Calas

Calas are fried rice cakes, sugared for use as breakfast bread in New Orleans. They were made and sold by African American women from wooden bowls carried on top of their heads, mostly in the second half of the nineteenth century. Recipes and references at the end of that period in The Picayune’s Creole Cook Book (1901) and La Cuisine Creole (1903) by Celestine Eustis are nostalgic in tone, recording the street cry, “Bel calas tout chauds.” The first printed recipe is for “callers” in the 1885 Creole Cookery, by the Christian Women’s Exchange of New Orleans—that is, unless one counts two similar recipes for “rice puffs” in the 1847 The Carolina Housewife. Carolina-style rice cookery was taken up wholesale in Louisiana when rice began to be grown there in the 1880s.