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Spatula Diaries: Five Louisiana food festivals you can’t miss this spring


Springtime in Louisiana signals festivalslots of them. There’s no better expression of our shared sense of food, culture and recreation than the weekend fest, where you can run a 5K in the morning, sample the handiwork of cook-off participants during the day, dance to live music in the evening and return home stupid tired and plied with satisfaction that night.

Yes, some of the biggies take place this weekend, including the first weekend of the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and Festival International de Louisiane (read tips on those two festivals from 225‘s April issue), but scads of others will also take place in the state’s inimitable small towns that are worth your time and energy.

Here’s a sample of what’s coming up:

Etouffee Festival

Arnaudville
April 22-24
The Town of Arnaudville has become a magnet for artists, musicians and Francophiles in recent years, and it’s also home to the annual Etouffee Festival in which determined teams cook all manner of etouffee using wild game, seafood, vegetables, and yep, classic crawfish. The Mayor’s Etouffee Cook-off takes place between 8:30 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Saturday. The three-day festival is organized by and benefits St. John Francis Regis Catholic Church.

Lecompte Pie Festival

Lecompte
April 22-24
The signature mile-high meringue at the famed Central Louisiana restaurant Lea’s Lunch Room in Lecompte has earned this small town its own pie-centric community food festival. In typical Louisiana fashion, expect a court of pageant-sashed lovely ladies, live music and, in this case, more fresh baked pies than is safe to consume. Like the organizers say, a slice of Louisiana is waiting for you.

Contraband Days

Lake Charles
April 28-May 8
There are more than 75 festivals in the Lake Charles area throughout the year, including the family-friendly Contraband Days Pirate Festival, a two-week celebration in April and May that plays on the city’s legacy as a haven for legitimate swashbuckling baddies like Jean Lafitte. The festival is replete with food, crafts, arts, music and a whole lot of zany water sports and activities along the lake downtown.

Cochon de Lait Festival

Mansura
May 12-15

Mansura’s Cochon de Lait Festival draws thousands of attendees for a four-day event that features local cooks slow-roasting whole hogs over pecan and hickory wood, booths and a dance party in the streets of downtown Mansura set to live roots music played by regional bands. On Sunday morning, the slow-roasted pork is finally served in the communal pig roast known as the “Grand Feast.”

Louisiana Peach Festival

Ruston
June 24-25
Things get peachy in north Louisiana at this large festival, one of the state’s largest and oldest celebrations of agriculture. The fest features peachy royalty, a peach dish cook-off, quilts and fiber arts, fine arts, a scavenger hunt and, this year, a peach cobbler-eating contest that nets a $1,000 prize.


Maggie Heyn Richardson is regular 225 contributor and the author of Hungry for Louisiana, An Omnivore’s Journey. Reach her at [email protected].