Dirty rice

Dirty rice is a spicy and flavorful Cajun rice dish made from white rice. It gets its “dirty” color from finely chopped chicken livers and ground beef or pork. The chicken livers give it such a deep flavor. Since they are finely chopped, the overall dish doesn’t have much of a chicken liver flavor.

Dirty Rice is a spicy and meaty rice dish that just may become your favorite rice dish of all time.

Usually Dirty rice is served as a side dish, but with all that meaty goodness added to it, it’s tempting to eat it as a main dish. The flavor of Dirty rice starts with the Holy Trinity- onion, celery, and bell pepper. Garlic, dried thyme, and a few teaspoons of Cajun seasoning round out the seasonings.

The earliest versions of this dish trace back to the Antebellum era of southern Louisiana in the late 1700s and the 1800s and falls under the category of Soul food. During this period, the individuals working the slave trade would bring back crops from Africa, along with captives who knew how to cultivate them in order to grown them on plantations back in the colonies. These crops included sweet potatoes, okra, peanuts, kidney and lima beans, watermelon, and rice. Captive farmers from the West African Coast were brought to Louisiana as slaves for their ability to cultivate rice in the marshes and bayous and as a result, rice plantations grew to be a very large and profitable industry for Louisiana plantation owners.

The plentiful nature of rice made it very cheap to come by, thus it was a food allotted to slaves as well since it was an essential part of their diet in Africa. Rice was one of the limited foods slaves were permitted to eat on plantations, along with corn, beans, sorghum, succotash, and greens. In addition to these crops, slaves were also given the "undesirable" cuts of the meat served to the plantations owners; the portions that would otherwise be thrown away. This generally included the intestines, neck, feet, head, ears, ribcage, tail, and tongue of the hogs, cow, and chickens present on the plantations. Through these options, slaves had to create meals to feed themselves and their families.