Madame Langlois' Legacy

As you prepare your next batch of cornbread, or steaming pot of gumbo, or even a fancy supper of grillades and grits, say a small thanksgiving prayer for Madame Langlois, Governor Bienville's many talented "housekeeper and cook". There is a legend that twenty-three young women were dispatched to the new colony to provide wives for the settlers. Finding only some queer looking sea creatures and game along with a few ears of Indian maize, they quickly rebelled at these poor victuals and threatened to leave the colony unless they could have real French bread. Madame Langlois took the lady rebels in hand and taught them to the secrets of grinding meal for cornbread and preparing hominy and grits and succotash. Her efforts to help the Louisiana ladies deal with their awful food situation led to the birth of Creole Cuisine. The talents and techniques of these European and African women in turning the meager culinary resources they found into flavorful and nutritious sustenance is indeed the very stuff and spirit of Louisiana cooking.

This volume thoroughly revises and updates its predecessor The Petticoat Rebellion.  A half dozen new chapters introduce many new recipes, historical vignettes, and continuing tales of our imaginary Frére Gerard and Tante Suzanne as they create and develop today's world famous New Orleans Creole Cuisine. It carries the story forward to 1803 and takes a bit beyond. So brew yourself up a pot of good New Orleans chicory coffee and plan a few historical meals for your family of the new century.

The Three Ingredients of Madame Langlois' Legacy

HISTORICAL FICTION:

Frere Gerard, aka Brother Kitchen at the Capuchin Presbytere and Tante Suzanne, Head Cook in the kitchen of the Famille Marigny love to share recipes, cooking secrets, and tales about how they feed their "families" in early New Orleans. Their stories and conversations form the backdrop for the original Creole recipes represented in the book

VERIFIED 18th century recipes

Original historical sources, today's research, and 18th Century cookbooks insure that only recipes and food ingredients available in colonial Louisiana are presented in Madame Langlois' Legacy.

RELEVANT historical background

Each chapter concludes with a historical vignette providing a solid documented background to the stories and recipes contained therein.

Writing "popular" history as opposed to writing "professional" history;

"The confusion of the times, and the scarcity of authentic memorials, oppose equal difficulties to the historian, who attempts to preserve a clear and unbroken thread of narration. Surrounded with imperfect fragments, always concise, often obscure, and sometimes contradictory, he is reduced to collect, to compare, and to conjecture: and though he ought never to place his conjectures in the rank of facts, yet the knowledge of human nature, and of the sure operation of its fierce and unrestrained passions, might, on some occasions, supply the want of historical materials."

Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. opening paragraph, V. 1, Chapter 10.