They may be as beloved as each other in the southern US state of Louisiana, but Cajun and Creole aren’t interchangeable terms. Loosely defined as Cajun being ‘country’ food and Creole as ‘city’ food, it’s fair to say it’s a lot more complex than that, each one—and each dish—telling a story of Louisiana’s multi-layered history and heritage.
From my seat on the starboard side, I could see the muddy Mississippi snaking its way through New Orleans, between the mighty Lake Pontchartrain and Lake Salvador.
It was my first visit to the Big Easy and what I wanted to do more than anything was head straight out to eat. Films like Jon Favreau’s Chef brought Louisiana’s beignets to the spotlight, but instead of kicking off with the deep-fried sugary dough, I decided to start with a classic gumbo, a rich chicken and shrimp stew, often served with sausage or ham.
Over the last decade, I’ve visited the USA’s southern states several times, diving deep into their history of cowboys, gangsters, pirates, rodeos, moonshine. But as someone fascinated by food and its origins, Louisiana’s cuisine had always remained a mystery to me. I’d long noticed how often people used Cajun and Creole interchangeably and kept wondering: Just how interchangeable are they?
Even before I visited, I’d tried Louisiana dishes in restaurants across London, where I live, such as gumbo, étouffée (a thick, spiced stew usually with shellfish served over rice) and jambalaya (a one-pot spiced rice dish with chicken, shellfish or meat). They were always deliciously seasoned with spices such as thyme, cayenne pepper, black pepper and garlic, but with differences. Some had tomato, some did not; some had okra, some didn’t; some used filé (a spicy, powdered seasoning from ground-up sassafras leaves), some didn’t. And I wasn’t sure what these differences meant.
From various cookbooks I’d stumbled across, I’d learned that Cajun cuisine came mainly from western and southern Louisiana and is known for its bold, spicy flavors—dishes like jambalaya, étouffée and gumbo are seasoned with ingredients such as smoked Andouille sausage, crawfish, and pork. Creole food, on the other hand, is a fusion of different cultures, and incorporates more seafood from the Gulf of Mexico, and tomatoes. But there was more to their history.
I’d had an extraordinary childhood growing up in Bangalore, India. Our house was adorned with Mardi Gras paraphernalia, from sparkly gold, purple and green beads to fridge magnets depicting alligators, pelicans (Louisiana is the Pelican State), carnival masks and jazz musicians. This was thanks to my mother, who’d always loved Louisiana—two of her closest friends lived in the capital Baton Rouge, and she’d visited them every year until they passed in 2021.
I felt I was getting close to better understanding the difference between Creole and Cajun, but I also discovered this greatly depended on who was asked.
I vividly remember a conversation we had when she was decorating our house during Mardi Gras in 2008. As she talked about the food, particularly gumbo, I asked her if Creole and Cajun were the same thing. “No, they’re not the same cuisine,” she told me. “Their history and cooking techniques vary, but both cuisines have a lot of lagniappe.”
“Lagniappe?” I asked.
“Yes, it means ‘a little extra’. I think it’s the love that the food is cooked with there,” she’d said. “They’re all such a resilient bunch as they’ve endured some of the worst storms and yet have such a zest for life and love going that extra mile for their guests. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you visit someday.”
And that conversation triggered my quest to better understand Louisiana’s cuisine and history.
The Cajuns were Acadians—an ethnic group descended from the French who’d originally settled in the New France colony of Acadia during the 17th and 18th centuries, and the first European settlers in Nova Scotia. In 1755, many fled to various parts of the USA as they did not want to pledge their allegiance to the British Crown. Most migrated as far south as they could, reaching parts of southern USA which was mainly Louisiana.
The Creoles on the other hand were a mix of French, Spanish and West African people, who were present in Louisana before the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 (when the United States bought 828,000 square miles of land west of the Mississippi River from France for $15million).
