Word: cajun
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...started the meal with fried oysters and remoulade (tartar sauce’s more interesting cousin, an aioli-based condiment usually flavored with pickles, chili, a touch of curry powder, and other ingredients particular to each chef). Fried oysters are classic Cajun fare, using a mollusk loved by the French but, at the time of the dish’s creation, inexpensive and largely overlooked in the United States. Tossed in a thin, crunchy batter and deep-fried, the juicy oysters, drenched in tangy remoulade, burst with flavor and steam heavily when they split open. Tupelo’s were...
Using a rare parental visit as an excuse to venture outside the usual Square culinary offerings of burritos, pizza, and more burritos, I recently found myself at Tupelo, a Cajun restaurant near Inman Square which wholeheartedly embraces the varied cultural elements of its cuisine...
...Cajun cuisine is at the core of a culture defined primarily by its mixed identity. The term itself is a deformation of “Acadien,” originally used to define the French Canadian colonizers of the bayous of lower Louisiana, but which has now come to apply to the diverse population throughout the region. These people are one of many unique segments of American immigrant societies—poor, subjugated, and concentrated into local majorities—that incubated and grew a coherent cultural and artistic style. The culture has produced Zydeco music, its own French dialect...
Fried catfish and a rich gumbo, even more directly communicative of the history of the culture that created them, followed. Catfish—a dirt cheap, bottom-feeding fish generally looked down upon by most cuisines—is a Cajun favorite. Moist, tender, and succulent, the fish can hold its own against the nearly overpowering ingredients ubiquitous in Cajun cooking. Cajun catfish is often served “blackened”—lightly battered with a potent mix of garlic, cornmeal, flour, cumin, generous amounts of chili, and other spices—and pan fried until...
...nutty richness neither of the ingredients alone suggests. Nearly all gumbos have tomatoes, chicken, rice, sausage, and red pepper flakes, and are thickened by okra. Okra is a small, green squash-like vegetable whose sappy secretion transforms gumbo from a thick stew to something halfway towards gelatinous. The sausages, Cajun Andouille sausages, derived from the far milder French Lyonnaise pigs’ intestine sausages of the same name, combine pork offal and piles of spices into a dark red, incredibly rich and flavorful ingredient that gives gumbo the bulk of its flavor. Tupelo’s Andouilles, and, by extension...