SMOTHERED & STEWED By Ken Wells Photos by Romney Caruso
you need a roux to make a stew.
W
hen I was growing up on the banks of Bayou Black, my mother made an amazingly tasty dish she called smothered potatoes. To cook a dish big enough to feed our family—six boys, my parents and my Wells grandparents who lived with us—she would caramelize six to eight large yellow onions, chopped, in a big pot. Then she would throw in her diced potatoes (about double the volume of onions) and stir everything together.
She’d add chicken stock, enough to cover the mixture, and bring everything to a boil. Then, she would lower the heat to a simmer and cover the pot. The dish required a lot of attention. She would remove the cover from time to time, stir like crazy, and, as the potatoes absorbed the chicken stock, add more stock to keep everything moist and prevent the concoction from sticking to the bottom of the pot. Toward the end, she would add her seasonings—salt, pepper, a dash of Tabasco or cayenne pepper, maybe a little garlic, parsley, thyme and a bay leaf or two. Her goal was to cook the potatoes to a consistency just north of mashed potatoes. She had a variation of this, sometimes adding cut green beans to the recipe and cooking them down with the potatoes to a delicious tenderness. Neither variation ever failed to please. What made this dish “smothered”? Well, for my mom, a Toups by birth from a French-speaking Thibodaux family that cooked Cajun food, the explanation was that the onions made it smothered.
ARROW-CIRCLE-RIGHT You can use sliced bread to absorb and blot extra grease or to skim the top of a stew, soup or gumbo, the same way you use bread to sop up gravy.
mouse-pointer STEWED CHICKEN RECIPE ONLINE AT W W W.ROUSES.COM 16
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Of course, there’s another explanation for why this dish is called smothered potatoes: the cooking technique itself. Cajun and Creole food experts describe “smothering” as a variation of braising meat, seafood or vegetables. Like braising, smothering happens in a closed environment (in this case, a lidded pot or Dutch oven) with plenty of water, broth or wine, and the process is a long one; smothered meat dishes often require four or more hours of low heat and high patience. You could, as some do, call smothering a kind of “stove-top braising.” Stove-top braising? My mom would’ve looked at anyone who used that term and said, “What’s that, cher?” Call it what you will, the fact remains that smothered potatoes (and chicken, and pork, and just
about anything else) are delicious and quintessentially Southern. We eat so well in the Gumbo Belt because we cook so well. But even our professional chefs admit that there is a fair amount of befuddlement about our terminology, especially when it comes to beloved dishes and styles of cooking—stews, fricassees, etouffees, and various smothered food recipes. Do you know the difference between a crawfish stew and a crawfish etouffee? And since etouffee is a bona fide French word meaning “smothered” or “suffocated,” why can’t it be called smothered crawfish? (Answer: It probably could be; it’s just not done.) And what about the difference between a chicken stew and a chicken fricassee? Again, my mother spoke French and cooked a mean chicken stew with a dark roux. But I never heard the term fricassee used in our house or our kitchen. I decided I needed help to clarify this confusion, so I consulted two of my favorite chefs and people, Pat Mould and Randy Cheramie. Pat is as rooted as a cypress tree in South Louisiana food culture. He’s a Southwest Louisiana native who has served as a chef for two of Lafayette’s renowned Creole-Cajun eateries, Café Vermillion and Charley G’s, and for years was chief organizer of the city’s annual Festival Acadiens et Creoles, which has a huge foodie component. He is widely credited with inventing a much-copied version of smoked duck and Andouille gumbo. Randy also has impeccable South Louisiana cuisine cred. He is a Golden Meadow native who for 20 years owned and operated Randolph’s, a South Lafourche fine-dining restaurant founded by his father in 1946. Since 1999, he has been a mainstay at the Chef John Folse Culinary Institute on the Nicholls State University campus where he’s taught everything from classical French cuisine to perfecting the Cajun roux. (A man of many talents, he also ran the joint for a few years.) I asked Pat about the chicken stew/ fricassee confusion. “There’s really no rhyme or reason as to why some people call it a stew and some call it a fricassee. I go back and forth on it. For instance, when I do shrimp I call it a stew, and when it’s chicken I call it a fricassee—and
PHOTO BY ROMNEY CARUSO
