Why do tourist make the common mistake of saying that they ate Cajun cooking in New Orleans, when in fact I do not know of one Cajun restaurant in New Orleans?

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Because the actual history of the area is only really interesting to people with a direct bloodline tie to those Acadiens who came down from France after being expelled from Nova Scotia. Nobody else really cares.

I am one of those direct descendants. Don’t get me wrong, there is no love lost between me and South Louisiana. As far as I’m concerned, the “Cajun” culture can rot. My mom still holds on to those traditional Cajun values and cultures, even though they drove her to marry a guy who would yank our family away from all of that.

But now that I’ve been outside of Cajun society for the entirety of my adolescence and adulthood, the only thing that interests me about my heritage is the food. That’s the only thing I can think that’s worth preserving. I would have zero regret if everything else got lost to the sands of time. Everything else looks like traditional patriarchal culture that you see the world over, just with a peasant French flavor.

But Cajun food? Oh sha. Done well, it’s peasant French cuisine at it’s absolute finest. You will never eat anything like a traditional Cajun gumbo. Anybody, like me, who grew up with the real stuff could never call New Orleans-style gumbo Cajun. Even if the roux is dark and delicious, it’ll never be what my grandma used to make for me on my childhood visits. And I would have many many questions for you if it was. “Who the heck taught you how to cook like that????”

If I want real Cajun gumbo and I can’t make a trip south, I have to make it myself. There’s nowhere to go, for sure not in Atlanta where I live. The one time I visited New Orleans I had a seafood gumbo that just, well, I mean it was good. It just wasn’t Cajun.

So why do tourists insist on calling New Orleans style food Cajun? You want my opinion? It’s because Cajun has two syllables and New Orleans style has four.

That’s the only reason. When Paul Prudhomme popularized it 50 years ago, he surely understood the cultural and historical differences between the two groups of French people who colonized Louisiana hundreds of years ago and the differences wrought in the cuisine of the area.

But nobody else gave a shit. They were all too happy to just accept all the interesting new tastes and dishes coming out of South Louisiana as the label that sounded the most interesting and easiest to say. Cajun. Emeril Lagasse certainly didn’t care about the difference. I mean, what do you expect, Emeril was born in Massachusetts. Cajuns can’t be bothered to put up a real fight to protect their own culture, so they will forever have aliens coming in and misrepresenting it.

Cajuns themselves could be telling the world about how everyone is calling New Orleans style food Cajun and putting out chefs to teach everyone the difference. Heck, I could have been one of those guys. It really is different to the point of being amazing. But there are too few of us and we all got other things to do.

At some point when I get too old to care about being fit enough to attract women, I’m going to start making all those old Cajun dishes, and I’ll probably make a blog or book or something about it. Why don’t I care more? Well, honestly, it’s because ‘Cajun’ as an ethnic identity for myself has never really been strongly felt. I moved away too young. But all my relatives don’t seem to care all that much about the name or the culture, other than the food, either.

Cajuns themselves seem to just think of themselves as Americans who just happen to have a certain heritage. I mean, that’s all it really is when you get right down to it, and certainly there’s a few people out there who care to preserve the culture. You can go to restaurants in Lafayette that have been there for fifty years.

The kids? Loosely connected to the old ways. I predict in another generation, the Cajun culture will be reduced only to a few holdouts who really care about the cuisine differences between theirs’ and New Orleans.