Lafayette, Louisiana: What authentic Cajun food is really like

You know Cajun food, right? Cajun chicken – that ubiquitous, vaguely spicy pub-grub offering. Goes well with chips. Seems authentic, not to mention flexible enough to be exported to all corners of the Earth.

"I've tried that stuff just for the sake of trying it and it's normally pretty gross," says Marie Ducote with a wave of her hand. I'm talking to the founder of Cajun Food Tours aboard her bus in Lafayette, Louisiana. She is understandably irked by her region's inaccurate reputation. "There might be a little heat on some of our stuff but it gives Cajun food a bad name – people think it's going to be so hot, but it's not."

Lafayette sits in the centre of Acadiana, the official name of French Louisiana, home of the Cajuns and their distinctive food. Marie has made it her job is to educate visitors on the history of the region and its food during tours in a bus she bought and converted specifically for the purpose.

Because of the exportation of bad food masquerading as Cajun, she often has to calm guests' fears about how hot the food will be before they arrive. "Nothing we eat is so spicy that you have to sit there with a gallon of milk, but that's what people expect," she says. During peak season she leads two tours a day, darting around six Lafayette restaurants in just three hours, leaving the participants better informed, happier and considerably fatter than they were before getting on. Chicken is rarely on the menu at all.

In total, she works with 26 restaurants, to find a blend of dishes that people might have heard of (gumbo, jambalaya) and several which are equally important but less famous. Perhaps the best example of this is boudin, a precooked sausage popular throughout the region, made to individual recipes, some spicier than others, some using seafood, some using pork. As ravioli is in Italy or pasties are in Britain, so boudin is in Cajun country: a broadly agreed upon but ultimately customisable dish.

As the vowel-heavy, nasal sound suggests, its origin, like the Cajun people themselves, is French. At a time when the plight of refugees generates global headlines, the Cajun story seems as relevant today as it did during the Le Grand Dérangement of 1755 – the Great Upheaval, when French Acadians were forcibly deported from Canada by the conquering British Empire.

Fleeing south, these persecuted Catholics scattered through nascent America, many having to continue all the way to French colonies in the Caribbean, before seemingly useless, swampy land was made available to them in what is now Louisiana. Along the way, the mangling of "Acadian" led to "a Cajun", and so their fate was altered once more.