Despite building my entire personality (and career) around food, there was once a time (two weeks ago) when I thought "Cajun" and "Creole" were two words for the same food. Spicy, one-pot, rice-related. I was…so wrong (and adequately embarrassed by my confusion in front of my friend’s Louisiana-born and bred parents).

This week, after copious, boots on the ground (I wish. It was more like, fingers on the internet), papercut-ridden research, I'm sharing the history of Louisiana cuisine, the core ingredients that make it up, and the TLDR on my favorite magazine to scour for recipes.

Cajun and Creole cooking both start with what Louisiana cooks call "the trinity": onion, celery, and bell pepper, sautéed together as the flavor base for almost everything (it's essentially a French mirepoix, just swapped for what grew well in Louisiana).

From there, the two cuisines split.

Creole food is "city food." It developed in New Orleans out of French, Spanish, African, and Caribbean influence, and tends to use tomatoes and more elaborate technique.

Cajun food is "country food," developed in the rural parishes by French-speaking Acadian settlers who'd been exiled from Canada. It's rustic, smoky, and famously tomato-free. That’s the main sticking point. If you ask a Cajun cook, they'll tell you flat out, if it's got tomatoes in it, it's not “Cajun gumbo.”

The word "gumbo" is a giveaway to how many hands built this cuisine. Most linguists trace it back to West African words for okra, brought over by enslaved cooks who used the vegetable as a thickener. Meanwhile, the Choctaw contributed filé powder (ground sassafras leaves) as an alternative thickener, and the French brought the technique of the roux, that slow-cooked flour-and-fat base that gives gumbo its depth. Louisiana cooks just cooked their roux darker and longer than the French ever did, which is where that nutty, almost-burnt flavor comes from.

The first written record of gumbo showed up during the early 1800s, when a French travel writer described eating it at a Cajun house party along the Mississippi. That same year, gumbo also turned up at a formal Louisiana Purchase gala, served to dignitaries. Same dish, two completely different rooms. Gumbo has never cared about class lines, and it still doesn't. It’s the great unifier and is one of the only dishes I can think of that's genuinely beloved by everyone from home cooks to James Beard winners.

Jambalaya, gumbo's rice-forward cousin, tells a similar split story. "Red" jambalaya, built on tomatoes, has Spanish Creole roots and is more of a city dish. "Brown" jambalaya skips the tomatoes entirely and gets its color from browned meat and caramelized onions instead. Tomatoes were simply harder to come by out in Acadiana than they were in New Orleans, so the cooks worked with what they had.

Louisiana Cookin' describes itself as celebrating the rich flavors and bold stories of Louisiana's unique culture, cuisine, and travel, which feels pretty accurate. Louisiana cuisine is truly one of a kind, with its mix of Cajun and Creole histories interspersed with Southern and French flavors, a distinction that matters enormously if you’ve ever had a real gumbo and compared it to the vague brown…stew (?) that’s passed off as gumbo anywhere else.

The magazine covers the full spectrum from the OGs (jambalaya, étouffée, red beans and rice, beignets) to the less-talked-about regional specialties. Each issue (published six times a year) contains more than 50 recipes with input from both professional chefs and home cooks, which means that it touches on both the technique and the DIY reality check, so you know what you’re getting yourself into when you want to make the recipe yourself!

If any of that made you want to actually cook something instead of just appreciating it from a drool-worthy, historical distance, we're lucky enough that Louisiana Cookin’ has shared some of their best recipes directly on Pepper, so you can get a taste (pun intended) of them right away!