"Calas, calas! Belle calas tout chaud! Belle calas tout chaud!" yelled the woman with a basket of pillow-soft doughy goodness wrapped in cloth on a woven basket balancing atop her head.
She was a Calas woman in the 1760s in New Orleans. Calas is the arguably better-than-beignets French Quarter street food that gets overlooked but has deep ties to our history.
The woman's Calas call translates to "beautiful calas, very hot!" Her dessert is made from a batter of rice, eggs, and sugar, then deep-fried in hot oil until golden brown and dusted with confectioner's sugar.
Sunday was the only day off that enslaved people had under French rule. The Calas women used their day to feed the streets and stack their money—many purchased freedom for themselves and their families using the money they earned.
We know that culinary traditions followed our ancestors across the Atlantic. Historians believe that making Calas might be traceable to the rice-growing parts of West Africa, like Ghana, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, where our people enslaved in Louisiana came from.
Today, we can take a delicious bite into history with HarvestNOLA, a local organization working on food security issues in New Orleans, which operates a pop-up calas cart to keep this culinary custom alive.
We've always used our talents to create new realities. Let's continue to imagine and shape the world we deserve creatively.