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(More customer reviews)This spectacular cookbook beats out even Julia Child for one special thing: no matter what he tells you, do it.
Cajun cooking is based on a number of principles not all of which are normal in the French-American styles dominant in most cookbooks, and which still aren't normal in the Asian-influenced or Italianate cookbooks that have increasingly garnered attention.
Loooong cooking times, in some cases. Very high heat. Complicated sauces. Intricate spicing. Cooking "the hell out of" some ingredients.
These things are antithetical to Chinese, Japanese, French, Italian, and Spanish cooking, from which come almost everything you might think you know about cooking. The whole concept, in so many cases, is to "bring out the true flavor" of some ingredient, which prompts all that "fresh and perfect" stuff about ingredients. All of which is grand, of course, but a little arch, don't you think?
This kind of Cajun country cooking, however, often takes unwanted ingredients, or ones that are a tad old, and makes something spectacular out of them. Looks like hell, tastes like heaven: it's brown and gooey, but by god you'll get down on your knees and beg to be allowed just a little more!
Now if you're an accomplished home cook and you've never cooked this type of cuisine, you're going to find instructions that you will naturally want to ignore. The Sweet Potato Pecan Pie, for example, has you bake it for something like an hour, at high heat. So quite naturally, you assume it's a typo or something and you "correct" it in the cooking. DO NOT DO THIS. My wife did this with that pie, and it was very good. I did exactly what I was told and it was spectacular, just absolutely to die for.
Here's some examples.
Barbecue shrimp. Will kill you if you eat it too often, but it's basically shrimp just barely poached perfectly in a spicy butter sauce, and you will beg for more.
Sweet Potato Pecan Pie. My very hard-core Yankee relatives who never eat anything they don't know were faced with this thing one Thanksgiving, and finally my uncle-in-law had a piece just to be polite. Within 30 minutes the entire pie was gone: word spread, and nothing was left over.
Chicken Etouffee. Heaven on earth. Chicken cooked the way it would have wanted if it could have known how good it could be after its demise, as Garrison Keillor put it.
Chicken-Andouille Gumbo. Bet you thought gumbo was all about seafood and okra, didn't you? Nope. This is amazing.
Crawfish Magnifique. Oh my god. Will make you worship at the altar. Unbelievable. Good with shrimp, but with crawfish it'll make you pound the table in ecstasy.
Oyster-Brie Soup. Huh? Yup. Just do what he says, will you please? Serve this at an elegant dinner and watch people sit up straight, realizing this isn't just messing about but serious eating happening right here.
I have now cooked about 90% of the recipes in here, and never once had a miss. I'm no great chef, but I can follow directions, and Paul Prudhomme never ever steers you wrong. Just do exactly what he tells you and brace up for some truly fine dining.
A hint: if you don't like spicy food, decrease the spice mix total. That is, make up the spice mix as he directs, and then instead of a tablespoon put in 2 teaspoons. Don't just decrease the hot stuff; it will not be perfectly balanced.
Another hint: if you use stock from a can or box (ugh), decrease the salt in the mixes and reduce the quantities of spice mix accordingly.
Yet another hint: read his notes at the start about ingredients and especially about cooking roux. It matters. Get a cast-iron pan and a good whisk, too.
One last hint: if you're making something with chicken in it, and it's too hot just before you put in the chicken to heat up, don't worry. The sweetness of the chicken will make it balance perfectly.
The man is a genius!
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Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana KitchenHere for the first time the famous food of Louisiana is presented in a cookbook written by a great creative chef who is himself world-famous. The extraordinary Cajun and Creole cooking of South Louisiana has roots going back over two hundred years, and today it is the one really vital, growing regional cuisine in America. No one is more responsible than Paul Prudhomme for preserving and expanding the Louisiana tradition, which he inherited from his own Cajun background.Chef Prudhomme's incredibly good food has brought people from all over America and the world to his restaurant, K-Paul's Louisiana Kitchen, in New Orleans. To set down his recipes for home cooks, however, he did not work in the restaurant. In a small test kitchen, equipped with a home-size stove and utensils normal for a home kitchen, he retested every recipe two and three times to get exactly the results he wanted. Logical though this is, it was an unprecedented way for a chef to write a cookbook. But Paul Prudhomme started cooking in his mother's kitchen when he was a youngster. To him, the difference between home and restaurant procedures is obvious and had to be taken into account.So here, in explicit detail, are recipes for the great traditional dishes--gumbos and jambalayas, Shrimp Creole, Turtle Soup, Cajun "Popcorn," Crawfish Etouffee, Pecan Pie, and dozens more--each refined by the skill and genius of Chef Prudhomme so that they are at once authentic and modern in their methods.Chef Paul Prudhomme's Louisiana Kitchen is also full of surprises, for he is unique in the way he has enlarged the repertoire of Cajun and Creole food, creating new dishes and variations within the old traditions. Seafood Stuffed Zucchini with Seafood Cream Sauce, Panted Chicken and Fettucini, Veal and Oyster Crepes, Artichoke Prudhomme--these and many others are newly conceived recipes, but they could have been created only by a Louisiana cook. The most famous of Paul Prudhomme's original recipes is Blackened Redfish, a daringly simple dish of fiery Cajun flavor that is often singled out by food writers as an example of the best of new American regional cooking.For Louisianians and for cooks everywhere in the country, this is the most exciting cookbook to be published in many years.
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