Although both Cajuns and Creoles speak French and use similar herbs and spices such as cayenne pepper and thyme, their cooking techniques vary, and those sometimes-subtle differences exist today between both cultures—Creole dishes tend to use more tomatoes, for example, in gumbo, while Cajun gumbos are less tangy, with a bolder, meatier flavor. Indigenous communities and German immigrants have also influenced both cuisines through cooking techniques, use of herbs, and of sausages. German heritage and population in Louisiana saw a decline after the Civil War and World Wars I and II.
As a food writer, I was aware of local icons in the state—one of these being chef Leah Chase who reshaped the culinary landscape of New Orleans by paving the way for African Americans to shine in Creole cooking, thanks to her Dooky Chase’s Restaurant, which opened in 1941.
The restaurant not only served popular Creole food, but was also a meeting point during the Civil Rights Movement where activists like Martin Luther King Jr. and James Baldwin often dined. In recent history, I remember her reprimanding former US President Barack Obama for trying to add hot sauce to her gumbo…
Though Leah passed away in 2019, her legacy lives on. Her restaurant is celebrated as the place for Creole cooking, especially the shrimp Creole stew, similar to an étouffée but thinner in consistency. She’s also said to be the inspiration for Walt Disney’s Princess Tiana from The Princess and the Frog: Tiana, like Leah Chase, was a waitress who eventually opened her own restaurant. I also had the joy of briefly speaking to chef Edgar ‘Dooky’ Chase, IV, her grandson, who told me, “The method of making each dish is primarily different. There’s no superiority though and that’s the beauty of Louisiana, where both cuisines co-exist peacefully, like cousins.”
On most menus, I noticed the same dishes listed as Creole and Cajun such as gumbo, jambalaya, and étouffée, but all dishes featured one cohesive element—The Holy Trinity, a medley of finely diced onions, peppers and celery as its base.
I felt I was getting close to better understanding the difference between Creole and Cajun, but I also discovered this greatly depended on who was asked.
For chef Mark Falgoust, who’s teaching me how to make a shrimp étouffée at a cooking class at Mardi Gras Cooking School, much of the reasoning behind the differences boils down to the region where Creole is more New Orleans and Cajun is the country side west of New Orleans. “Creole is city cooking; Cajun is country cooking. A lot of Cajuns weren’t wealthy, so the cooking was always humble,” he says.
“Fleeing religious persecution, the Acadians, the present-day Cajuns, got pushed out from Nova Scotia, Canada, all the way to the swamp in the south. My mom who is Cajun, took a paddle boat to school every day as they didn’t have proper roads here till World War Two. Every Cajun town in Louisiana is also different from the other—they speak a different dialect from a place that’s only 30 minutes away. It’s crazy!”
“We say here in Louisiana that food is love, happiness, sadness, death—it’s everything to us.”
- Connie Jackson, Southern Food and Beverage Museum
Falgoust also emphasizes that every restaurant that was established a hundred years ago in New Orleans was Creole as the city is primarily a Creole-populated region—there wasn’t a Cajun restaurant here until the late 1970s. He also believes the reason why Creole cooking is more frequently experienced through fancier restaurants and fine dining is down to chefs like Leah Chase, whereas Cajun is still perceived as a less urban, more homely, country-style cooking, of one-pot meals and game cooking, such as squirrel and rabbit.
After enjoying my first attempt at making an étouffée—surprisingly less labor-intensive than I imagined—Falgoust recommends I read The Encyclopedia of Cajun & Creole Cuisine by Louisiana chef and TV host John Folse. I was lucky to find the 850-page tome in a nearby bookshop, and quickly realized that Cajun and Creole cuisine was influenced not only by Acadians and African Americans, but also Native Americans in the region.
The book delves deep into this food heritage, such as the art of making stew by using dried sassafras leaves—common in Indigenous cultures in the region. I realize so many cultures contributed significantly to Cajun and Creole recipes—from the okra brought by enslaved West Africans used in gumbo to the German immigrants who introduced sausages.
