The smell of gumbo and cornbread wafted through the fourth floor of the Bissell Building on Thursday, as three graduate students in U of T’s museum studies program offered up a hot lunch for $4. Alicia Cherayil, Erin Offord, and Zella Llerena have been stationed at Bissell every Thursday since last November to pay for their plane tickets to New Orleans, where they will display their exhibit, Acadian to Cajun: From Migration to Commercialization. Next week will be their final session.
The exhibit was conceived for a final-year course in the museum studies Master’s program. Llerena came up with the idea after interning at the Food and Beverage Museum last summer. She wondered how she could show the connection between Canada and New Orleans.
“We want to show how Cajun food evolved, so how it started with Acadian food in Nova Scotia and how it became the Cajun food of today,” said Offord.
Llerena explained that the Acadians, who ate mainly barley, turnips, and cabbage, were exiled from Acadia by the British. They then immigrated to Louisiana where their diet changed to foods such as alligator, crawfish, jambalaya, and roux.
“Cajun food is now a multi-billion-dollar industry worldwide,” Llerena added. “When people think of Cajun food, they think of ingredients like cayenne pepper, but it’s more complicated than that.”
Professors Matthew Brower and Jennifer Carter oversaw the project. “At the beginning of the term, students will devise their own exhibition project or major research paper,” Carter said. “[The initial idea for the exhibition project] starts with an instinct, a hunch, and sometimes a curatorial premise, and then the students have to figure out how to express these ideas in text panels and through pictures.”
The Acadian to Cajun exhibit will add to exhibits that show the history of food in Texas, the holistic aspect of Louisiana cuisine, and the food Elvis ate. It will include 10 alcoves that contain different text panels and pictures, each alcove describing a different period in the evolution of Acadian to Cajun cuisine. The last panels will discuss the future of Cajun food as a result of globalization. A table at the centre of the room will display Cajun-related objects.
The group is also looking forward to having notable guests, including acclaimed Cajun artist George Rodrigue, creator of the blue dog series of paintings, at the opening of their exhibit.
They also hope to have a Cajun chef cook some food so that attendees can sample the food that is discussed in their exhibit.
“Programming is one of the educational forms that an exhibition can take,” said Carter. “Sometimes it isn’t enough to just create an exhibition. If you can supplement it, that is excellent.”
