Jim Bradshaw: South Louisiana has its own kind of holiday feast

I‘ve said it before and I’ll say it again, one of the things that we should be thankful for at Thanksgiving is that in south Louisiana we can do it up better than practically anywhere else.
To begin with, most of us come from big, close-knit families and our celebrations reflect that.
We don’t even have to worry about that old taboo of not discussing politics at the dinner table. Political “discussion” has been part of our tradition at least since Huey Long’s days, and probably before that.
Second, we are a fun-loving people and know how to enjoy a festive day ─ perhaps especially at Thanksgiving, since most of us are still close enough to our agrarian roots to understand the hard work involved in creating a harvest worth celebrating.
And what a harvest it is.
We raise cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, and rabbits. Ducks, geese or venison from the wild are always holiday favorites,
Want fish? Name a variety and we can probably pull it from the Gulf or a bay or a river or a bayou.
Lots of our vegetables come fresh from a backyard garden. What can we grow?
Beans, beets, broccoli, cabbage, cantaloupe, corn, cucumber, eggplant, greens of all sorts, mirliton, okra, onions, peas, peppers (hot, mild, take your pick), squash, tomatoes, turnips, watermelon, yams, and just about anything else we can think of.
Satsumas and lemons are ready to pick, and surely we’ve still got some fig or pear preserves that we put up this summer.
And don’t forget to put out the mayhaw jelly.
Best yet, we know how to cook these things in ways that are envied but seldom properly emulated.
It’s been that way from the beginning, you’ll remember. The Pilgrims thought they were feasting, but they couldn’t even spell courtbouillon, and to their misfortune, had never heard of etouffee, gumbo, or sauce piquante, which I would certainly prefer to a recreation of the Pilgrim’s meal.
Folks who study that sort of thing say there were plenty of wild turkeys in New England in Pilgrim days, but they were scrawny things; a Pilgrim looking for a good fat bird would probably pick a swan instead.
They had corn, but their “dressing” was boiled cornmeal pounded into a mush. They might have sweetened it with a dab of molasses, but they’d run out of the sugar they brought with them.
There were more turnips than potatoes. Mussels and curds were the likely seafood item, boiled and unseasoned, of course. They did have a fat pumpkin or two, but no flour or butter to make a crust for a pumpkin pie.
Contrast that with the first feast of the Acadians, who were in old Acadie years before the Pilgrims sighted Plymouth Rock in 1620.
The first Acadians had a big feast during the winter of 1606-1607, and, according to a diarist, made the table “groan beneath all the luxuries of the winter forest: flesh of moose, caribou, and deer, beaver, otter, and hare, bears and wildcats; with ducks, geese, grouse, and plover; sturgeon, too, and trout, and fish innumerable, speared through the ice.”
The venerable historian Francis Parkman adds that, “Of wine, in particular, the supply was so generous that every man in Port Royal was served three pints daily.”
The only thing missing was a football game to doze through once the deer, beaver, sturgeon, trout, and wine had been finished off.
A collection of Jim Bradshaw’s columns, “Cajuns and Other Characters,” is now available from Pelican Publishing. You can contact him at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.