In honor of Thanksgiving, the American holiday dedicated to gluttony, I offer this food-oriented essay.
Editors and journalists from the New Orleans Picayune newspaper published the Picayune Creole Cookbook in 1901 from recipes compiled in the late 19th century. If the reader is interested in this cookbook, be sure to purchase the facsimile of the original published by Dover Publications and not the newer version published by Random House in 1987. The ignorant clods who updated the original left out most of the historical recipes that made the original so unique and valuable for food historians. The text of the original version is available for free online from the following link http://archive.org/stream/cu31924073878708/cu31924073878708_djvu.txt
The great variety of organisms consumed by Creoles during the 19th century makes the Picayune Creole Cookbook an interesting one for naturalists as well as food historians. Today, turtles are a regional specialty but have gone out of culinary style for most of the United States. For 19th century Americans, turtle meat was an abundant and common source of protein. The Picayune Creole Cookbook gives recipes for green sea turtles and diamondback terrapins.
Diamondback terrapin. Reportedly a delicacy.
Diamondback terrapins live in saltmarshes all along the Atlantic coast from New England to Mexico. Like so many other animals, they were formerly abundant but today are rare due to human consumption and coastal development. I’ve never seen one. Turtles were cooked in soups and stews, giving me the impression the meat is tough. Turtle meat is not sold in stores around Augusta, Georgia and I’ve never eaten turtle.
The sheepshead was the most popular and “versatile” fish used in New Orleans around the turn of the century. This species uses its human-like teeth to crush the shellfish that it feeds upon. This diet is probably what makes them taste so good.
The teeth on a sheepshead look very human-like. They eat clams and the teeth crush the shells.
Look at that beautiful…fish!
The Picayune Creole cookbook also has 5 recipes for eel, 4 for stingray, and 6 for frog. Oddly enough, the only recipe for a freshwater fish species is for roe from green trout which is the name they used then for largemouth bass. Most of the fish recipes are for marine species including pompano, bluefish, flounder, red snapper, red drum, and croaker.
One of the most interesting dishes in the book is Pigeon a la cardinale, known also as pigeon and crawfish–a combination I bet not a single person in the world will eat for supper tonight. The dish calls for baking 3 pigeons between layers of bacon in a pan filled with beef broth and onions. The crawfish are boiled separately. After the pigeons and crawfish are done cooking, a little of the crawfish boil water is added to the beef broth and the pigeons are garnished with the crawfish. The authors of the cookbook differentiate between domestic and wild pigeons. The availability of passenger pigeons at the market was still a recent memory when they were compiling the recipes for this book.
The Picayune Creole Cookbook states that the pigeon and crawfish dish is “Creole to the letter.” Now this dish is almost unheard of. The above photo is the closest match I could find on google images. It’s a roasted pigeon served with crawfish tails, softshelled crab, and vegetables, but not with bacon and a gravy made from pigeon, beef, and crawfish broth. Passenger pigeons and crawfish were at one time both abundant, making pigeons and crawfish a practical dish. Now, it’s not at all economical to make.
The canvasback duck (Nyoca vallosneria) was praised as the best-eating waterfowl because it ate wild celery (Vallosneria spiralis). Some ducks eat a lot of fish, but canvasbacks are mostly vegetarian. This diet gives their a flesh a savory quality. They were simply seasoned with salt, pepper, and lemon juice and broiled quickly.
Male and female canvasback ducks–reportedly the best tasting of all ducks. Duck is one of my favorite foods.
The bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorous) known as the reedbird in the Picayune Creole Cookbook, apparently was common table fair when in season. The second part of its scientific name means rice-devourer. It still is a pest for rice farmers. Creoles shot these members of the blackbird family to protect their rice fields. It only takes 5 minutes to broil small birds such as bobolinks (robins and larks were also prepared this way). I’ve never eaten a bird smaller than a quail. It takes at least 2 quail to equal the amount of meat from about 1/4th of a chicken. It probably takes about 4 bobolinks to equal 1/4th of a chicken.
The bobolink, also known as the rice bird. It’s a pest to rice farmers and table fair for Creoles.
It took me a while to figure out what a pababotte was. I’ve determined that the pababotte discussed in the Picayune Creole Cookbook is probably the upland sandpiper (Bartramia longicauda). The upland sandpiper is a denizen of the prairie. Fossil specimens of this species were discovered at Kingston Saltpeter Cave in Georgia and Bell Cave in Alabama. Both localities are in a region where upland sandpipers are absent today aside from an occasional vagrant. This is evidence that small pockets of prairie existed within the mostly forested region of the upper south during the late Pleistocene. Upland sandpipers were once an abundant bird but overhunting and agriculture have greatly reduced their numbers. J.J. Audubon witnessed 48,000 upland sandpipers killed in a single day by a group of hunters in 1810. Creoles serve them stuffed and braised, roasted, or broiled.
Upland sandpipers were more widespread during the Ice Age.
Until 1861 an old French woman produced Fois Gras in New Orleans. She raised geese in small cages. She kept their feet nailed to the cage floor and force fed them to enlarge their livers. I’m sure the enlarged livers are rich and delicious, but the practice seems cruel and wasteful–the rest of the meat is flabby and unfit for eating. Raising geese for Fois Gras is illegal in the U.S. today.
There are many recipes in the Picayune Creole Cookbook that don’t require extinct or rare animals to make. One of the best I’ve tried is a soup made out of beef ribs, corn, and tomatoes. I could live on lentil salad–a simple recipe of lentils tossed in a vinegarette. The gumbo recipes from the book use less roux than most modern gumbos and instead are thickened with powdered sassafras leaves or okra. A gumbo made out of a leftover turkey carcass is an excellent example of frugality but I prefere a more roux-heavy version. There are 7 recipes for different types of sausages, and I’ve made several, though in the shape of hamburger patties rather than links stuffed in casings. For the home cook I think this book is still useful and will never go out of date.
GeorgiaBeforePeople 