Some Cajun Cooking Ingredients

The following is a partial list of ingredients used in Cajun cuisine and some of the staple ingredients of the Acadian food culture.

[edit] Grains

1938 Cajun woman using crude mortar and pestle in process of hulling rice. Near Crowley, Louisiana.

• Corn
• Rice — long, medium, or short grain white; also popcorn rice

Rice proved to be a valuable commodity in early Acadiana. With an abundance of water and a hot, humid climate, rice could be grown practically anywhere in the region, and grew wild in some areas. Rice became the predominant starch in the diet, easy to grow, store, and prepare. The oldest rice mill in operation in the United States, the Conrad Rice Mill, is located in New Iberia.

• Wheat (for baking bread)

[edit] Fruits and vegetables

• Bell peppers
• Blackberries
• Cayenne peppers
• Celery
• Collard greens
• Cucumbers
• Figs
• Limes
• Lemons
• Mirlitons (also called chayotes or vegetable pears)
• Muscadines
• Okra
• Onions
• Pecans
• Satsuma Oranges
• Scallions (also known as green onions or onion tops)
• Squash
• Strawberries
• Sweet potatoes
• Tabasco pepper
• Tomatoes

[edit] Meat and seafood

Cajun folkways include many ways of preserving meat, some of which are waning due to the availability of refrigeration and mass-produced meat at the grocer. Smoking of meats remains a fairly common practice, but once-common preparations such as turkey or duck confit (preserved in poultry fat, with spices) are now seen even by Acadians as quaint rarities.
Game (and hunting) are still uniformly popular in Acadiana.
The recent increase of catfish farming in the Mississippi Delta has brought about an increase in its usage in Cajun cuisine in the place of the more traditional wild-caught trout (the saltwater species) and redfish.