by Jon Laiche
These maps show the route through Barataria Bay to Bay Dogris, then up Bayou Perot into Lake Salvador. At the northern end of this lake is the outlet to Bayou Segnette which takes one to the river and the modern town of Westwego. Bayou Segnette is amplified on the detail map below.
Prior to the Lafitte’s activity in the early 1800’s, there is evidence that these routes had been well established by the 1750’s. While there are no prior records - smugglers rarely keep books - there is no reason not to suppose that as soon as New Orleans was able to receive travelers and trade, someone from the coast was willing to supply the markets. The following remarks by two later scholars would seem to settle this question of the existence of a thriving smuggling economy in French Colonial Louisiana.
“During the 16th and 17th centuries, especially among the Spanish and French colonies (less so with the British and Dutch) . . . The American colonies were chronically short of hard currency. Existing for the benefit of the mother countries, they were . . . not supposed to develop their own commerce with each other. The colonists would have starved if they had followed the Europeans' rules. Almost everything they needed ha
d to imported. But they were only allowed to buy their supplies from vendors (approved by the mother state) at a high price . . . “
“With the Caribbean ‘a Spanish lake’, . . . The only ways for the other nations of Europe to participate in New World commerce were through contraband, which became a way of life for the colonists early on, and through piracy. The colonists developed methods of conducting local business by barter, and traded with forbidden ships that were floating bazaars.”
“Santo Domingo withered from inattention . . . as Havana rose in importance. Contrabandists of various flags came to La Española’s north coast (Hispanolia), firing their cannons to alert the locals to come and trade. Buying up salted meat and hides, they drove up the price of beef in Santo Domingo. Worse, a cargo was intercepted of three hundred Bibles. Lutheran Bibles. The archbishop was alarmed; no Protestants were permitted in the New World.”
“Madrid’s response to loss of control over La Española was a spectacularly ill-advised order in 1605 to depopulate much of it, withdrawing the population to an area around the {capital}. . . . The entire northern coast of the island, and all of the west, was left unoccupied.
“The pirates moved in.”
From Sublette, pp. 26-27.
“In September, 1714, it seems, a vessel bearing a permit from the governor of St. Domingue came to Mobile for “repairs” after encountering a storm. There is no record of any trading transactions, but “disabled by a storm” was so common a pretext for illicit traffic that the statement at once makes one suspicious.”
The Crozat regime tried to prevent unauthorized trade with the colony but this only “increased the popular ill-will because of the great need at the time of foodstuffs. Early in 1716 a request for {food} was sent to St. Domingue.” Some supplies were sent including rice, brandy, and wine, but at exorbitant prices. The regime then tried to establish St. Domingue as a “general depot of food supplies for the province {of Louisiana}. Nothing was done with the suggestion and smuggling seems to have become more common than ever. . . . In September, 1716, {even} Bienville on his own account sold 800 deerskins at four reaux each and a considerable amount of lumber. . . . {the regime} refused to alter the conditions that had caused the development of an illicit traffic, therefore they were unable to suppress it.”
From Miller-Surrey, pp. 370-371
Shannon Dawdy, an anthropologist from the University of Chicago, does archaeological digs in New Orleans and goes well beyond these two academics. In her comprehensive work on French Colonial Louisiana, Building the Devils Empire, she establishes - as fact - smuggling in the colony during the 1700s. Her essay, "Smuggling Empire", (pp. 115-134) provides ample documentation that the Louisiana economy was based largely, if not mostly, on the trade of illicit goods throughout the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean with Spanish, British, Dutch, and other French colonies. Her archaeological digs in New Orleans as well as her research as documented in her various books and essays all confirm that New Orleans was a significant and major part of a greater Gulf/Caribbean commercial world. Through this network came the vegetables, herbs, and spices carried by the larger international trade of European colonialism. The 18th century can be viewed as the height of the much touted “Columbian Exchange”; through which flowed a delicious mix of spices from India and Africa, vegetable and herb seeds and plantings from the Mediterranean, Northern Europe, Africa, Mexico and the Caribbean islands. Now what remains to be established is the nature of the goods traded, specifically food, beverages, spices, and vegetable plants that found their place in the potagers and kitchens of Creole French New Orleans.
