"This is an outstanding study of the formation and ingredients of traditional Louisiana culture using anthropology, geography, history, linguistics, and cooking. It is a conscious rejection of previous studies which racialized and divided the culture and properly defines it as layers of original cultures of Native Americans, Africans and Europeans merging to form the new Louisiana Creole at the heart of much of Louisiana, East Texas all the way to the West Coast of the USA. It properly and effectively rejects the widespread mythology assuming a separate, "white" Cadjan culture still too widespread in studies of Louisiana. Its' impact should be found in any study of the formation of the many fascinating regional cultures of the USA and indeed, much of the world."-Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, author-scholar, Africans In Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century