Soul, Creole & Cajun Foods

This Soul, Creole & Cajun Foods lesson, activities and lab is a collaboration of ideas from me and Arlene DeJoy-Meckes (from Teachers Pay Teachers). We teamed up to create this cross-curricular resource as a way to add ethnic diversity to your food classes. There are many teaching possibilities for this as it could be taught as a stand alone lesson, connected to a regional foods unit, when exploring the South, or even as an example of a cultural influence when teaching about food choices.

Set

  • Begin the lesson by giving students the KWL like chart to see what students know or want to know about each type of cuisine. Note: some students may know nothing at all about these types of food cuisines.
  • Introduce students to the various foods by reading the actual children’s books or listening to them via YouTube. The titles include, Soul Food Sunday, Chef Creole, and The Cajun Cornbread Boy. As they listen to the stories, they jot down the foods associated with each on the provided chart. You can go over this as a class to be sure students have classified each correctly.

Materials

Activities

  • Provide students with the background information on Soul, Creole, and Cajun Foods, reading together as a class.
  • After the reading, students answer the corresponding follow-up questions.
  • Students compare the similarities and differences between the cuisines in a Tri-Venn diagram as well as create acrostic poems about each, applying what they’ve learned. The poems make a great bulletin board with the South and Louisiana and their Cuisine as the focal point.
  • To expose students to the flavors associated with each cuisine, we’ve included an optional lab using one type of food: macaroni and cheese. Each kitchen prepares the macaroni according to their assigned food type (Cajun, Creole or Soul Food). Afterwards, students taste test and compare to see not only similarities and differences among the flavors within the same food, but also select their favorite. 

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