The goal of this blog to highlight the history of "pecan candy." If you did not know, "pecan candy" is the term many African-Americans from New Orleans use to refer to what is commonly known as praline. Another African-American term is "plarine." If you noticed the letters l and r have switched places. This came from the french-speaking Creoles (African-Americans) who were unable to pronounce praline.
I never used the term "praline" until I started my research a few years ago. The only reason I began using it was because when I spoke to people outside of the African-American community about "pecan candy" they had no idea what I was talking about. As a result , the term praline has slowly crept into my vocabulary. No matter what you call them: Pecan Candy, Plarine, or Praline, they are still delicious treats with an even more delicious history.
It's definitely African American or Afro-Créole Vernacular. White people adopted the language.
ReplyDelete@Mr. Suave, Thank you. As a Louisiana Cajun Créole myself, I can tell you that all of my New Orleans family said Plarine while my more rural family was more likely to use Praline. If they knew the real history, they would know that before the "American" Colonists came, everyone here had adopted the Créole Ethnicity and were doing pretty good about getting along as a community. It wasn't until they came along from up the East Coast and started causing problems that anybody here was even caring about race. They showed up and panicked because we had Black Mayors from Africa and Native "savages" running towns. In fact, when the Civil War came along, the Louisiana Créoles told them that was their fight, not ours, and refused to even get involved. People need to learn before they open their mouth. Black, white, red, yellow, used to not matter to us here. We were swamp family and that was that.
ReplyDeleteUntil we were Americanized we never knew a racial divide.
ReplyDeleteNot to mention, why does everybody always assume it was because somebody "couldn't" pronounce a word correctly? Like this was some African-American POC inability to speak properly Maybe consider that some people just learned it a different way. Our language has many dialects from town to town and neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the state. It's like being from London. You can pin point where someone is from within a few blocks if you really know the area just by how we talk. People need to quick acting like it's somehow wrong because some people say things different. Variety makes life more fun y'all.
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