If you like spicy dishes or fried rice, you will enjoy “Dirty Rice.” Dirty Rice is a traditional Louisiana Creole dish. It is made from white rice which gets a “dirty” color from being cooked with small pieces of pork, beef or chicken, bell pepper, celery, onion, and Cajun-style spices. Dirty rice is common in the Creole regions of Southern Louisiana. Recipe Below.
When I first married my Georgia-born husband decades ago, he asked if I knew how to make Dirty Rice. “Dirty Rice? What the heck is Dirty Rice.” He soon made a batch and I was hooked. Now it has become a common filling main dish in our household. I usually make a large batch on a Sunday and we eat the rice all week long.
The dish can be traced back to the Antebellum era of Southern Louisiana in the late 1700s. Enslaved individuals from the coast of West Africa, who included rice in many aspects of their diets, were brought to Louisiana. They adapted their rice dishes to what was available to their families. Rice combined with the organ meat and animal parts provided by the slave owners, were the primary components of dirty rice. The meat was diced and then mixed in with the rice mixture.