Etouffee You Say? It’s Pork Chops Whats Cajun

Move over gumbo. Chef Donald Link is on a mission to let the world know that real Cajun fare means barbecued ribs, stuffed pork chops, and sausage with sauerkraut. The James Beard winner’s German ancestors settled in the so-called Cajun Prairie west of New Orleans in the 1880s where they set about farming rice, making sausage and raising crawdads — the building blocks of Cajun food. ”Cajun food really is the food of these poor farmers,” he says. “It’s what they grew.”

Link doesn’t dispute that etouffee and other “smothered” dishes — which follow the French technique of browning meat, making a roux and then simmering the pot — are Cajun too, but they’re only half the story. “Paul Prudhomme put Cajun on the map so he became the standard bearer,” Link says. But in his world, Cajun is still “five pots on the stove, every one of them with a bone in it.”