Chief Thomas Dardar of the Houma Nation stood over a kettle of boiling oil at the New Orleans Jazz Fest, gently tending fry bread dough as it cooked. With canola oil in the kettle heated to 350 degrees, the temperature was rising rapidly in the Fry Bread demonstration tent at the Native American Village.
"He lets them cook a couple of minutes on each side and turns them over and over until they're a nice golden brown on each side," said John Silver, a member of the Houma Nation Tribal Council. "After they drain and cool a little, then you can put some honey or powdered sugar on them, depending on how sweet you like it."
According to Silver, every American Indian culture has a variation on fry bread, a staple that is cooked in oil but was baked in earthen ovens long ago. Some are savory, some are sweet. But none of the tribes use the term for fry bread that the Houma do: gallette.
"We're a French speaking tribe and a lot of French terms turn up in our language," Silver explained. "In Louisiana, we first lived in the area around Angola, but as the French and Americans came in, we gradually migrated south toward the coast."
The tribe gradually began incorporating French into their tribal language until their current tongue, "Houma French," appeared.
Marie Francoise Crouch, a Frenchwoman who befriended the tribe years ago, said she has been studying their language for years and feels she has made an important discovery: Houma French is derived from the language of the early French settlers of New Orleans and the Louisiana territory, rather than from inter-mingling with the Acadians from Canada who settled in south Louisiana in the late 1700s.
"You can tell the difference in the terms, the sentence structure, the inflection," Crouch said.
Although the Houma call their fry bread "gallette," a French term, its recipe and method of preparation is the same as most fry breads.
"In the back of the tent, we mix the self-rising flour with vanilla, eggs and milk, until it has a bread dough consistency. Then we cover it and let it rest for a while so the yeast can take effect," Silver said.
The dough is then divided into balls and put on wax-paper, where they rest again. During that step, the balls re-form themselves into patties.
"The step after that is very important," Silver warned. "The flat dough is patted down to a regular thickness, then removed from the tray and stretched, then patted down again. This step ensures that the dough fries evenly and that there are no air pockets inside.
In Silver's home town of Dulac, Louisiana, most residents are Houma tribe members, some of the 17,000 populating a six parish region in southeast Louisiana.
"Our culture is matriarchal," Silver added, "so that means Chief Dardar is our first male chief in more than 20 years."