the New World: Louisiana Creole and French Canadian Cuisine , Frances D. and Peter J. Robotti quote Lafcadio Hearn, who defined a Creole as “a white descendant of an original Louisiana settler, who may be either French, or Spanish, or German, or English, or even American.”

It’s strange to read that Hearn thought that a Louisiana settler could be American. Wasn’t Louisiana already settled by the time the Americans arrived? Each of these authors is very careful to state that Creoles are purely descended from Europeans. “Many of the leading citi- zens of Louisiana are proud they are Creoles, but they would be surprised to know that there has been in existence and still lingers the belief that the word Creole is associated with ‘mixed-bloods,’ or mulattoes, as they are more generally called,” Cooper wrote. “It only remains to observe that the Cre- oles of New Orleans and of Louisiana (whatever right any save Spaniards may originally have had to the name), are all those native-born who can trace back their

ancestry to European immigrants to or Euro- peancolonistsoftheState,whetherthosewere English, Dutch, German, French, Span- ish, Italian, Greek, Portuguese, Russian, or Sicilian,” Hearn wrote in the essay entitled Los Criollos . “But the term is generally understood here as applying to French residents, espe- cially those belonging to old French fami- lies, and few others care to claim the name,” Hearn wrote. But on the website 64parishes.org, the historian Shane K. Bernard writes that, in its earliest usage, the word Creole, or its Span- ish equivalent, was used specifically to refer to people of African ancestry. “The word Creole derives from the Latin creare , meaning ‘to beget’ or ‘to create,’

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