Ode to Chauvin

By: The Local Palate

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**In her new cookbook, Mosquito Supper Club, Melissa Martin pays homage to the vanishing South Louisiana community she calls home**

The first thing I think when someone refers to the states below the Mason-Dixon Line is “that’s the North.” As a child in one of the southernmost parts of Louisiana, I didn’t understand the concept of the American South. To me, everything above Baton Rouge was the North. I grew up with leftover gumbo in the fridge and an oil rig drilling just outside my window. I didn’t know it was special to eat cold crabs for breakfast and be surrounded by water and bayous, ibis and pelicans, receding land and dying cypress trees. I also didn’t know I was Cajun.

I was born and raised in South Louisiana in Terrebonne Parish. Terre bonne means “good earth” in French, and situated as it is on delta soil, the parish is aptly named. The Terrebonne my dad remembers growing up in sounds like a fairytale land: cypress-and oak-lined waterways; squirrels jumping from tree to tree overhead; egrets, cranes, and herons hiding in hues of green, blue, and emerald.