The story of Creole, Cajun food comes alive at the New Orleans School of Cooking

The talk is flowing faster than the Mississippi River. New Orleans School of Cooking's chef de cuisine, Matt Guillory, is giving a potted history of Louisiana's food before we make like chefs ourselves.

We're tucked within a renovated 19th-century molasses warehouse in the city's historic French Quarter to make a very New Orleans meal – roasted sweet potato and tasso ham bisque, Cajun Benedict topped with crawfish cream sauce, and bananas Foster – but first we mix ourselves a cocktail and take in Guillory's fascinating history lesson.

Creole food, he explains, is city food while Cajun food is from the country. "It's basically French peasant food – a lot of one-pot meals, very simple fare, it's good for whatever you've got if you're cleaning out your fridge or pantry," says Guillory, who describes his city-country background as "a foot in both worlds".

"It's a lot of brown food because if you cook it in one pot, it just turns brown. It's not very pretty, like the food of the city. Here in the city we like the plate to look nice and cook everything separate.

"But in the country, you throw it all in the pot, serve it with a lot of rice and gravy. I grew up eating rice and gravy – I didn't realise that was weird until I started meeting people from everywhere else."

Before the French founded New Orleans in 1718, "we had Native Americans first and they were already eating good," Guillory says. "They had access to all the saltwater seafood out in the Gulf – crabs, shrimp, oysters, fish – and all the wild game out in the swamp, the ducks, the bears, the alligators, the possums, and all the plants too, the bell pepper, pecan, sassafras, sunflower.

"Sassafras powder is used to thicken soup. If you get a filé gumbo, that's been thickened up with sassafras leaf. They had a lot of agriculture too. Corn, squash and beans are the three sisters – they grow together because they help one another out."

The French brought African slaves to their territory to develop the land and grow crops. They, too, influenced what was in the cooking pot, slipping in okra and black-eyed peas. They liked to cook rice, meat and vegetables in the same pan – a dish that evolved into the city's jambalaya.