Finally, as a finishing touch, we have this note from a newly discovered, translated, and published journal from 1720s Louisiana. Marc-Antoine Caillot came to Louisiana in 1727, as an employee of the Company of the Indies. In his luggage was a trunk, common among virtually all travelers from Europe to its colonial territories. The contents of these trunks were a direct response to:
“Mercantile policies embodied by the Company’s right to complete control over imports and exports rendered any alternative trading systems illegal but actual enforcement of those policies proved difficult. Not all the goods loaded onto the Durance (or other trading ship) could be considered legitimate. Before setting foot in
the colony, Louisiana bound passengers (not to mention ships’ officers) ranging from high-level administrators to soldiers destined for the lowest ranks of the outpost workforce took every opportunity to fill their trunks with contraband trade items that might help them sustain or further themselves once they traversed the Atlantic. Demand for metropolitan fashion accessories was high in the colonies…”
The Company Man, p. 60 n. 98.
While it is important to establish, for a fact, that a vibrant smuggling economy sustained Louisiana all through the 18th and the first quarter of the 19th centuries, a culinary history like this must focus on the items exchanged within this economy. Specifically, the edible items. Once again, Ms. Dawdy’s book leads us forward.
“New Orleans served as the central agricultural market where small farmers sold or bartered rice, greens, figs, sweet potatoes, eggs, and hams in exchange for imports such a sugar, coffee, wine, cloth, and furnishings. … Plantation slaves came to New Orleans on Sundays to sell the surplus of their provision plots… Records show that they came on other days as well… to peddle produce and street food. … Native Americans frequented town, peddling fresh fish and game, bear oil, corn, herbs, and Persimmon bread, in addition to deerskins.”
“Mercantilism and Alternative Economies” in Building the Devils Empire, pp. 104.
While this food list gives us a good solid ground for what could be found in a typical Creole pantry, the task still remains to specify the “greens”, “provision plots”. “produce and street food” grown in the cities potagers, and the spices that were to be acquired through this “alternative economy”. Throughout the various sources supporting this paper, there are many mentions of such particulars as …
“Indian trade items”, “Household sundries”, “Fine goods”, “foodstuffs considered contraband”, “French imports stocked in city shops, or . . . delicacies in the bustling open air market.”
(Dawdy, p.106.)
France treated Louisiana as an importer of flour, alcohol, and a few more luxurious foodstuffs, but supply lines were too tenuous and shipments always too small or spoiled for colonists to rely on…
(Usner. p. 198)
{Author’s Note} Could the “luxurious foodstuffs” mentioned possibly be the spices, herbs, and other luxury ingredients from France?
M. Caillot tells of stewing some birds with bell peppers upon his arrival in Louisiana.
A Company Man (p.72)
The documents examined so far, mostly government records and memoirs, are incredibly useful for s
etting the context of a culinary history. As has been shown, they become inadequate resources for identification of the actual food and recipes that are being prepared. References to actual food, especially vegetables, herbs, and spices, are sporadic and very general in nature. The 17th and 18th centuries saw very little in the way of cookbooks or recipes that were written down. Thankfully, though, a few were prepared in those years and do give us insight into these foodstuffs. For instance, François Massialot, did write a cookbook that was published in 1699 and revised throughout the 1700s. Simply leafing through his work, one can extract the following vegetables herbs and spices by just reading through the recipes.
truffles, mushrooms, morelles, garlic, onion, St. George’s mushroom, cucumbers, shallots, artichokes (hearts), asparagus, hearts of lettuce, beets, leeks, peppers (green & hot), carrots, celery: also Lemon, oranges, orange flower water, limes, parsley, bay leaf, sorrel, chervil, thyme, fines herbs,?flowers?, bouillon, anchovies, vinegar, oil (olive?), butter, fat rendered into lard, parmesan, wine red or white, macaroons, flour (wheat?), almonds, pistachios, pecans (native), quartre épices*, capers, salt, pepper, nutmeg, cloves, cinnamon, mustard, filè†, allspice . . .
