29 louisianacookin.com
LOUISIANA
FOODWAYSTHE FRENCH AND SPANISH INFLUENCE
on Louisiana’s culture and cuisine is evident, but
what many don’t realize is that German settlers also
made signifi cant contributions to those aspects of the
state’s traditions. In the early part of the 18th century,
Germans settled along the Mississippi River in southern
Louisiana, about 20 miles upriver from New Orleans
in what are now known as St. Charles and St. John the
Baptist Parishes. Th is area became known as Côte des
Allemands, or the German Coast.
Beginning in the 1720s, families from the Rhineland
area of Germany came to the Louisiana colony in the
hope of fi nding a better life, encouraged by propaganda
from John Law, a notable Scottish economist and director
of the Company of the Indies, which was granted a trade
monopoly in the territory for 25 years. In pamphlets
distributed in Germany, he described Louisiana as a place
with great soil that could raise four crops a year and land
“fi lled with gold, silver, copper, and lead mines.”
Around 10,000 Germans chose to immigrate to
Louisiana, but fewer than 2,000 completed the journey.
Th ose early settlers soon proved to have expert farming
skills. Th ey provided rice, vegetables, and other cash crops
to the New Orleans markets and, more than once, saved
the city from famine. Th e farming tradition is carried on
today by descendants of those settlers.
As the Germans and Acadians began to intermarry,
French culture and language became dominant on the
German Coast. In fact, since French was the language of
the time, many Cajun surnames popular today originatedCÔTE DES
ALLEMANDS
THE HERITAGE AND CULINARY TRADITIONS OF LOUISIANA’S GERMAN COAST