Contact Us

Books

Our Book

Speaking In Tongues

Inspired from a larger and earlier work, Louisiana’s French Creole Culinary & Linguistic Traditions: Before & Since Cajunization, 2012, this book, Speaking In Tongues: Louisiana’s ‘Cajun’ & Creole Languages Tell Their Own Story reveals Louisiana’s Old World French language traditions alongside the diverse ethno-historical layers of her creolization, or cultural diversification. Louisiana French (misnomered “Cajun French”) and Kouri-Vini (relabeled “Louisiana Creole”) are the two related franco-creole forms of French. 

They are the result of a long marriage of diverse peoples who, together, over 300 years, created the larger cultural traditions of “lower Louisiana” –the ultimate and present-day center of which is southern part of the American State of Louisiana. These languages are tied to a much older and larger tradition which is still found and heard across the former international and interracial French Colonial world-her colonies of Québec to the French Antilles and the Latin Caribbean to West Africa, to Réunion and Mauritius in the Indian Ocean across to old Vietnam, in its own diversifications.

Buy Now

Our Book

Louisiana’s Creole Food

This is an outstanding study of the formation and ingredients of traditional Louisiana culture using anthropology, geography, history, linguistics, and cooking. It is a conscious rejection of previous studies which racialized and divided the culture and properly defines it as layers of original cultures of Native Americans, Africans and Europeans merging to form the new Louisiana Creole at the heart of much of Louisiana, East Texas all the way to the West Coast of the USA.
 
 It properly and effectively rejects the widespread mythology assuming a separate, “white” Cadjan culture still too widespread in studies of Louisiana. Its’ impact should be found in any study of the formation of the many fascinating regional cultures of the USA and indeed, much of the world.”-Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author-scholar, Africans In Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century
 
Buy Now

Our Book

Their Words, Their Hands

This book is a unique and original study of Louisiana’s diverse franco- and creolophone peoples, their food ways and the secrets of their diverse ethnic origins revealed through the language of Louisiana French & Creole, their classic food recipes, their names and processes.

The author, John LaFleur II is himself a Louisiana Creole and cultural scholar. He knows the food, the language(s) and the recipes along with the history of Louisiana. He traces the beginnings of Louisiana’s Creole food culture from its foundations in colonial Louisiana to the marriage of the French to the Muskogean indigenous peoples-the Choctaw, Chetimacha, Biloxi, Avoyelles et al. Indians with whom the enslaved Africans were later intermarried-the beginnings of Louisiana Creole cultural and culinary fusion. Apart from this earliest metissage, it is impossible to understand the later Afro- Spanish- Acadian- German and Italian Creole culiinary foundations which adorn New Orleans’ and southern Louisiana’s remarkable history, social and culinary traditions!

Buy Now