In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou [Hardcover]

Terri Pischoff Wuerthner (Author), Bruce Turner (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2006

When most people think of Cajun cooking, they think of blackened redfish or, maybe, gumbo. When Terri Pischoff Wuerthner thinks of Cajun cooking, she thinks about Great-Grandfather Theodore's picnics on Lake Carenton, children gathering crawfish fresh from the bayou for supper, and Grandma Olympe's fricassee of beef, because Terri Pischoff Wuerthner is descended from an old Cajun family.  Through a seamless blend of storytelling and recipes to live by, Wuerthner's In a Cajun Kitchen will remind people of the true flavors of Cajun cooking. 
            When her ancestors settled in Louisiana around 1760, her family grew into a memorable clan that understood the pleasures of the table and the bounty of the Louisiana forests, fields, and waters. Wuerthner spices her gumbo with memories of Cajun community dances, wild-duck hunts, and parties at the family farm. From the Civil War to today, Wuerthner brings her California-born Cajun family together to cook and share jambalaya, crawfish étoufée, shrimp boil, and more, while they cook, laugh, eat, and carry on the legacy of Louis Noel Labauve, one of the first French settlers in Acadia in the 1600s.
           Along with the memories, In a Cajun Kitchen presents readers with a treasure trove of authentic Cajun recipes: roasted pork mufaletta sandwiches, creamy crab casserole, breakfast cornbread with sausage and apples, gumbo, shrimp fritters, black-eyed pea and andouille bake, coconut pralines, pecan pie, and much more. In a Cajun Kitchen is a great work of culinary history, destined to be an American cookbook classic that home cooks will cherish.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A Cajun cookbook in a post-Katrina world is a delicate undertaking, but Wuerthner (Food for Life: The Cancer Prevention Cookbook) finds the right approach. In a soothing roux of memoir, gentle humor and classic dishes, she comforts the reader even as she turns up the spice. Family comes first, literally, with an opening section that lays out the author's family tree and its roots in their 120-year-old Louisiana farmland. Next comes a handy glossary and an exploration of the Cajun style of cookery. Wuerthner's recipes are mostly hearty hand-me-downs: from her father's first cousin, Madge, there's Pork Jambalaya, and Great-uncle Adolphe adapts a recipe from Central Grocery in New Orleans—Cayenne Roasted Pork Muffaletta, which employs the traditional olive salad. Her late Aunt Lorna, however, is the chief inspiration as well as the source for the majority of the concoctions. Her most intriguing choices include Chicken Maque Choux (a kind of stir-fry with corn and bell pepper). Wuerthner begins each recipe with a brief paragraph on what the dish means to her family and ends each with a lagniappe: for instance, readers learn that supposedly hush puppies got their name from outdoor cooks who offered fried batter "to keep the dogs from barking." (Oct.)
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Review

"Terri Pischoff Wuerther's In a Cajun Kitchen is the real thing---true Cajun cooking. This is an incredible experience spending time with an old Cajun family. You will treasure the stories and love the recipes!"
---Shirley O. Corriher, author of CookWise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed
 
"In a Cajun Kitchen rings with the authenticity of food and memory shared across time and place and is destined to become a classic food memoir. Terri Pischoff Wuerthner brings us into her family's Cajun kitchen not only with love, but with a keen cook's eye for the details that make old family recipes work in the modern kitchen. I cooked grits for the first time following Terri's recipe for Cheesy Grits and they are now a stand-by in my kitchen. She is a cook you can trust and a storyteller you can revel in."
---Georgeanne Brennan, Author of The Food and Flavors of Haute Provence

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; 1st edition (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312343051
• ISBN-13: 978-0312343057
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 7.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #414,872 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's the Real Thing, August 22, 2007

By 

Margaret D. Fallon "Peggy" (Burlingame, California United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou (Hardcover)

by Peggy Fallon, author Ice Cream and Frozen Desserts DK Publishing, 2007
This book travels between my nightstand--where I enjoy Terri's thoughtfully written prose and stories of her colorful family--to my kitchen, where I revel in her detailed recipes for fried chicken, grits, and gumbo. Lots of good food here, and I recommend this book to anyone interested in authentic Cajun cuisine.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cajun Like I Grew Up Eating, December 7, 2006

By 

John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou (Hardcover)

The opening wording on the flyleaf of this book expresses a couple of points better than I can. 'When most people think of Cajun cooking, they thing of blackened redfish (or blackened nearly anything else) or, maybe, gumbo.'

No, blackened meats and a bunch of other dishes are the creation of New Orleans chefs preparing foods for the tourists. Note, I'm not saying that I don't like these dishes, they just aren't the kinds of foods that I grew up with in the swamps of South Louisiana.

This book talks about the kinds of things we really ate. We had things like etouffee, shrimp boil, jambalaya. Just like she says. But then I do find a few points with which I disagree.

For instance on page 225 she says that they usually use quick grits, which cook in just a few minutes, rather than stone-ground or old-fashioned grits, which take up to an hour to cook. The stone-ground are delicious, but very difficult to find outside of the South.

Terrible, terrible, sacrilege. Go on the web and you can find lots of places that sell 'real' grits. Just substitute them for her recipies that use grits. Incidentally I highly recommend her Baked Spicy Cheese Grits, page 223. Her recipie is a bit different than mine, I put in a bit of spicy sausage. She puts in eggs. You might also want to try varying the types of cheese you use: blue cheese is good, so is Velveeta. Try this at a pot luck, you'll be surprised at the result.

Try some of her Gumbos.

Try a lot of her recipies, you'll be glad you did.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In a Cajun kitchen, August 31, 2006

By 

Bonnie Willacker (Palm Desert, Ca) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: In a Cajun Kitchen: Authentic Cajun Recipes and Stories from a Family Farm on the Bayou (Hardcover)

Recipes are easy to follow and use ingredients easily found stocked in everyday grocery stores and personal kitchens. An added bonus was the personal angle of the stories about the originators of the recipes. There is gentle humor and good advice on almost every page. Best of all, the several recipes I tried not only looked good, but tasted wonderful. This book is NOT about burning your taste buds with "hot and spicy" but enjoying flavor bursting tastes. The book is everything I hoped for in a Cajun cookbook. I agree with the book reviewers!