Wow - two posts in one day! I feel so opinionated. Yesterday I spoke in class for two minutes flat on what I thought was wrong with the novel Wide Sargasso Sea and also why I thought it was such a great success anyway. I think I’m turning into someone else…
Okay, so tonight is “junk food” night at the Newkirk household. I am making Natchitoches meat pies and french fries. Ah… Lasyone’s… Although mostly when I was at LSMSA got our meat pies from a place called “Leon’s,” which started out as a sort of lunch shack across the street from the LSMSA high school building. At any rate, I usually just did meat pies “my way,” but just for kicks I thought that I would look up meat pies on the internets and see how other people made them. What I found compelled me to make this post.
The reason they are called “Natchitoches” meat pies and not “Cajun” meat pies is because they are not, in fact Cajun. I swear. Natchitoches, being the oldest settlement in the Louisiana Purchase (or so my LA history professor told me), was settled before the Acadians came and settled Acadiana (a portion of the state of Louisiana whose parishes, by the way, do not include Natchitoches Parish.) As many people should know by now, just because one is from Louisiana, or even has French heritage and is from Louisiana, does not mean that one is Cajun!
Similarly, just because one is from New Orleans and may happen to have French heritage does not mean one is Cajun. My friend Eric (who is most certainly Cajun) frequently professes to like me anyway, even if my family hails from “too far east”. My snooty New Orleans grandmother frequently asserted that our family was most certainly not Cajun. At our house we frequently had Creole dishes such as gumbo and Creole “barbeque” shrimp, but we hardly ever had etoufee or jambalaya. If you want to make a Cajun angry, imply that New Orleans is Cajun or that Creole is also Cajun. Also, let me know before you do this so I can be safely out of earshot so I don’t have to listen to the lectures and/or beatings.
So just remember: crawfish pies = Cajun, Natchitoches meat pies = not. Thank you.
Oh, and a personal note to all four of you who read this blog: I know that you already knew this. I just have to rant.