Some Louisiana recipes that may or may not tempt you to eat up your weight in groceries

I love that the title of today's cookbook sounds like it should be a movie sequel title: River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping (The Junior League of Baton Rouge, Louisiana; the back of the title page says this is from the January 1976 fourth printing, but considering the first printing was in September 1976, I suspect this is from January 1977). I can almost picture a movie full of improbable car chases involving plots like Miss Luella trying to get her jambalaya to the church potluck before Miss Charlotte or Miss Blanche can serve those abominations that they brought last time.

I was of course also curious about what cooking in 1970s Louisiana looked like. Would it be full of Creole and Cajun flavors we traditionally associate with Louisiana, or would it be full of gelatin and endless canned foodstuff (usually including at least one can of cream-of-something soup) like seemingly every other regional cookbook from the 1970s?

The answer, as I of course should have anticipated, was "Yes."

There is a Crawfish Pie...

...loaded with the holy trinity of onion, bell pepper, and celery, the crawfish of course, red pepper, fresh parsley, and a can of cream of celery soup!

Often, the book offers multiple options for preparing a dish. For those who want to use fresh ingredients when they can, there's a Hot Sausage and Shrimp Jambalaya.

It uses fresh onions and parsley, but offers choices for other ingredients: fresh garlic or garlic powder, fresh or frozen shrimp, canned tomatoes or additional water for the no-tomatoes-in-jambalaya crowd. 

Or there is the Quick and Delicious Jambalaya, for those in a hurry...

...featuring ground beef, shrimp, the holy trinity, Tabasco, and TWO cans of soup (cream of chicken and onion).

There's plenty of gelatin, but a lot has seafood in it.

At least Florence Culpepper's Molded Shrimp Salad starts with unflavored gelatin-- not lemon! The shrimp have to mingle with canned tomato soup, cream cheese, and mayonnaise, though... Plus the holy trinity, pickles, olives, Worcestershire, and Tabasco, so it seems hard to escape canned soup, in any case.

Also of interest, I found a recipe cut from some old newspaper (from a time when you could buy a bedspread for $5.66 on sale, according to the ad on the back) tucked into this book. I was a bit surprised a Louisiana cook would really save a Creole recipe from Hunt's, but there it was:

It seems pretty plain compared to a lot of the other recipes, but maybe the simplicity was part of its appeal? (Or maybe it was the cost of "only 62¢ per serving"?)

And there are at least a few recipes that feel almost midwestern, like Seafood Macaroni Casserole. Maybe this book just has room for everything.

From the macaroni and cheese dinner to the cream of chicken soup and canned seafood, this seems more like something I'd find in a regional cookbook from Nebraska or Illinois than Louisiana... but I guess the midwestern version would have been more likely to use canned tuna than canned shrimp.

In any case, this is an interesting look at how Louisiana cooks were adapting older recipes and cooking styles to newer ingredients (and to families where nobody's primary job was cooking). Now I kind of wonder whether the conflict in the movie version of River Road Recipes II: A Second Helping would stem from Miss Luella's disapproval of the other cooks using canned condensed soups and/or other convenience foods in their recipes, or whether she'd just be upset that they were using the wrong brands of convenience foods. It's hard to tell...