Jambalaya à la Créole (Picayune 1916)

Your Jambalaya, Louisiana, Jeff’s ongoing recipe has a 14-ounce can of crushed tomatoes in it, with three question marks in front of it. Here is a data point for that question, and it is a good one.

The Picayune’s Jambalaya à la Créole has no tomato in it at all. No tomato, no flour, no roux. Pork cut in half-inch dice and browned slowly with onion, then ham, garlic, thyme, parsley, bay and ground cloves, then a dozen chaurice, then three quarts of beef broth, then the rice. That is the entire recipe.

And here is why that is more interesting than “Creole jambalaya is red”: turn the page and the book’s Crab Jambalaya takes three tomatoes and a tablespoon of flour, and its Shrimp Jambalaya does the same. In this book the tomato does not track Creole versus Cajun. It tracks seafood versus meat. Same chapter, same author, same city — the pork one is brown and the shellfish ones are red.

The header is worth keeping too: “Jambalaya is a Spanish-Creole dish, which is a great favorite in New Orleans.” Spanish-Creole, in 1901, in the city’s own book.

UNTESTED — but this is the one of the seven most directly useful to you, since you are actively refining your own.

Ingredients

• 1 lb fresh pork, lean and fat, cut into 1/2 inch dice
• 1 slice ham, chopped very fine
• 1 dozen fine chaurice (Creole pork sausage), cut apart
• 2 onions, chopped very fine
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tablespoon butter
• 2 sprigs thyme, minced
• 2 sprigs parsley, minced
• 2 bay leaves
• 2 cloves, ground very fine
• 3 quarts beef broth or hot water — BROTH PREFERRED
• 1 1/2 cups rice, carefully washed
• 1/2 teaspoon chili pepper
• Salt, pepper and cayenne to taste — “the Creoles season highly with Cayenne”
• NOT IN THIS RECIPE, and that is the point
• No tomato. No flour. No bell pepper. No celery.

Directions

Key ingredients

Salt · Black Pepper

1. Brown the pork and onion slowly, and take your time. Butter into the saucepan, then the onions and the diced pork. Let them brown slowly, stirring frequently, and let them “continue browning slightly.” This is the only browning in the dish and there is no roux and no tomato behind it, so all the colour and most of the depth comes from here.
2. Ham and garlic next. When slightly brown, add the finely chopped ham and the garlic.
3. Then the herbs and the cloves. Thyme, bay leaf, parsley and the ground cloves. Let all of it brown five minutes longer. Two ground cloves in a pork and rice dish is a small amount doing a lot of work — do not leave them out.
4. Chaurice, five minutes. Cut apart and added whole, not crumbled.
5. Liquid, ten minutes, then the rice. Three quarts of broth or hot water — always using in preference the broth. Cook ten minutes, and when it comes to a boil add the washed rice. -> photo 1
6. Season, then half an hour. Half a teaspoonful of chili pepper, salt and cayenne. Boil half an hour longer, or until the rice is firm. Serve hot.
7. On the liquid, because three quarts to a cup and a half of rice will look wrong: this is a wet, boiled jambalaya, not the drier pilaf-style dish most modern recipes produce. The rice is boiled in it rather than absorbing a measured amount. If you want the modern texture, start at about 3 cups of broth per 1 1/2 cups of rice and add from there — but then you are cooking your recipe, not this one.
8. See also, in the same chapter: Jambalaya au Congri, rice and cowpeas with salt meat and a square inch of ham — and on Fridays and fast days the Creoles boiled the peas with a tablespoonful of butter “but no meat.”
9. Compare with Calas, Creole Rice Fritters (Picayune 1916) from the same rice chapter.

Notes

Where this recipe came from — and what it isn’t The backbone is The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book, fifth edition, published by The Times-Picayune in New Orleans in 1916 and copyrighted 1901, 1906, 1910 and 1916. The scan is the Cornell University copy, and it is in our Reference Library: library.fubsypoly.com/picayunes-creole-cook-book-1916.pdf I read the quantities off the page images rather than the OCR. The optical text of this book renders every fraction as a hyphenated pair — 1-2 for a half, 1 1-2 for one and a half — and it misread the 5 eggs in Pain Perdu as a letter B. If you go back to the scan yourself, go to the page image. UNTESTED. I have not cooked this version. The measurements are the book’s, converted to modern phrasing but not re-proportioned, and where the original is vague I have said so rather than inventing a number.

⭐ The tomato finding, stated precisely It would be wrong to say “the Picayune’s jambalaya has no tomato.” The book has four jambalayas and they do not agree:

• Jambalaya à la Créole (pork, ham, chaurice) — no tomato, no flour.
• Crab Jambalaya — 3 tomatoes, 1 tablespoon flour.
• Shrimp Jambalaya — 3 tomatoes, 1 tablespoon flour, browned as a roux.
• Jambalaya au Congri — rice and cowpeas, no tomato. So the tomato in this book goes with the shellfish, not with the word Creole. The common modern rule — Creole jambalaya is red because Creoles had tomatoes, Cajun is brown because the country did not — does not describe what is printed here.

How to boil the rice, since every recipe in this chapter refers back to it One cup of rice to one quart of water, a teaspoonful of salt, and the water boiling before the rice goes in. Boil rapidly about twenty minutes. “As soon as the grains commence to soften do not, under any circumstances, stir or touch the rice again.” Then pour off the water and set the pot in the oven about ten minutes to dry — “do not let it brown, but simply dry.” Every grain white, separate, and standing apart. That oven-drying step is the part almost nobody does and it is what produces the texture the book keeps describing.

Chaurice, which is the ingredient you will actually have to solve The book gives its own recipe on p. 71: 4 lb lean fresh pork, 2 lb fat pork, 2 large onions, a clove of garlic, cayenne and chili pepper and red pepper, salt, black pepper, thyme, parsley, two bay leaves and allspice, in sheep casings. It says the high seasoning “distinguishes the Creole sausage from all others” and that you should “not fear to have too much red pepper.” Fresh, not smoked — so andouille is not a substitute for it, though it is what most modern jambalayas use. Fresh Mexican chorizo is closer in texture and wrong in spice; a fresh hot Italian is closer in format and wrong in flavour. This is a good candidate for making yourself, the way the cudighi went.

Where the dish came from The book calls it Spanish-Creole and leaves it there. The usual derivation from Spanish paella by way of Louisiana rice is plausible and I have not verified it; the competing derivation of the name from Provençal jambalaia is also unverified here. NOT FOUND: anything in this book dating the dish or naming a source.

Still open Whether a no-tomato Jambalaya à la Créole is a New Orleans city-Creole norm of 1901 or one household’s version that got into print. One cookbook is one cookbook. The earlier editions (1901, 1906, 1910) would be worth comparing to see whether the tomato was ever there and got removed, or never appeared.