Louisiana's identity is inextricably tied to its famous foods; gumbo, red beans and rice, jambalaya, and touffe are among the delicious dishes that locals cherish and visitors remember. But Louisiana's traditional cuisine has undergone a recent revision, incorporating more local ingredients and focusing on healthier cooking styles. In The Fresh Table, locavore Helana Brigman shares over one hundred recipes that reflect these changes while taking advantage of the state's year-round growing season. Her book offers staples of Louisiana fare -- seafood, sausage, tomatoes, peppers, and plenty of spices -- pairing these elements with advice about stocking one's pantry, useful substitutions for ingredients, and online resources for out-of-state cooks. Brigman equips every kitchen from New Orleans to New York with information about how to serve Louisiana cuisine all year round. For each season The Fresh Table provides an irresistible selection of recipes like Petite Crab Cakes with Cajun Dipping Sauce, Rosemary Pumpkin Soup served in a baked pumpkin, Fig Prosciutto Salad with Goat Cheese and Spinach, Grilled Sausage with Blackened Summer Squash, Blueberry Balsamic Gelato, and Watermelon Juice with Basil. Brigman introduces each recipe with a personal story that adds the last ingredient required for any Louisiana dish -- a connection with and appreciation for one's community.

Stuffed with 125 Creole and Cajun inspired dishes, Acadiana Table gets to the roots of everthing you need for Louisiana cooking and regional cuisine.

Master the art of all the most delectable styles of Louisiana cooking, from Cajun to Creole, rural Acadiana to down-home New Orleans, in more than 100 easy-to-use recipes. George Graham—a lifelong Louisianan, a former chef and restaurateur, and now an award-winning food writer and blogger—is a brilliant cook, a warm, funny, and engaging storyteller, and an ace photographer. He brings all these talents alive in Fresh from Louisiana, his second cookbook, following on the heels of his masterful Acadiana Table. George makes Louisiana cooking not just easy for home cooks to learn, but fun and interesting, too. The recipes range from George's pitch-perfect versions of classic Louisiana dishes to imaginative, brand-new ideas that use the signature flavors of the region's cuisines in utterly new ways. You can start a glorious Louisiana meal with a Corn and Crab Bisque, a Crawfish Boil Chowder, or Mini Bell Peppers Stuffed with Crabmeat. For a main course, why not try a Pork Roast with Apple Pan Gravy, Crisp Chicken Thighs with Creole Jasmine Rice, or a Gulf Shrimp Pasta Primavera? There are lots of desserts, too, like Praline Pumpkin Pie, Macadamia Nut Ice Cream Sandwich, and Sweet Potato Pie Brûlée, plus sides, sandwiches, cooling drinks, and breakfast and brunch fare. For soul-satisfying everyday dinners with family to amazing weekend feasts with friends, this beautiful book—with more than 100 color photos—brings the intriguing and delicious flavors of Louisiana home, wherever you might live.

An untamed region teeming with snakes, alligators, and snapping turtles, with sausage and cracklins sold at every gas station, Cajun Country is a world unto itself. The heart of this area—the Acadiana region of Louisiana—is a tough land that funnels its spirit into the local cuisine. You can’t find more delicious, rustic, and satisfying country cooking than the dirty rice, spicy sausage, and fresh crawfish that this area is known for. It takes a homegrown guide to show us around the back roads of this particularly unique region, and in Real Cajun, James Beard Award–winning chef Donald Link shares his own rough-and-tumble stories of living, cooking, and eating in Cajun Country. Link takes us on an expedition to the swamps and smokehouses and the music festivals, funerals, and holiday celebrations, but, more important, reveals the fish fries, étouffées, and pots of Granny’s seafood gumbo that always accompany them. The food now famous at Link’s New Orleans–based restaurants, Cochon and Herbsaint, has roots in the family dishes and traditions that he shares in this book. You’ll find recipes for Seafood Gumbo, Smothered Pork Roast over Rice, Baked Oysters with Herbsaint Hollandaise, Louisiana Crawfish Boudin, quick and easy Flaky Buttermilk Biscuits with Fig-Ginger Preserves, Bourbon-Soaked Bread Pudding with White and Dark Chocolate, and Blueberry Ice Cream made with fresh summer berries. Link throws in a few lagniappes to give you an idea of life in the bayou, such as strategies for a great trip to Jazz Fest, a what-not-to-do instructional on catching turtles, and all you ever (or never) wanted to know about boudin sausage. Colorful personal essays enrich every recipe and introduce his grandfather and friends as they fish, shrimp, hunt, and dance. From the backyards where crawfish boils reign as the greatest of outdoor events to the white tablecloths of Link’s famed restaurants, Real Cajun takes you on a rollicking and inspiring tour of this wild part of America and shares the soulful recipes that capture its irrepressible spirit.

It's the essence of great eating with Emeril Lagasse in Louisiana Real & Rustic. Join the award-winning chef, television personality, and restaurateur on a tour down the back roads and bayous of Louisiana for some of the greatest home cooking in America. With his authentic Louisiana recipes, Emeril takes the reader on a tour of the state, from country cabins in Cajun country to the refined town houses of Creole aristocracy, bringing to life the colorful history that has made Louisiana a true culinary crossroads.

Emeril Lagasse fuses the rich traditions of Creole cookery with the best of America's regional cuisines and adds a vibrant new palette of tastes, ingredients, and styles. The heavy sauces, the long-cooked roux, and the smothered foods that were the heart of old-style New Orleans cooking have been replaced by simple fresh ingredients and easy cooking techniques with a light touch. Emeril serves up a masterpiece in his first cookbook, Emeril's New New Orleans Cooking. Emeril offers not only hundred of easy-to-prepare recipes, but plenty of professional tips, shortcuts, and useful information about stocking your own New Orleans pantry and making your own seasonings.

In recent years, ethnographers have recognized south Louisiana as home to perhaps the most complex rural society in North America. More than a dozen French-speaking immigrant groups have been identified there, Cajuns and white Creoles being the most famous. In this guide to the amazing social, cultural, and linguistic variation within Louisiana's French-speaking region, Carl A. Brasseaux presents an overview of the origins and evolution of all the Francophone communities. Brasseaux examines the impact of French immigration on Louisiana over the past three centuries. He shows how this once-undesirable outpost of the French empire became colonized by individuals ranging from criminals to entrepreneurs who went on to form a multifaceted society -- one that, unlike other American melting pots, rests upon a French cultural foundation. A prolific author and expert on the region, Brasseaux offers readers an entertaining history of how these diverse peoples created south Louisiana's famous vibrant culture, interacting with African Americans, Spaniards, and Protestant Anglos and encountering influences from southern plantation life and the Caribbean. He explores in detail three still cohesive components in the Francophone melting pot, each one famous for having retained a distinct identity: the Creole communities, both black and white; the Cajun people; and the state's largest concentration of French speakers -- the Houma tribe. A product of thirty years' research, French, Cajun, Creole, Houma provides a reliable and understandable guide to the ethnic roots of a region long popular as an international tourist attraction.