Every August, for almost a century, the Guadeloupe Islands celebrate the Fête des Cuisinières (Festival of Female Chefs) to honor their greatest bastions of Creole culinary tradition: female chefs.
Dressed in their traditional chef clothing, but with headscarves and aprons embroidered with a special emblems – a grill and a fish – they visit the St-Pierre and St-Paul Basilica to have baskets of food, flowers and cooking utensils blessed by the clergy. Afterward they walk through the town to a large celebration that involves plenty of dancing and dining.
Custodians of Traditional Flavor
Originally, the festival was a gathering of so-called "household servants," who, for the most part, were very fine cooks. At the time, in 1916, those penniless women assembled to create a tontine (a common pot) through which cooking traditions could be preserved and shared.
Later, the tontine became “Le Cuistot mutuel,” the first cooking club in Guadeloupe. In 2001, it became the Cooks' Association of Guadeloupe, which annually honors its patron, Saint Laurent, who was burned alive on a grill.
Laurent was a 3rd-century deacon in the service of Pope Sixtus II. Laurent refused to deliver the wealth of the Church to the Romans. This refusal is what resulted in his gruesome death. Laurent has since been beatified and a proclaimed a saint, adopted as the patron saint of cooks and roasters.
The Cooks' Association of Guadeloupe is called on regularly throughout the archipelago to promote Guadeloupe's culinary traditions.