上周,我在纽约发现自己运行looking for a particular spice blend: Tony Chachere's. I tried to dispatch the person who lives with me, who was in Michigan at the time, to look for it in the local grocery stores, but I had a hard time explaining myself on the phone. I wasn't saying the name right, he wasn't understanding it. Several days later I found success (confidential to New Yorkers: Zabar's, toward the back, near the coffee) and, triumphant, texted him a picture of my quarry.
"Oh, you just meantCajun seasoning," he said. "I didn't know it had another name."
That's how synonymous Tony Chachere ("sash-uh-ree," "sa-shur-ee," and/or "sash-er-ee," all according to the manufacturer) is with his most famous product, a Louisiana-style blend of black and red peppers, chile powder, and garlic that counts legions of fans who sprinkle it on gumbo, on red beans and rice, on anything involving seafood. (Package instructions: "Use it like salt. When it is salty enough, it's seasoned to perfection.") It's here forcrawfish boils,jambalayas,étouffée. It's here for more prosaic purposes too: Until it ran out, we had a package we'd always take with us camping, which is but one venue where a solid spice blend really comes in handy. Plus, it's great on popcorn. As American regional seasonings go, Tony Chachere is right up there with Old Bay.
Tony Chachere—the man, not the spice mix—was from Opelousas, a little town in Cajun Louisiana where he was born in 1905. Before he was developing flavors, he was developing elixirs; Chachere's career was in the drug business, first as a traveling salesman and then as a wholesaler. According to a biography of Chachere in a reissue of his 1972Cajun Country Cookbook, he "formulated over 100 products back in the 1930s and '40s, most famous of which are his elixir 'Mamou Cough Syrup' and insect spray 'Bon Soir Bug.'"
He kept a passion for food, and wroteCajun Country Cookbookupon his retirement, drawing on meals he'd had during his travels and a period in the 1950s when he was a member of a men's cooking fraternity in Opelousas. The book features dishes made with an impressive number of small game—rabbit, nutria, armadillo, squirrel—plus the usual larger creatures, seafood and vegetables, and an array of traditional Creole and Cajun preparations. Plus some of Chachere's own creations: crawfish egg rolls, for instance. Chachere also seems to have been an early adopter of the deep-fried turkey.
The book "came about at a time when people in this area refrained from calling themselves Cajuns, as the term back then had the connotation of 'backward' or 'countrified,'" that biography notes. "Tony had unknowingly made a bold statement about his culture, a whole decade before 'Cajun' was a hot national phenomenon," substantially popularized bychef Paul Prudhomme. Soon after the publication of the cookbook Chachere started selling his spice blend, these days marketed as "Tony Chachere's Original Creole Seasoning."
(Of the difference between "Cajun" and "Creole," there are many opinions. "Cajun is very old, French country cooking," Prudhomme wrote. Creole "began in New Orleans and is a mixture of the traditions of French, Spanish, Italian, American Indian, African and other ethnic groups"—city cooking, he thought. In her 2003 bookBeyond Gumbo,cookbook author and food historian Jessica B. Harris writes that Creole, beyond its associations with New Orleans, encompasses "the food of the southern Atlantic rim," and in factBeyond Gumboincludes recipes not only from the Southern United States but from Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and elsewhere. It's food from a profusion of cultures intermingling—"the world's original fusion food," she writes. But that's a story for another day.)
Tony Chachere died in 1995, shy of his 90th birthday and just a week after becoming the first inductee into the Louisiana Chefs' Hall of Fame. His famous seasoning mix remains available...well, at many places, if not exactly everywhere. But it's definitely worth searching out.
