Admit a weakness:  I participate in Facebook food forums, mostly about Cajun versus Creole, i.e., Louisiana cuisine.

I’m Cajun – 75%.  I spent a lot of time in the kitchens of Cajun women growing up – Cajuns who learned their skills in the kitchens of their own parents.  I consider that fact to be my credentials.

Great-grandmother – Dad’s grandmother,  was a LeBleu married to a LeDoux, names that showed up in Louisiana after the British ran us out of Canada.  Those people hadn’t been in France for a hundred years before that, and upon arrival in Louisiana, they found that New Orleans was populated by the same ‘French’ that they’d left France to avoid in the first place.  Us Acadians – Cajuns now – moved on into south central Louisiana, an are now called Acadiana.

Totally different than New Orleans. New Orleans, the home of privileged French, had servants, many of then slaves, to do meal prep for them.  They had access to ingredients and spices imported into the port of New Orleans.  That’s Creole food – more ingredients, more labor-intensive techniques.  totally legitimate Louisiana food.

Just NOT Cajun.

Grandma, like those before her, had a household to run.  Her ‘help’ was the labor of her children.  Her ingredients – before electricity and refrigeration – were those that would keep on the shelf of the pantry, or things that would store without refrigeration.

Chicken wings?  A chicken had two of them.  The chicken didn’t need refrigeration as long as it was running around the yard.  (Grandma didn’t allow chickens in her fenced-in yard.  They had free range outside it.  No little wet chicken surprises in HER yard).

One chicken – one meal. Fried chicken was a rarity.  Chickens usually went into fricassee or gumbo, both of which would ‘stretch’ to feed a house full of guests.

Grandma worked magic with food.  Her pantry of spices included salt, black pepper, cinnamon, dried ginger, nutmeg – things that could be brought home from a trip into town that took a day, or later, bought from the truck of the travelling Watkins salesman’s truck.

Outside the kitchen was a little patch that grew parsley and bunching onions. A little garden provided  vegetables in season.  Cucumbers lasted a year as pickles.  Okra, tomatoes, squash, eggplant, peppers (bell and cayenne) came from the garden.

So did potatoes – red “Irish” potatoes, planted in late February, harvested a couple months later, laid in a single layer on the floor of the ‘potato house’.  We’d have potatoes well into fall of that year.  Of course, in Cajun homes, potatoes took a back seat to rice as an everyday starch in meals.

Aside from the chickens, Grandma did pork -sausage and tasso, which is seasoned smoked pork cuts.  In her day, smoking wasn’t a four-hour deal to impart a bit of flavor and color. Smoking was a multiple day affair, developing a layer impervious and unpalatable to insects, able to be stored in a dry place for months.  Other cuts of pork were cut and salted, the salt drawing out moisture, creating a thick brine that kept it edible for a season.  Put up in crocks, the salted pork sealed below a layer of lard, melted and poured over it to seal, there was a winter’s worth of the meat in the bean soups and gravies.

When electrification reached the Gulf coastal prairies, a freezer became the wherewithal to keep beef.  Grandma regularly sent one of her cattle off to a butcher, paying him with a quarter of the beef in return for a load of wrapped beef cuts.  Those weren’t USDA Prime, folks.  Those cows didn’t come from a feedlot, they spent their lives wandering the pasture, eating what grew from the ground.   They needed Grandma’s cast iron pot and a few hours of moist heat to approach tenderness.  Of such technique came savory gravies that words cannot describe.

Nestled in the arms of bayous and marshes, game and fish rounded out the menu. Grandma occasionally got shrimp from friends and family who were a little closer to salt water, but shrimp gumbo was rare, chicken and sausage gumbo being the norm.

All that – the way things used to be.  People today bemoan the fact that “my gumbo doesn’t taste like Grandma’s”.  This is why.

Here’s a recipe for something special.

In the old days, generally on the morning of the first frost, the old Cajuns used to slaughter pigs.  I’ve written about boucherie before.

One of the outcomes of that day was salt pork.  In the days before refrigeration, salting meat was a way of making sure that you had meat for a long time after the butchering.

The process is easy, as are the ingredients.

Ingredients:

Kosher salt

Red pepper flakes (optional – gives your future dishes a running start to flavor)

pork – this does NOT have to be particularly lean nor fat.  It’s usually the inconvenient bits from boning out a carcass.  More fat ain’t bad, though.

Mason jars. (the authentic version used pottery crocks.)

Procedure:

Boil the jars and lids.  You want ’em sterile.  I’m sure great-grandma washed those crocks out with boiling water.

Cut the pork up into chunks.  I like to keep things rather small so that the salting doesn’t have to go very far into the meat – half-inch or so think, but honestly, the old folks weren’t that picky.

dump salt and red pepper flakes into a big bowl. Dump in the pork.  Mix well.  We’re talking LOTS of salt.  Coat every bit of pork.

Now, dump MORE salt to cover the bottom of the Mason jar.  Put in a layer of pork.  Add a layer of salt. ‘Nother layer of pork.  Salt.  Pork.

Finish with a layer of salt.

That’s it.  Cap the jar.  Stuff it into your fridge. That’s a departure from the old way – they used to pack the pork tightly then pour a cap of melted lard over the top and put the crock into the coolest part of the pantry.

leave it for at least a week.  Spoil?  Not with all that salt.  The salt might leech enough moisture from the meat to form a brine, but that won’t support bacteria for spoilage either.

So now you have this hand-crafted example of a by-gone era in your fridge.  What do you do with it?

BEANS!!!  Soak your beans overnight.  In the pot you’re going to cook your beans in, start it over medium-high heat, cut up some salt pork into quarter or half-inch chunks, put in the pot and start it cooking. It’ll start releasing flavor.  When it’s sizzling good, add chopped onion.  When the onion’s translucent, add the soaked beans and water,  bring to a boil, the turn the heat down and wait.

And now you’re enjoying a bit of culinary history – and some darned good beans.