Cajun and Creole Food: Cajuns

In 1755, the French Acadians, who first settled in Canada in the seventeenth century, fell victim to the colonial struggle for control of North America and the Mississippi River and were ordered by the British to leave Canada. Thousands returned to France, while others wandered the Eastern Seaboard in search of a welcoming place. The first Acadians arrived in Louisiana around 1765. Over the next forty years, several thousand settlers would make the colony home, many having passed through Saint Domingue on their way. Some scholarship suggests that about half of Louisiana’s Acadians can trace their roots to coastal areas of France, such as Brittany and Normandy.