In one sense, music is short-lived. You sing a song, you fiddle a tune, and it’s over in less than four minutes. But in another sense, music lives longer than any of us. Like fire that passes from one candle to another, the performer sparks the listener, the teacher sparks the student, and on and on it goes.

You won’t find them in stores, they grow among thorns, and who knows what wild creatures you might startle with your rubber boots when you trudge through the vines to collect them, but there’s just no substitute for the taste of wild dewberries, and this cobbler is their perfect showcase.

Gammy’s recipe for tarte à la bouillie combines an extra-thick, pudding-like custard filling with a cookie-like sweet dough pie crust.

There’s no sign on the road alerting you to its presence, and driving through the sparsely inhabited area on the outskirts of Catahoula, which is covered with sugar cane like much of the rest of the parish, the rural landscape calls no particular attention to itself. You’d never suspect that remnants of a prehistoric society lie buried just below the surface.

I spent the coldest night of the year at one of the oldest buildings in the parish . . . and I loved it

Initiative to revive native population of Louisiana irises on Bayou Teche gathers momentum

If autumn in St. Martin Parish is synonymous with sugar cane harvest season, then gateau sirop, a spiced cake made from cane syrup, is surely the most autumnal dessert.

My Uncle Cheese has been catching crawfish one way or another since 1938. In February, March and April of this year, I tagged along as he went crawfishing in the Atchafalaya Basin, and I photographed the entire process from bait to boil.

Fig pinwheel cookies are by far my favorite use for fig preserves. Unlike other recipes where the figs get lost in the dough, the spiral shape of this cookie highlights the fig and achieves the perfect proportion of texture, chew and crunch. If you’re a fan of fig preserves, you’re going to love this recipe.

Because of their tartness, blackberries, in my opinion, are best eaten in a cobbler or in a pie, rather than right off the vine. So when blackberries came into season recently, and I found myself with a bucketful, I went looking for a pie recipe

The story behind the contest to name Evangeline’s Daughter

I had heard of black bears in the Basin. I never imagined I would see one in Catahoula. But there it was, two Thanksgivings ago, toddling across the turn-row of the cane-field, so close I could see its nose.

I stopped for a snowball in Henderson last summer, the bow of my bright blue kayak poking up from the bed of my truck, and by the stares it got from the people in line, you’d have sworn I’d just come from Alaska. “What is that?” “Where do you go with that thing?” “What do you do when you get there?” The owner of the snowball stand, serving me my coconut snowball, leaned out onto the counter to get a closer look.

Running a restaurant can be a game of cold numbers. The St. John Restaurant in downtown St. Martinville goes through two thousand pounds of cucumbers every year and three thousand pounds of tomatoes. Thousands of heads of lettuce and tens of thousands of peppers.

The St. Martinville Garden Club will be celebrating the recently renovated Evangeline Oak Park with events scheduled throughout the month of April. For the first time in the city’s history, over the course of five events, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie will be read in its entirety, beginning and ending under the legendary oak.

The official state wildflower of Louisiana is the Louisiana iris, and who, having seen her purple petals in person, would deny her her celebrity status? Some even trace the roots of the fleur-de-lis symbol, so central to Louisiana’s mythology, back to a wild iris, fittingly, and not a lily. And the spectrum of her petals befits her grandeur, too: purple, purple-red, purple-black, purple-blue. Horticulturists create hybrids in her honor. But this is a story about another Louisiana wildflower. She isn’t an official anything. In fact, she’s considered a lowly weed.

Some call her Evangeline’s daughter, or Evangeline’s sister, but she has no official name. That is about to change.