Difference Between Cajun and Creole Foods

Cajun food is the food of the Cajun people. The Cajuns were French farming folk who had settled in a region they called Acadie near Quebec. Cajun is just a corruption of Acadian. They were forcibly expelled by the British for suspected collaboration with the French during the war over Quebec in the eighteenth century. They found themselves at sea with nowhere to go: most of them were eventually taken in by the state of Louisiana, which already had a large, Catholic, French speaking population. They were given some pretty poor land to farm out on the bayous. They had to redevelop their agricultural French cuisine, using rice as a staple (easier to grow in swamps than wheat) and using other local ingredients like crayfish. They throw "everything in the pot". A Cajun will eat anything that doesn't eat him first--Alligator, Crawfish, Rabbit, Duck, Pork, Chicken, Beef, whatever is out there.

Creole just means something which originated in a French colony - be it a person, a language or a dish. Creole food is the food of the French community in Louisiana, and their descendants. Now, this community came straight from France, not from Quebec. Like the Cajuns, they faced the challenge of adapting a French cuisine to local circumstances - but their cuisine was that of Paris and urban France, not a 'peasant cuisine'. Creole is more French - heavy, creamy sauces. Creole owes more to haute cuisine, while Cajun is more home-style.

This was all a long time ago, and the two cuisines have come to intermingle on menus. Even more importantly, the cuisines have been subject to outside influences, most distinctively that of African cooking on Cajun dishes. The use of okra, the term 'gumbo', for example, came from the poor African slaves or former slaves who lived alongside the Cajuns in rural Louisiana.

~Wilfrid