Sometimes, Louisiana culture seems to run countercyclical to mainstream America. So it goes that, with Labor Day well behind us and with others putting away outdoor summertime pleasures like so many pool toys, people here are wheeling out their grills and wiping down their heirloom cast iron.
The reason isn’t the calendar, and it really isn’t even the temperature. It’s football.
The return of football signals the start of the Louisiana’s great outdoor cooking season, in all its generous, gregarious, sometimes competitive glory.
So what if the relative humidity remains as thick as barbecue sauce? The football faithful are ready to party, and many are ready to cook.
It’s just football, right? Just a game. There’s enough hoopla around it already. But in Louisiana it’s more than what happens on the field. This is an important time in the life of our community. We’re coming off the slump of summer. It’s a time to reconnect. Everything we live for in this region lays ahead.
For those who channel this feeling through football, it’s time for tribal rites of the season. Of course this makes it to the table, and the backyards, patios, sidewalks and tailgates.
In Louisiana, people cook for football the way those in other lands cook for holidays. The July Fourth barbecue blowout? This has nothing on the weekly holiday of football around here.
It does not hurt that many of the traditional dishes of Louisiana are at their best cooked outdoors. Stands and gas rings and huge round-belly black pots are deployed for jambalaya, sauce piquant, fried fish. Grills are racked with butter-spurting Gulf oysters alongside all-American burgers and wieners and wings.
There’s no guarantee that a game’s outcome will make us happy. But the framework for coming together and reconnecting, the restorative moments of leisure and socializing when our friends and family are on the same page, this is how football ensures time well spent. New Orleans would not be New Orleans if food wasn’t a central part of that.
So, whatever the football gods have in store for us on the gridiron, Louisiana culture has already guaranteed something great on the plate.
