When I was young, I remember that, amidst the great variety of unfamiliar marchandises (“goods, merchandise”) that lined the shelves at the grocery store, there was one item in particular that would always sauter à la vue (“stand out”) to…
Edward Abbey (*1927-†1989), author and noted defender of America’s wilderness, once wrote that “the indoor life is the next best thing to premature burial.” As denizens of the twenty-first century, most of us spend the great majority of our time…
Beyond the incredible natural biodiversity of Louisiana’s wild places, beyond even the — as the naturalist Charles Darwin once wrote of life’s dizzying variety across the planet — “endless forms most beautiful” that make up the prairies, forests, and terres…
Langage (“language”) — whether spoken, written, signed, or merely thought — permeates every aspect of our daily lives. But while the course of an ordinary day brings us into contact with many hundreds of unique words, it is only very…
Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, a celebrated French gastronome (“epicure, food-lover”), opens his 1826 book The Physiology of Taste with a series of twenty culinary aphorisms, the most famous of which is: “Tell me what you eat : I will tell you…
Louisiana’s musical landscape is extraordinarily rich and varied, and has been since the beginning: the land between the Pearl River and the Sabine has long been de la terre fertile (”fertile ground”) for the growth of a variety of rich…
Mémère (“Grandma”) ran a kitchen that in many ways straddled two different eras: sometimes, arriving at her house for le dîner de dimanche (“the Sunday lunch”) that followed morning mass, the deep, almost palpable aroma of strong coffee that seized…
Tout les temps en temps (“Every now and then”) — about once every ten years here in South Louisiana — we’re all reminded of a fact that is otherwise easy to forget or ignore: a hurricane passes, the electricity goes…
“Dans ce temps-ça, ils onviont pas beaucoup des affaires à faire d’autre chose que s’assir et conter des contes.” (“In those days, they didn’t have many things to do besides sit down and tell stories.”) Between the time that…
I was listening to the radio the other day, an old program from the 1960s hosted by the late Dudley LeBlanc: “Les Nouvelles de la Semaine” (“The News of the Week”). Among a certain generation of Louisianians, “Cousin Dud,” state…
There’s an old saying in Louisiana, which goes: “Février est pas bâtard,” meaning (very) roughly “February isn’t half-hearted.” If that’s only a little less clear than troubled water, there’s another expression, quite similar, said still in France: “L’hiver est pas…
While the Louisiana winter is a sometimes pleasant, sometimes harsh reminder that we are indeed a part of the North American continent, and while, culturally, we do share many historical connections with our French cousins far to the north, as…
In the sometimes petty, but often heated, squabbles that plague Louisiana’s cultural landscape, the culinary domain is often hotly contested territory. Most of these disagreements arise ultimately from the very thing that makes French Louisiana unique: the diversity of the…
In the north of Old France, in Normandy, Picardy, and Wallonia, there is an expression that many old country dwellers still use even today: instead of speaking of faire récolte [harvesting crops], to describe this culmination of the year’s work,…