*quartre épices= pepper, cloves, nutmeg, ginger.
18th Century Cuisine: a blog
† provided by Louisiana’s Native Americans
To this we can add the following food items that were provided by the Germans who settled up river from New Orleans on the German Coast in 1721. By the middle of the this decade they were providing…
The gardens {of the German Coast} LIKELY (my emphasis) included leaf, lettuce, onions, radishes, cabbage, beans … , corn, peppers, celery, endive and a variety of root vegetables. . . . they quickly adapted to rice and sweet potato crops in Louisiana. Mustard greens, collards, turnip tops, beet tops, spinach, and purslane were also provided from here.
From their farms in the Rhineland, “chestnuts, peaches, apricots, figs, … flourished.( in Louisiana)”
Mint and herbs grew in the kitchen gardens. Other important herbs MAY HAVE INCLUDED horseradish, sweet marjoram, coriander, caraway, fennel, and rosemary.”
( the German Coast also provided) cream, cheese, and eggs; as the century progressed, this area was also providing pies made from cherries, apples, plums, peaches, strawberry, blackberry, raspberry, elderberry, custard, cheese, crookneck squash, and mincemeat.
These above listings give us a much clearer picture of the ingredients and items that may have found their way into Frére Gerard’s pantry. Virtually all of these items were available to French cooks in the old country. This is not to say that some were not rarer than others. Even so, I feel it is not unreasonable to hold that, between the international trade routes, the Columbian exchange, the Caribbean-Mexico-North Gulf coastal trade route, as well as the gardens of old New Orleans; many if not all of these ingredients were available to the cooks of French Colonial New Orleans.
Therefore, by the end of his first decade in New Orleans, Frére Gerard potentially had a pantry and a garden as well supplied as any in the old world. The only remaining item in question that, is the tomato. While this staple of modern Creole cuisine was certainly grown in Mexico and probably in the Caribbean during the 18th century it was unpopular among the French who thought it was poison. There was no documentation either way as to whether Gerard or Suzanne ever “ate a tomato”. Turning again to the work of Dr. Dawdy, we are only left with a tantalizing mystery as to the presence of tomatoes and their introduction into the gardens of French Louisiana - and into Creole cuisine. Some of the sources suggest that possibly the Acadians used them in their “country cooking” after the 1750s. There is no doubt that they definitely entered the equation during the Spanish period, roughly 1770 to 1803. However, beginning in the late 1800s, historians have used both documentary evidence and archaeological evidence to do their work. So we close this essay on ingredients with some evidence from Dr. Dawdy's digs.
Archaeologically, seed types of the nightshade family are well represented, probably from peppers or tomatoes. Although native to South America and the Caribbean, these savory fruits had become key elements of many West African cuisines by the middle of the seventeenth century.The most likely route for their entry into the Louisiana repertoire was via enslaved cooks. In the French colonial period, however, this was not a transmission that fit with the French recipe for colonization, which, according to those scripting the colonial story, centered on the exchange
of knowledge and resources between Native Americans and Europeans, including recipes and foodstuffs. It is remarkable that not one of our writers mentions these fruits or other ways in which Africans contributed to local foodways, despite the fact that Africans and their descendants comprised one half of the nonnative population and undoubtedly dominated the kitchen in slave- owning households. While we know that gumbo derives from the Bantu word nkombo , for okra, an ingredient itself imported from Africa, our writers do not mention either food.