Wondering how fellow epicureans can better understand the region, I head to the Southern Food and Beverage Museum (SoFAB) in Louisiana’s up-and-coming Central City neighborhood near the leafy Garden District. Founded by Liz Williams, a New Orleans native, the museum offers Cajun and Creole cooking classes, and has a permanent exhibition which examines the households of both cultures.
“We say here in Louisiana that food is love, happiness, sadness, death—it’s everything to us,” Connie Jackson, the SOFAB’s curator, president and CEO tells me with a smile. She echoes what chef Falgoust told me; that the Cajuns ate country food, making do with whatever ingredients they had, be that alligator, rabbit or squirrel. Meanwhile, Creole is an amalgam of French, Spanish and some African, and is a roux-based cuisine (where flour and butter are reduced to form a thick base) with seasoning and slow cooking at its core.
“To me, this food is the first real instance of Black excellence where you see enslaved people who had only a few things from home like okra and yams and encountered all these new herbs that they found when they were brought to The Americas,” says Connie.
The food the enslaved people were asked to cook by slave owners was delicious, she says, and as a result, has gained a favorable culinary reputation over time. Today, people travel from all around the world to savor it, but for Connie, enslaved people receive very credit for how Creole cuisine has evolved.
One domestic Creole example that stuck with me is red beans and rice, a Louisiana staple that’s consumed mainly on Mondays. I find out why thanks to Mark Aspiazu, co-owner of New Orleans Secrets Tours who I spend an enjoyable afternoon with, sampling local dishes such as po’boy sandwiches (typically filled with fried meat or shrimp, shredded lettuce, tomato and a tangy remoulade sauce) on Magazine Street.
“In New Orleans, each day of the week was designated for various chores and Monday was laundry day,” he tells me. “This was a tradition brought here by the Haitians in the 1700s. Simmering the beans required little attention which allowed them to focus on the washing.”
Beyond Cajun and Creole dishes, Jay Steiner, a Lafayette-based chef and food historian recommends heading up north to Natchitoches to try their local spicy Natchitoches meat pies. One of the official state foods of Louisiana, they’re similar to empanadas, and an example of a Native American recipe later adopted by the Spanish. Up in Shreveport, Creole food is evolving as chefs like Niema DiGrazia, who has roots in Sierra Leone, adds West African touches to her food, such as serving gumbo with jollof rice.
Cajun food has also evolved over time, on a different trajectory—appealing to home cooks before spreading across the state to hotels, restaurants, gas station eats, and diners. Cajun chefs such as Justin Wilson and Alzina Toups are revered as legends in Cajun cuisine even today.
Wilson, who passed away in 2001, was a popular Louisiana chef and humorist who authored cookbooks on Cajun cuisine and appeared on numerous cookery shows. In Galliano, south of New Orleans, Toups served Cajun-style gumbo and other dishes from her family kitchen, from a tiny windowless welding shop, which she converted to a restaurant called Alzina’s Kitchen. While the restaurant closed after she died in 2022, her grandson, accomplished Cajun chef Anthony Goldsmith, continues her legacy as the owner of Kajun Twist & Grill, a Cajun-style diner in Galliano serving his family’s recipes, with a second branch in Lockport.
While the differences between the two cuisines are integral to their identities—the people, origins, cooking techniques and the ingredients they use—what I realized most of all was what they had in common: An emphasis on food cooked with love, in plentiful portions, and with lots of lagniappe.
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The writer was a guest of Explore Louisiana and traveled between New Orleans and Shreveport.
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Rashmi Narayan is a travel, food and drink journalist who often uses her curiosity to explore the world through food and drink. She writes for a wide range of publications and websites, and has a passion for sustainability, stargazing, train journeys and history. She lives in London with an ever-growing collection of non-fiction books, steam train models and vinyl records.
