L O C A L E AT S
It wasn’t until many years later that I began to realize how very fortunate I was to have been raised in this landscape. seafood available to the LaBove family. Jim’s mother, Cora, as he goes on to explain in his book, “loved to cook and she passed that love of cooking for loved ones down to me,” he writes. Weaved throughout romantic observations from his youth, Jim flavors the narrative with mouthwatering descriptions of Cajun dishes as prepared by Cora. The recipes included in Cotton’s Seafood are authentic and approachable, most of which employ a short list of humble ingredients. As was Cora’s cooking philosophy: use only what you need to enhance the main ingredient. Albeit, you may first have to catch what you intend to cook! In this autobiographical cookbook, Jim reveals the hard truth about what it means to be Cajun. He provides a historical account of how the Acadiens (French spelling) came to inhabit the unforgiving swampland of Louisiana and their influence on the modern idea of the Cajun lifestyle. Readers will also enjoy Jim’s regular use of Cajun-French terminology throughout the book, complete with pronunciation cues. As I took a stab at saying a few of the words aloud, I laughed as I recollected times when my grandmother and greatgrandmother would exchange CajunFrench phrases, trying to pass on to us grandkids a bit of their heritage.
30 | THE LOCAL
The charm of Cotton’s Seafood is that it is a story that appeals to nearly everyone. You either grew up in this era, or your parents did, or your grandparents did. No matter what category the reader falls in, what they will discover is a deeper appreciation for the culture that has come to define our region, the people made of it, and the legacy they have left for the rest
of the world to enjoy. On page 42, it reads, “I guess the great inequity of life is that the people to whom we all owe so much always seem to be gone by the time we finally realize their importance to us.” This became a prompt for me on which I quickly acted. I invited my 81-year-old Cajun grandmother over to cook a recipe straight from Cotton’s