Saucy – Pork, fish, shrimp, chicken, oysters what goes into an authentic jambalaya? WonderingAnything and long grain rice.
I consulted cookbooks in the Saucetorium and of the dozens of recipes on hand there are all sorts of different ingredients including one that requires squirrel but all call for long grain rice.
There is an odd fascination with authenticity in cooking. While employed at an Italian restaurant, customers would often volunteer “That isn’t the way they do it in Italy”. "Okay", was my verbal response, but mentally I would retort there isn’t an Italian way, (dumbass), if you think there is one way one kind of food is prepared throughout Italy just go to the next village or next region and tell them they are doing it wrong. Influences, fashion, ingredients all change and shift – I remember reading an article about 10 years ago how modern Sicilians came to NJ/NY to study recipes and cookbooks from the first wave of Italian migration. The belief was the food ways immigrants brought to the US at the turn of the 20th Century was less corrupted than the constantly evolving Sicilian cuisine left behind in the Mediterranean. So what is more authentic – the food cooked in modern Sicily or the recipes frozen in time from a particular period in history. I’d answer both.
I’d also guess some would adamantly claim authentic jambalaya would be prepared in a three legged cast iron pot heated over a hardwood fire and cooked by a board certified Cajun - not some citified Creole or slow talking northern interloper like myself.
Most cookbooks will tell you that jambalaya is a bayou interpretation of paella imported by Louisiana’s one time landlord the Spanish. Historian Karen Hess argues the dish is actually based on the Provençal-French-Acadian-Cajun rice dish, pilau, which uses long grain rice rather than paella’s short grain arborio type rice. Which begs the question wouldn't a really authentic jambalaya really be pilau?
Authentic has a very short shelf-life that might extend to the way your parents or grandparents made something - maybe but it isn't something I worry about; I am more concerned about good. Evan Jones' recipe calls for a roux, the New Orleans Cookbook doesn’t. Jeff Smith, teevee’s creepy Frugal Gourmet calls for spareribs. John Folse requires mushrooms, Lillian Hellman, yes she wrote a cookbook and grew up in New Orleans and had opinions about food different from the rusticated Justin Wilson. Emeril plays it accurate, offering many interpretations in his body of work.
Saucyman’s jambalaya is usually andouille sausage and shrimp cooked in a stock made from shrimp heads, shrimps shells and crushed tomatoes. Sometimes bacon, less frequently tasso (cured pork shoulder), occasionally crawfish and once even quail have found their way in the rice. Red pepper and a little celery are always added to the rice, as are onion, garlic, thyme and oregano. Whatever is in the rice it is always served with crystal hot sauce, generally with a piece of baguette and hopefully with a cold beer. Is it authentic? Who knows, but it is good and I can live with that.
1 comments:
my grandfather made one thing (afaik) and one thing only: jambalaya. others, including my unassailable grandmother, made it, too, but i hew to his version, which is made w/very short (practically arborio, but not all the way to sushi) rice. then again, that's the kind of rice most people in the swampy land very-south-of-new-orleans used for everything. and i think the long-grain rice was more for fancy dishes. i don't care. i prefer short grain w/as much water as possible. the stickier the better. my paella, though, tends to be less sticky & more seafoody. but i pick jambalaya for comfort w/o sacrificiing taste anytime.
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