Hearn, Lafcadio

In writing La cuisine créole (Creole Cookery), Patricio LafcadioTessima Carlos Hearn (1850–1905)—journalist, sometime novelist, and unsuccessful restaurateur—tapped into and celebrated New Orleans’s heterogeneous culture. The landmark 1885 cookery book was the first to describe the cosmopolitan Creole cuisine, which blends the characteristics of the American, French, Spanish, Italian, West Indian, and Mexican traditions.

At first glance Lafcadio Hearn seemed an unlikely cookbook author. Born on a Greek island in 1850, the son of a minor British bureaucrat, he was reared by a rigidly religious aunt in Dublin, Ireland. Small in stature (five feet three), extremely nearsighted, one eye virtually blind and the other bulged to double normal size, he was frail, often ill, and almost constantly in pain. His extreme shyness and often irritable personality are thought to have influenced his morbid, gothic interests and writings. But Hearn’s timidity also made him a keen and unobtrusive observer.