How Locals Celebrate Carnival Season in Cajun Country, From King Cake to Crawfish

The seasons on the bayous of Louisiana are not necessarily summer, fall, winter, and spring. They are marked by nature, traditions, and distinct emotions. They are rituals playing out on a stove every day. We mark years with dishes and celebrations — some so small that they are personal to my own table, or those at my New Orleans restaurant, Mosquito Supper Club — and some, like Fat Tuesday, that are world-renowned. We commemorate, reminisce, and harvest through the year. We celebrate holidays and memorialize the days life marks for us, like the passing of a loved one or the date a hurricane made landfall. We never need an excuse to gather and toast to life, love, and supper.

As a result, there are countless versions of Cajun life and Cajun food. But all the parishes that make up Cajun country sit on delta soil and have bayous running through them, old pathways and tributaries of the Mississippi River that appear as arteries through southern Louisiana.

On the bayou, folks are tethered to the heart of Cajun life: food, family, and the rhythms of a year.

On the bayou, folks are tethered to the heart of Cajun life: food, family, and the rhythms of a year. Neighborhoods, homes, and businesses flank the bayous. Directions are given as “up the bayou,” “down the bayou,” and “across the bayou,” and folks identify themselves by the bayou they come from. Chauvin is nestled on Bayou Petit Caillou; Montegut and Bourg are on Bayou Terrebonne, to the east of us. Lower south is the epic, lush, Amazon-like Bayou Pointe-aux-Chenes, and Isle de Jean Charles, an island cut off from the mainland that is near extinction and home to American Indian tribes. To the west of Chauvin is Dulac on Bayou Grand Caillou. Louisiana is home to countless bayous; they all spill into the barrier waters of the Gulf of Mexico, and all are home to fishing communities. The bayou is part of our identity and a lifeline to our culture.

The variations in dialect and in food are vast in this tiny 20-mile radius, but we all start our New Year feasting with family. In my case, it’s a simple meal of black-eyed peas and cabbage rolls to digest the holidays and the preceding year. We look forward, feeling great hope that life’s cycles of solitude and resilience will restore us in our complicated world. It takes a bit of grace and fortitude to call south Louisiana home, but these qualities become us. Our work in kitchens breathes life back into us; we contemplate and create, then we bring together our family at tables to share in the act of communion, to fill our inner state with the love around us. Communion with others restores us; gathering in small groups on a birthday or in large groups for Carnival brings equilibrium and an abundance of love, laughter, and pure joy. Those moments create stocks of resilience and jubilation. Time alone is precious, but time together is warm and restorative. There is a certain euphoria to each.

Our work in kitchens breathes life back into us; we contemplate and create, then we bring together our family at tables to share in the act of communion, to fill our inner state with the love around us.

We party, and then we fast. It may come as a surprise to people converging in south Louisiana for debauchery to learn Mardi Gras is a religious holiday, dating back to pagan festivals of revelry and excess followed by 40 days of fasting. Today, we move from one delicious religious season to the next.

Between Epiphany and Mardi Gras, we embrace the season of parties, parades, and hangovers that all culminate in Fat Tuesday (aka Mardi Gras). It’s a marathon, best taken slow and steady. Consumption of crawfish, Popeyes chicken, and king cake ramps up as Carnival season rolls on, and the urge to eat and live abundantly with a little extravagance becomes our daily norm.

Throwing backyard crawfish boils or making meals of crawfish fettuccine, decadent po’boys, or traditional crawfish étouffée are extravagances best enjoyed with company. Dishes like barbecue shrimp and jambalayas filled with chicken and sausages will satisfy a hungry parade-going crowd. There is no dieting during Carnival season, only a desire to fill yourself to the brim with ritual, culture, and food — to become part of the living feast and revel through the greatest party on earth.