A Baked oyster trio — Rockefeller, Bienville and Fonseca — sits on a placemat supporting Louisiana seafood at the Bourbon House Restaurant in New Orleans. Photo: NOLA.com | Times-Picayune Archive
By Benjamin Alexander-Bloch, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune
The Louisiana seafood industry’s history, from its start to its present challenges, was laid out during the first Louisiana fisheries summit in Houma. Local historians Carl Brasseaux and Don Davis spoke of the Louisiana commercial fisheries’ origins from its beginnings in the settlements that formed along the Mississippi River in the early 1700s to the industry’s true materialization in the 1800s.
Area waters were teeming with sardines during the early part of Louisiana fishery, with settlers salting and storing them, according to Brasseaux and Davis.
And despite the fact that the French who arrived in the late 1600s and early 1700s had a particular fondness for oysters, “shell fishing was at best a secondary aspect of the industry” in the early 1700s, Brasseaux said.
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