"La Cuisine Creole" -- The First Creole Cookbook

New Orleans has for long been known as a city of outstanding and unique cuisine. In short, we have great food! Although this tradition goes back many years to the time of the French colonial days, the first cookbook on New Orleans food was not published until 1885.  The author, who was part Irish and part Greek, was a subject of Great Britain; he became a journalist and travelled the world, living in many exotic lands and reporting on his adventures. At various times he lived in Europe, the Caribbean, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Japan.  His named was Lafcadio Hearn.

Although he was usually very poor, despite his writing career, one of the ways he would deal with his limited ability to buy all the fancy foods he wanted, was to write about them. So, when he got to New Orleans, he began to compile all the recipes he could find from the local cooks. The result of this was the first ever published New Orleans cookbook -- La Cuisine Creole.

As was typical -- and we see this even today -- a total stranger to New Orleans could immediately fall in love with the place. Despite the many ills of the city, the allure and charms of New Orleans were overwhelming. For Lafcadio the main charm of the city was its food. Hearn stayed in New Orleans from 1877 to 1887.

Hearn did not specialize in writing about food but wrote on many cultural topics. Additionally, he wrote about, what we would call today, the paranormal. He was interested in ghost stories.

Some of Hearn's recipes are basic compared to more modern versions of dishes. For example, his "Jambalaya of Fowls and Rice" is essentially this: Stew a chicken, add rice and ham, and salt and pepper. Cook.
He sometimes adds comments to recipes, such as for the jambalaya, "Southern children are very fond of this..."  But he adds, "... [it is] very wholesome as well as palatable; it can be made of many things."

Many of the recipes are suitable for cooking even today despite the changes in cooking technology, although some seem very antiquated and are more for historic value than anything else.

Hearn eventually moved to Japan and wrote about Japanese culture. He became wildly popular there, and there is even a memorial museum to him in Matsue, Japan. He took a Japanese wife and became a Japanese citizen. He is claimed by the Irish, the British, the Greeks, and the Japanese.  But his real fame is in writing down all those great New Orleans recipes.

You can read more about him at www.cincinnatilibrary.org/main/hearn.html Hearn spent time writing for two Cincinnati newspapers, and that city claims him as well.

(In the photos we see a copy of La Cuisine Creole from the Cincinnati Library website, and a photo of Hearn himself from the same site. Also see Pelican Publishing's 1967 version of La Cuisine Creole with an introduction by Hodding Carter. Tulane University's library also has good material on Hearn in its special collections section.)
-- Adrian