“A Wild Taste: Food and Colonialism in Eighteenth Century Louisiana”
Shannon Lee Dawdy, University of Chicago
http://www.academia.edu/1450883/
Nineteen
MAKING SAUSAGE ON THE COTE DES ALLEMANDS
A few months before we arrived, several ships carrying Germans from Alsace and Lorraine had made port on Louisiana’s coast near Biloxi. The company settled them a bit upriver of the new capital. We could claim a bit of kinship, as it were, with these German people who were really under the rule of France at home, because we were both sent over by the Company of the Indies. As I write this, over a decade later, it is very fortunate that our German comrades from the Rhine arrived when they did. Most of the Canadians and the Frenchman who had been in the colony prior to 1720 were not doing very well. Truth be told, they had fallen under the spell, probably spread by the Spanish, that the hills and rivers of the New World were literally flowing over with gold. What they neglected to realize was that you can’t search for gold unless you can eat first. Luckily, our Rhenish friends did realize this. About 30 miles upriver from the capital, they planted the rich lands along the river and was soon producing more food than they knew what to do with. Their hard work paid them many dividends. The first year they produced good crops of tobacco, corn, rice, beans, peas, and other vegetables. The same hurricane that greeted us when we arrived in 1721 did much damage to their farms and harvest that year. However, within the next two seasons, they were supplying New Orleans regularly with produce. They had cultivated 115 arpents of land and harvested 612 barrels of rice as well as a wide variety
of vegetables. According to one Company census, they had 51 hogs and 12 cows . . .” One of their number, Monsieur, or should I say Herr, Lothar Bayer, had become a good friend of mine through our market transactions over the years. This week, now that the weather had turned cooler again, I had been invited to go upcountry to join Lothar and his family in their annual boucherie. Pére Raphaël, had graciously allowed me time to take part of this annual fall festival. So leaving my seconds in charge of the kitchen and the garden I begin to pack for the trip upriver planning to spend a week or so. The following morning I went to the river market very early and met with some of Lothar’s neighbors to arrange for passage back up river for the boucherie. It was a simple matter, and soon arranged. The next morning we would leave early for the trip upriver which should only take the greater part of the day. When we arrived that evening, Lothar and his Frau were expecting me, and I was warmly greeted and fed a filling autumn farm supper. We all retired early, because we knew we had a big day tomorrow. The next day dawned bright and cool, a perfect day for a boucherie. As usual, some of Lothar’s and Marguerite’s neighbors showed up, and a fine fat boar and sow had been picked to grace our tables this winter. I was not a stranger to boucherie, we had them in the old country on my parent’s farm by the lake in the forest for as long as I can remember. This day, I did not take part in the slaughter, but was there to help with the blood
gathering and butchering of the animals. My main goal this particular day was to learn how the Germans made their fine sausages. Now making sausage is not such a hard thing to do, the hardest work is the cleaning and the preparing of the intestines to hold the sausages. This work fell to Lothar’s two sons, Hans and Wilhelm, now mostly known by their Louisiana names, Jean and Guillaume. In the old country, these Germans had come up with an ingenious device, a tube made out of leather that they attached to their water pump and on the other end of the tube was a very narrow nozzle. With this device which they called a hoose, they were able to flush out the intestines and cleaned them unlike anything I had ever seen. They also use this hoose to force the intestines inside out.
Doing this allowed us easy access to scrape the fat off the inside of the intestines. Once this was done the only thing that remained was stuffing the intestines with the sausage mixture. This was a tedious job as it had to be handled one spoonful or handful at a time.
As to the preparation of the actual sausage stuffing, I do not know where to begin. There are literally thousands of recipes one can follow to create this fine meat dish.
One can start with the poorest cuts of meat from the animal, such as the ears, the nose, the feet, the tail; one can add as much or as little fillers such as breadcrumbs, or grains, or cheese as you wish. There also are ancient recipes, from almost every culture, that includes adding the blood of the animal to the sausage mixture. Variously called the black pudding, boudin, or blood sausage, these recipes are either loved or hated according to the taste of the individual. For my contribution to the boucherie, I decided to make a sausage recipe that I discovered in M. Massialot’s cookbook, my treasure from France. It is called . . .